Friday blues

So, now it's the Friday blues.  This is a bad sign.  OK, Monday blues, that's normal, the work week in front of you and all.  Wednesday maybe, you wish you were further along.  But friday, still, the idea of one more day being a challenge, this is a bad sign.

I always thought the "working for the weekend" thing was the saddest thing ever.  People on the elevator on a thursday morning or wednesday evening saying, hey, how's it going, only two more days.  Like the workweek, five-sevenths of your life, is just something to endure rather than something to approach with relish.  But I've definitely reached that point with this job.

Perhaps it's just too idealistic to think that everyone should be able to find some paying work that they can approach with relish, something that provides an opportunity to achieve a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment.  After all, one's sense of accomplishment and satisfaction is very, very personal, and what somebody's willing to pay you for, well, that's usually someone else's idea of what's important.  Or in the case of a giant bank or other giant entity, that's the institution's idea of what's important.  And a giant institution probably doesn't have the same values as you do.

I keep thinking about "values" as one of the keys to understanding life, what makes a good and satisfying life.  Unfortunately, the word has been just utterly destroyed by political types.  But on a basic level, "values" just means "what's important to you, as an individual".  What do you value, what do you think is important, what gives you that sense of satisfaction, of accomplishment?  Take me and my utterly misfit job, for instance.  I just don't value "closing the deal" or "achieving the targets" or whatever it is that's supposed to be important to a Sales Manager.  To me, "closing the deal" just means you talked someone out of their money, which I find ethically suspect.  Literally, which is a real problem for a sales person.  Now, I know this is ridiculous, that for the world to go around, for commerce to happen, deals need to be closed, people and companies need to buy things.  This is not ethically suspect at all.  But the more selling that's involved, the more persuasion and influence the sales person manages to exert, the more likely the purchase decision is to be less than ideal for the purchaser.  And at its core, this seems to be somehow unethical, since after all, ethics at its most basic is treating other people's interests as just as important as yours.

Isn't this funny?  -- (a) the extent to which something so utterly normal and such a basic part of commercial life as 'selling' gives me ethical misgivings; and (b) how somehow I found myself in a sales manager job, something I find about as unsuitable for me as anything I can imagine.   (except maybe an actual sales person!)

Let's see -- (a) I think is sort of OK, it's like my little quirk, some kind of exaggerated ethical sensitivity.  I attribute this to some kind of exaggerated sense of empathy, which is actually a nice thing, and it's one of the reasons why people like me and why I have a lot of good friends.   So (a) I can live with.  But (b), finding myself in this utterly inappropriate job, this is what kills me.  And this is more a result of my own passivity and I suspect insecurities.  I appear to be just unable to take the fucking bull by the fucking horns and pursue more suitable work.  Much as I am unable to pursue other things, female things, eh?  This is what really brings me down.

Is this something changeable, this passivity?  Doesn't seem so -- I am 51 now, and I am no better at being "pursuitful" than I ever was.  Actually I appear to have gotten worse.  And so I don't expect this character flaw to go away, or to improve much.

Later, I will have to think some about this inability to pursue my own interests, and how it relates to general anxiety or over-sensitivity.   And maybe I'll do some thinkin' about how anxiety and over-sensitivity are related, but not necessarily the same thing.