The Slow Death of the Wage Worker

Do you grind the nine to five? Are you happy?

Went to Mexico today. 

It’s exactly fifty-three minutes from my Welcome mat to the sand of Baja’s most consistent beachbreak. That’s if you don’t have to sneak into a Mexican alleyway to take a shit into a plastic bag first. So today it was closer to an hour.

The best thing about Mexico is not the waves (though they are great), nor the food (though it is best), but the fact that I learn something every time I go. This time I learned that I don’t want to work for a living — or at least not the average joe’s version of “working”.

Here’s how. And why.

I rode down with my friend Jeff. He turned his devotion to the environment into a lucrative profession, one that has him chasing honey-holes around San Diego county. And when he’s not getting barreled, he’s a bee removal expert! Specializing in safely extracting whole hives from private residences and transporting them to a bee conservation station.

“Spring and summer are really buzzy for me,” Jeff explained, “but the bees pretty much go dormant in the winter, which leaves me free to surf!” And so Jeff goes to Mexico on Wednesday mornings.

Oh, and did I mention that’s technically work too?

Because in his free time Jeff likes to tinker with cars and GoPros and shit. And one day he invented the MyGoMount GoPro mouth mount, the one with the clever respiration channel, the one that Anthony Walsh uses. In an effort to continually improve his product, Jeff puts in a lot of “R&D” time. Racing and Driving. He gets tubed and then indirectly paid for it.

And I am jealous.

Right now I have no real occupation because I got fired or laid off or whatever. I had what many would call a “dream job” – working for the illustrious Surfing Magazine as a writer/web editor.

Would I have picked any job over it? Never. Was I happy there? I don’t think so.

And that’s crazy! Because in terms of a nine-to-five, there’s literally nothing I am more qualified (which speaks to my lack of practical knowledge and skills rather than any particular talent in this field) or willing to do. Every time I found myself bored or annoyed by the trivial task at hand, I’d tell myself that not only could it be worse, but it theoretically couldn’t be better. And that’s a little depressing.

But then I was let go and within four hours I was genuinely happy about it.

I learned that I’m even lazier and more self-absorbed than previously thought. Any sane person would opt out of nine-to-five employment if it were that easy, and to think that I am somehow special enough to avoid it altogether would be a negative representation of myself, but also not untrue.

Freed from the shackles of a half-year job that had me deskside for the better portion of daylight, I began counting the trips I would take, the waves I would catch, the dog I would spend my whole days with in this liberated state. Life becomes significantly more bearable when you remove the impermeable prism of schedule, simply by the fact that spontaneity breeds positivity. The prospect of something awesome happening at any given moment is truly alluring. And there’s nothing more joyful than dropping everything for the evening glass-off.

I learned that I’m even lazier and more self-absorbed than previously thought. Any sane person would opt out of nine-to-five employment if it were that easy, and to think that I am somehow special enough to avoid it altogether would be a negative representation of myself, but also not untrue.

So I’m gonna ride this chowder train until it runs out. If I discover a way to financially support my personal brand of egotism and aloofness, awesome. If not, I’ll hop back on the wage-worker wagon and die the same slow, painful death as many of you.

But I’m definitely never doing manual labor. Those fuckers die fast.