I woke up at 5 this morning because I had scheduled work to do.

A license application to an artery service. Easy work but sensitive. License applications can blow up servers.

Somehow I fantasized about writing instead of working because the idea of doing something indulgent and for myself sounded appealing when I got out of bed but seems a lot less appealing now, sitting in front of the monitor, trying to type something.

The problem is that when I, at night, fantasize about writing in the morning it is because think I will have the energy to be interested in myself in the morning. I think I can use my best energy to write and maybe this will help the process. It seems do-able.

But here at something past 5AM, trying to write something, I have to say the truth of how it is going. I do not want to write. It is because a large chunk of my brain is already thinking about the work. It is impossible to ignore it, it sits on top of me and applies pressure by creating intrusive thoughts about how I am going to fuck the work up. I can't do anything else until I know the work is done and I haven't fucked it up.

So I did that. I stopped trying to write anything, did the work, and it went fine, but now it's 6AM and I'm full of caffeine and I took half a puff of cannabis, just the tiniest amount, to give me the passivity to just sit and focus because I get concerned that without it I will let the anger about my job rise and once that rises I start on a big anti work rant and inner dialogue about how I am sick and tired of doing this kind of work at so early in the morning, barely visible, unvalued shit work. I followed a wiki doc I wrote step by step and worked through it. Four nodes (servers) needed the same process repeated exactly and validated.

It's hard to write about this because it's so dull. I never thought I would be doing something so dull for my fucking job. I feel like a worker on an assembly line if I let myself think about it. Anyone could do this. And it's me. I am wasting my life on this. It is only valuable in the context of ME at work, i.e. while I am work, working in the broader sense, working as in: employed – it is valuable within that context because certain people see I am doing work and I'm visible and it's another item to put down on my annual review so I don't struggle so hard to list achievements. It's valuable to have people see me and know I'm working because otherwise they forget I exist and I could become a target. I know I work at an educational institution and they rarely let people go for any fucking reason at all but man I would like to stay on the valued employee list. They could make my life miserable if I'm not. They could demand I show up in the office four out of five days a week or something like that as a condition of continued employment. They can begin to demand meetings constantly.

As soon as I'm not working though, this work is not valuable to me. I'm sorry – there are other people who say things like I had a good career and I'm proud of the work I did.

I don't know how much of that I'm going to say. I will say I'm proud of myself for sticking with it to earn a living because you have to do something to earn a fucking living or you end up like my brother. Better this than that.

But how much of the work am I proud of? I am occasionally proud of fixing something difficult for a critical service. And occasionally proud of building something useful, to prove that I'm able to do such things.

But the vast majority of it, the positioning and jostling and politics and rote work and vendor interactions and complaining to HR about this and about that, and so on – the stuff you initially think is at the periphery of work actually constitutes, by far, most of your work, probably seventy or eighty percent.

You are no longer "what you do." Most of your work is actually integration work within your company – you are continually working to integrate yourself. You are inserting and reinserting a part (you) into a machine (the organization) so that the machine understands and notes that you are present. If you aren't present, the machine can reject you. To mix metaphors, like a host body will reject a liver that doesn't have a certain enzyme match, or a blood type that isn't compatible with the one currently installed.

But the reinsertion processes are often those things you don't like – to repeat it, the emails and chat conversations with people to take work and provide updates on work and seek clarifications on requirements and update a wiki with documentation and get a pull request approved by reviewers – you will repeat and repeat and repeat these things during the day and so this makes me go back to the earlier question about what I do

And what I do is reinsert myself continually with the people and culture with whom I work so they know I'm there and working. Which means most of what I do is unnecessary cloud teamwork style interactions. It isn't programming. It is communication and process and positioning myself to look busy and perhaps better than another co-worker. It is empty, hollow work and a terrible way to spend my time. It is non-explorative junk work.

It is a hard thing to understand that this is most of who you are. And I make excuses to myself to prioritize this junk work over other things that I should be able to make matter more – exercise, health, writing – but I cannot. It seems that it matters to me that I do these things at work. I do not want to be seen as lazy, stupid, expendable. My ego cannot seem to take it. But it's not just my ego, to be fair to myself. It seems safer to me that I'm held in esteem within the organization. If my manager leaves, for example – my manager with whom I have an understanding of sorts with – and I get a different person assigned, then the first thing that manager will do is try to get the organization's impression of me. And I want it to be : Yeah Tobias is good.

Because then I am not at war at work and as I learned last year when I feel I am at war at work things can get very stressful and weird for me on a daily basis. I don't want to attend meetings that feel combative. I don't like questions about why did this go wrong and why didn't you deliver here or there.

And yet when you take away work, it turns out that the vast majority of the time I can't write either, because most of the time I don't care about myself, I'm not interested in myself enough to write anything at all


and I don't believe anything I write will ever be worth someone else reading
and there is no point to trying