Saturday 24 January 2009

How to spend our time (mostly with ourselves)

Having very demanding and busy professional lives, we use to complain often - if not all the time, perhaps as an excuse for not being able to find other topic to address with other fellow humans, apparently eager to see - we don't have time, social life, beyond our scheduled devoted, at least 5 days the week, to the life in our offices.

But, when it's possible to meet other people, not sharing the same "fantastic" life targets - based, guess !, on our very demanding jobs - we cannot do anything else than to checking nervously our complicate cell phones or to send short messages. Because, in these tormented times, more than ever, we have to fight for our salary. Instead to enjoy a different conversation and pleasant presences or, simply, a different environment, we are keeping tight our connections exclusively with our offices.

During my last vacations, I'd observed (too) many young couples spending a wonderful time abroad fighting and arguing each other. Normal. It was the only time they were able to share together and they discovered the lack of any kind of communication.

I'm fully aware our daily lives these days are by far three times more complicated than it was 15 years ago. In order to survive, you need to be always ready, stubborn, strong enough to cope with stress and intellectual pollution. Also, than not all of us are doing the job they dreamed to since they were children and getting a secure salary is almost all they want before going retired. The other side of the story is that we don't have any excuse to unlearn the social language and to enjoy, even for one minute but for a one full minute, the other people's presence. Against the broad accepted image of the workaholic, I'm more and more convinced that outperforming individuals are those who have the sense of their time and could see, at a glance, what's worthy or not to focus your attention and those subjects could be not-at-all professionally related. If somebody is telling me he/she's not having time to do anything else than the office life, I'll be extremely reluctant to deal with, because the resources are limited and the lack of social imagination and intelligence are good predictors that, sooner or late this person will be a very devoted robot, but an extremely limited human.


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