Taking time off work for a medical leave feels like getting ice cream on a Wednesday after school because my Dad had the craving and took me with him. It’s the sweetest treat imbued with so much joy and the knowledge that this is a rare occasion. But scarce moments getting to be a free adult come paired with a somber disappointment in the society that treats necessary time away from soul ripping capitalism as a midweek trip to Sullivan’s Ice Cream. Day one of my leave of absence and I’m already finding myself being more productive than I’ve been in months and incredibly envious of those who have reached the retirement milestone. I don’t want to be 65 years old yet. I don’t want to wish away 45 of the best years of my life. But I crave the freedom to live a life cut off from capitalistic ties and tethered only to my desires.
We have this notion that the good life is earned. Slow living is a reward for frantic survival. You must work yourself to the brink of death before you’re given the gift of relaxation, assuming you spent the grind perfectly planning for after it was over. Then you hope to be lucky enough that those next 5 to 25 years are spent with mental clarity and relative physical ease. But most aren’t so lucky. By that age, they’re riddled with chronic aches, a fear of falling, and sometimes an inability to remember their kid’s face or how to form a coherent sentence. So they spend their good years working; contributing to the monetary gain of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and their more covert constituents. Then they suffer until someone pulls the plug on them because the suffering grew too dark for any living being to witness. Many end up alone in a nursing home, sipping on boxed juice laced with hints of cardboard and slurping sugar free pudding because god forbid they ingest an ounce of delectability and die a monotonous day sooner. Is this the prize we deserve? Is this why we work ourselves ragged? Why we yearn for time with families while staring at spreadsheets and dream of sinking our toes into white sand beaches while our feet are crammed into six inch heels hidden beneath particle board desks? We do it all only to be damned to reminiscing about our favorite Saturdays?
I crave more than that. Some may call me a dreamer, spoiled, or even delusional. But sane people don’t believe they’re capable of changing the world. We don’t teach the practices of Gandhi because he fell in line. And I’m no Gandhi, but I wasn't built to follow the status quo either. I aspire to a life lead by pleasure and childlike joy. I will play in the snow, I will read by the water, I will scream atop mountains. And I will do this not just on Saturdays. I will sacrifice a prescribed life for a fulfilling one.
These six weeks will be worth the months of heartache getting here. I will not waste these days and I will take them with me when I’m back in front of a computer screen from nine to five. I will create art with my free time. I will inspire the world around me to prioritize the love in their life and let their coworkers struggle a little more without their name on the payroll. You can tell me you’ll suffer without another body at the workplace, but you will not guilt me into your compulsive capitalism. My life is so much greater than being a receptionist. I’ll take care of the patients that walk by my window, I’ll do all I can to help the people on the other end of the phone get their needs met, but I will not sacrifice my wellbeing for a paycheck headlined by “$18/hour”. That’s a sick joke that the only species more cruel than Satan could write the punchline to. We’re more insensitive than Louis C.K., and yet we haven’t canceled the human race over entrapping each other as well as ourselves into suffering our whole lives.
I never stop questioning why we chose to live our lives in such a way that produces massive amounts of pain and glorifies the dismissal of pleasure. Is this the only way we can justify our own agony? To inflict it on others and call it the expectation that they need to endure as well to earn any peace? I do not need to earn my contentment. I was born with a right to my life as my own. Nobody delivers that to me on a silver platter tarnished by decades of rotting in a dark basement because I wasn’t given the key to the mysterious door until I paid over 100,000 hours of my breaths to a supervisor that struggled through enough hours to have a bigger number written on their paycheck. I will indulge as I please, and nobody will stop me from doing so. Only I permit my pause. And I will steal those keys if I must. Saturday will not bear my only fruit.