Work Is A Four Letter Word

I was really struck by an excellent blog post I read last week by John Lammerton entitled Working From Home Sucks.  What John was saying in a nutshell is that working from home isn’t always all it is cracked up to be.

It struck me because working from home is all I’ve ever known.  I’ve now been working from home for 30 years now.  Since before I left school in fact.  Anyone who knows me will tell you I’ve never done anything else so you could say I know a thing or two about it.  And I’m here to tell you that it isn’t working from home that sucks.  It’s work full stop that sucks.

John’s right when he says it can be lonely working by yourself from home.  Not as lonely as it was before Instant Messenger and even e-mails mind you.  But you can be equally lonely working in an office employing dozens or a factory employing thousands.  I also know what he means about the lack of feedback that you would normally get from your bosses and peers, but again this can be as soul destroying in a work environment too.  Same goes for health.  There are millions of people who go out to work every day in this country who are depressed because of their job, ill because of their job, overweight because of their job.

As for your family being a distraction when you work from home, I’ve never really found that.  One of the biggest distractions you’ll face is the phone ringing.  And there are plenty of distractions in workplaces to rival any family, not least never ending rounds of meetings.

The truth is that it is work in general that sucks.  The industrial age created a society that has become dominated by work and that is plainly wrong.  Life is far too short to devote most of our waking hours to work, whether from home or not.  I talk about this a lot in my forthcoming (honestly!) book, Get Out While You Can, and my own alternative to the rat race, my  Plan B, offers an alternative way of working that relegates work to something you do before getting on with what we’re really on this planet to do.  Not to work.  To live.

We are, each and every one of us, incredible people.  We should not be leading ordinary lives.

Incidentally, I’ll shortly be closing my mailing list for those who want to be told when the book goes on sale.  That might sound crazy, but bear with me.

I don’t want more than 1,000 copies of the book to be sold during 2010 because I want to be in a position to gauge initial feedback and then have the time to give as many people as possible a helping hand to create their own Plan B.  I’m my toughest critic and the success of my book won’t be measured by me by how many copies it sells, but by how many people I can help find an escape route from a lifetime of work.

So if you think it’s a book that should be on your reading list and you’ve yet to join my mailing list, do so now at the Get Out While You Can website.