Sysiphus, the Sherpard, and the Leaking Bucket.
A half baked theory on self worth
When did my full-time job become that of a bucket filler? I thought the assignment was to become a software engineer, or a doctor, or some other thing with a label and a paycheck. I wish someone had sat me down and explained to me the multitude of non-optional, perhaps more omnipresent jobs that would be quietly slid on top of the standard assignment.
It’s not just that you have to support yourself financially, but you have to do it in a way that makes you feel fulfilled. You should probably do it in a way that makes the world a better place. You also need to maintain friendships, because work can’t be your entire life. Don’t forget to be creative, too. Don’t become a corperate drone. You’re still working on that promotion, though, right? Suddenly, everyone around me is getting engaged, and now I’m caught with my pants around my ankles because I was so busy worrying about career that I forgot to make a Pinterest board for my at-some-point-yet-to-become-a-reality-future-wedding. But while I was busy figuring out how to make homemade biscuits, I forgot to post it on LinkedIn, so now everything is probably going to fall apart.
I thought the deal was that I gave you my nine to five, and in exchange, I’m left with the complete and unadulterated freedom to gobble up my remaining five-to-nine like a toddler on their third birthday double fisting a chocolate cake. Instead, it feels like I’m the Sisyphian shepherd to a herd of leaky buckets. 18 hours to keep them full, 7 to rest while they slowly drain.
I become most aware of the state of my many identity-representative buckets when I’m catching up with friends. I take them on a small tour of my heard, and we stare down into each bucket, matching our reflections, laughing at the weight we’ve accumulated before moving on to examine the next. Statements like how’s work? Any fun plans this weekend? Dating anyone new? Flow between us, as we take a moment to discuss the apparent “fullness” of our lives.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I have bucket insecurity. What if someone judges my buckets… maybe I filled the wrong ones… maybe I tried to fill too many and now none of them will ever overflow in the way they do for a true specialist. Some of my buckets are easy to fill, but others drain so quickly that keeping them full feels not only like an impossible task but also like a waste of time. After all, not all buckets have the same cracks. To help me sleep at night, I’ve developed a hypothesis.
If the level of water in each bucket is forever changing, staking any part of my self-worth or identity on the amount of water in the bucket seems like a losing battle. What if instead I focused on myself, the shepherd, and my ability to fill the buckets? If the buckets themselves, my career, my friends, my love life, my creative endeavors, are all embodied extensions of an internal identity, then they can be viewed as inanimate objects controlled by the internal locus that composes my autonomy. If a bucket leaks or fills, it solely reflects the amount of attention being paid to it. If I see someone whom I perceive to be struggling, maybe the best way to be helpful is to approach them with the mindset that our internal loci simply aren’t oriented in the same direction, rather than the mindset that they are lacking in some value or ability. So is true autonomy simply to stop and recognize that these buckets are meaningless? Unincumberment at its finest. Maybe this is just beating around some free-will self-worth half-baked hypothesis… It will definitely need more work before I can turn it into a full essay.
