Finding Meaning To Living.

It’s been roughly 7 months since I’ve been unemployed. It has been quite the journey.

I still recall how I instantly said enough is enough and right there decided to quit my job. It was over something trival as the matter was resolved merely hours later. But you can say that it was too late at that point. The window had already been cracked and so, the matter was the pebble that shattered it.

About a week later, I journeyed back home. Funny that it wasn’t the first time that happened. It wasn’t the first time I left my job. This time, however, it felt different. It felt right. It did not feel like I was perhaps short-changing myself. It felt like I was finally doing something that was for me.

I arrived home with ambition. I arrived home feeling alive. I arrived home ready for the new chapter. But I was not ready for the challenges that I was going to experience. Besides the obvious challenges such as how to make money and such, the biggest challenge was the employee mindset that still dominated my mindset.

In this case, the mindset was used to having a paycheck every month end. Like, at the end of each month, it would allow one to reset. It’s like playing a video game. You might lose but you’ll also have the opportunity to try again. That’s how it felt. And with this thinking still ingrained in my mind, I entered a new stage of my life.

Until about the 3rd month of being home that reality set in. In the 3rd month, the money was no longer giving me a new leg to stand on. But the grip of the employee's mindset. I still continued living like I did when I was employed. And mind you, I was not wasting money. I wasn’t spending money like a blesser. I was merely living the way I did when I was employed.

The interesting thing about that is that I realised that employment had created a certain lifestyle that I was accustomed to. That lifestyle was a good lifestyle. It provided me with a car, money to buy things I liked and money to take my girl out now and then. But you see, this was not the lifestyle that I desired.

It was a lifestyle that employment had created for me. I wasn’t the lifestyle that I created for myself. I’ll try to explain this in detail.

When you are employed, there are certain standards or certain “requirements” that come with it. For instance, since you are working now, it is expected that you should have a car. It is expected that you should buy new clothes quarterly or monthly. Basically, there’s now an image that you have fulfilled under the guise of employment. And mind you, most of this is happening on a deeper subconscious level.

It stems from the subconscious lessons that you learnt growing up. You perhaps noticed the young men buy the Polo with the paychecks and so, you buy one too. You perhaps noticed the young men get married and live in a Midrand apartment and so, you aspire to get married and live in a Midrand apartment too. All of this is happening on a subconscious level that is invisible to the conscious mind.

Yes, you might have a certain say in the Polo. Instead of the red one, you’d get a blue one. You might believe you have some control over the decisions you make with your paychecks but the truth is that the decisions that you make are dictated by deep-seated seeds from your childhood.

And that’s exactly what was happening to me. I did not notice these things at first. But my soul was fighting against it. But my employee mindset was fighting harder. I still remember the one day I sat outside of campus shaking. My whole body was shaking. My heart was racing like I drank a six-pack of Redbulls in one shot. I was totally losing it. Because my soul, the true me was screaming at me, telling me that this was not the life for me.

So fast forward to now, I am home. I have never had an episode like that since being home. Instead, my soul is at peace. But this peace did not come easy. Not at all. There were moments were I experienced the worst cases of depression. There were moments were I felt like ending it. There were moments when life lost meaning. Because the meaning of my life was created by the job I was working.

My identity was a lecturer. The meaning of my life was that of being a lecturer. That was what my life had become. So when I decided that I was no longer a lecturer, my entire being lost its identity. In conversations, I could no longer say that I lecture for a living. That was not what I was doing for a living anymore. Instead, I was just living.

It took a while before I could just live freely. It took a while before I could find peace in the life I was living. But it was and is totally worth it. Indeed, there is a great feeling of relief when you begin taking charge of your own destiny.

What most of us forget is destinies are created by the Creator. It is God who placed us on Earth. The moment we believe that we are here for a reason, the soul and mind begin to work to make us realise what our destiny might be. It might be that you are an explorer. And so, your destiny is to explore the world and share your discoveries with the world. It might be your destiny is to be a chef and so, you can create meals that can fully nourish the vessels that carry our souls.

It is at this moment when we escape the cage of the fabricated life that we can find who we are and why we are here in the first place.

Leaving my job has been the greatest decision I have made to date. And I would not change it for anything.