1 January

Work can be fun, and it can also be boring, tedious, stressful, and just bloody hard. But what it increasingly isn’t, and why I’m glad to be closer to retirement than not, is meaningful. Look at St. Peter’s Basilica, in Rome. It took 120 years to build, often the grandsons of the the original builders finished the work their fathers and grandfathers started. They had a purpose, as a society, something that seemed bigger than them. Today the closest you’ll get to that is a career. I’ve never wanted a career, the whole idea of it bores me. Making work personal, bleh. We’ve all had to work for too many incompetent dickheads climbing career ladders. I want work to have meaning, beyond my own skin. For there to be a feeling of us all building something magnificent for generations to come. For that to happen, society would need to have some sort of unified belief system, that all of our individual beliefs could plug into. Without that, our lives become nothing but personal. The personal is so meaningless and boring, why I probably sound so negative about social media at times, with its focus on our personal lives and feelings. God used to provide that unified structure, but the idea got very debased and became about fairy tale men living up in the clouds. It really just meant something bigger than us, and you don’t even have to be religious to recognise that much of life is bigger than and beyond us. To have a sense of deference and awe. Of humility.