Them's Fightin' Words

I don’t know what the hell is going on, maybe some kind of cosmic realignment of the planets or a massive, fundamental shift in the universal ebb and flow, but a lot of people I’ve spoken to recently are all saying the same thing:

This year is kicking our asses.

Deadlines, last-minute projects, clients freaking out, agencies freaking out, pressure building to the boiling point, stress levels maxing out, traffic fucking with our shit and people just wandering how? How the fuck did it get like this?

We’re only one month into 2011 and already Christmas and New Year feel as though they happened in a different lifetime, it’s insane!

Of course, the only people I really interact with are my colleagues and the other people in my industry, which is fairly pressurised even on a good day, so I could be way off here.

Maybe you’re having a nice gentle start to your year. Maybe you wake up slow and easy, make a delicious, piping hot breakfast, catch some morning news while you’re getting ready, drive at a normal pace to work, greet everyone with a big smile in the office and knuckle down for a few hours before taking an hour’s lunchbreak to eat your sarmies outside with the pigeons.

For a lot of people I’ve spoken to it’s a vastly different situation as we sprint, as fast as humanly possible, through a minefield of one catastrophic fuck-up after the next, praying for the weekends to deliver us from email, but when they come we’re never free to truly enjoy them because work is always, always, always there, SOMEWHERE, burning like a lit cigarette inside your brain.

Do you feel it to? How’s your year working out so far?

I’m interested to know because holy shitballs, at this rate I’m dabbling with the idea of running away to an exotic island somewhere to mix cocktails on the beach far, far away, where my only concern everyday will be where my next bong hit’s coming from.

-ST