If You Have No Choice but to Work,
Do you have ADHD? I do. Have you ever worked in an office? I have. Why did you start working? For me, it was a necessity?I had no other choice. Were you incompetent or competent at your job? I was competent, yet I was treated as a scapegoat, forced to carry the weight of other people's blame.
If you have ADHD, my honest advice is this: try to avoid the typical office environment if you can. But life often leaves us with no choice. What do you do when they target your ADHD, weaponizing your traits against you? What do you do when they dump their impossible workloads onto your shoulders, claim the credit for your results, and then dismiss your value entirely?
When you are bullied, when your work is stolen, and when you are left to take the fall for everything, you cannot just cry and run away. That is not the right path, nor does it serve you in the end.
In the opening paragraph of "Reading" in Walden, Henry David Thoreau writes, "If a man were more reflective, he would be a student and observer of nature, for the nature and destiny of man are essentially the same."
Even without ADHD, we should carefully choose our work to fulfill our destiny more beautifully. However, reality demands we earn money, sometimes driving us into a corner?leaving us no choice but to survive. There is a force that pushes us into a standardized world of work, preventing us from living according to the unique vessel we were born with. This force appears at times with the face of our parents, at others with the face of our teachers, or as the crushing weight of peer pressure.
Without a moment to hear the inner voice asking, "What do I truly want?", we are swept away helplessly. Because we are young and ignorant of how this world operates, we are met with veiled threats masked as concern: "What are you going to do for a living?" Thus, we are driven into the "slaughterhouse" of office life to sustain ourselves. At twenty, we are too fragile and know too little. Many of us lack the guidance of good parents or the safety net of a reliable foundation. We are left with no choice but to sell our education, our labor, and our time for a wage. We enter the corporate machine and submit to labor, not out of passion, but out of absolute necessity.
So, I, too, entered the corporate world, biting the bullet. Clutching my hard-earned diploma, I knocked on the company door in terror, trapped by the vague sense that all paths were blocked except for the one labeled "employment." Fortunately, because I was young, reasonably presentable, had decent grades, and looked persistent enough, I landed a job. And there, my friends, I witnessed another kind of hell.
They say the boundary between this world and the next is so blurred that many don't even realize they've died. There are stories of spirits visiting mediums, worried that people no longer look at them or acknowledge their existence, only for the medium to reveal, "You are already dead."
I will teach you how to tell if you've crossed over in your sleep. They say the afterlife is the exact "inverse" of this world. Here, mountains are high and valleys are deep; there, mountains are low and valleys are elevated. Here, the sun is bright and the night is dark; there, the sun is dim and the night is luminous. In that place, language and actions are reversed: "Go" means "come," and "eat" means "spit it out." Left and right are flipped, so you button your collar or wear your shoes on the wrong feet. The entire orientation of existence is the mirror image of this world.
