what is the right way to live? and my white plate theory | 070826

hey hey ^.^

it’s been a long week. i had to work five days in a row at my retail job and woof. it sounds kind of silly saying that because that’s just a normal work week, five days in a row, and it’s not like i’m there for 8 hours (except for two shifts). but i can still complain a little right? sitting on the couch typing is a little different to running back and forth serving customers surely. i’m gonna complain :) 

but it also means that when i take time off it actually feels like i’m resting. working on my sofa and resting on my sofa didn’t really give me that sense of relief. but i love now that my home is simply my sanctuary and doesn’t also double as my workplace as it did before. sometimes i still think a remote job would be nice, especially since i can still get a bit anxious just before leaving the house sometimes and it would be nice to avoid that, but i am really enjoying this separation. i might think twice about work from home jobs in the future. never thought i’d say that.

honestly i’m so comfortable working retail. i still get a bit apprehensive telling people i work in retail because obviously people see it as menial work, but i don’t think we talk enough about the freedom it can give you (at least if you work somewhere where the people you work with and the hours aren’t horrid). i don’t think about work at all when i’m home, i don’t dread my next work day, i don’t get the sunday scaries. my week is broken up unconventionally and it works around me not the other way around. people hear retail and think oof, customer service, dealing with rude people, picking clothes off the floor, unchallenging work, but what i see is flexibility, exercise, socialisation, productivity, actual teamwork! i Hated how much you have to talk about being part of a team in corporate and it’s all crap. nothing brings people together more than a closing shift during a heatwave and everyone just wants to get the hell home.

also, i’ve been feeling more like reading and journaling and writing in my commonplace book and being that version of myself lately. i don’t know what happened this summer but something in me just kind of turned off. i just didn’t want to do any of those things, they sounded exhausting. maybe it was starting this new job? was it a form of depression i hadn’t experienced before? i really don’t know. whatever it was, i feel like i’m on the tail end of it. i’m excited to dip into multiple books at once, learn new words, get lost in my modded stardew valley farm (on today’s to do list hehe), write things i genuinely enjoy on substack, play on my new handheld gaming pc! guys i love this thing so much and i love it even more now that i’ve personalised it look!

speaking of reading multiple books, i think i’m too stern with myself when it comes to reading. there’s so much to life that’s handed to you that you just go along with and never end up questioning, some of it is a lot more serious–how you live a good life that meets your individual needs and makes you happy, how capitalism eats into everything, the “right” and “wrong” way to live, what your relationships “should” and “should not” look like–but things like you need to finish one book before starting another, who said that? (in the voice of porsha pls) and who cares if i’m in the middle of one book for three months. who cares if i start a book in the middle for goodness sake. i mean i wouldn’t do that with most books but i did borrow seneca’s dialogues and essays and skipped to the chapter on the happy life and idk no one has come to yell at me about it you know? i’ve stopped myself from reading the age of surveillance capitalism by shoshana zuboff for years because i thought i had to finish reading whatever i was reading first. i just picked it up and starting reading it yesterday because i had a moment of what am i doing just read the book. it’s so strange when, as my favourite youtuber brittany simon calls it, you have a bubble pop moment and you’re like wait, i don’t have to do it like this. i love those moments to be honest, and i think we’d all be a lot happier if we came to those realisations a little more often in our lives.

personally i call it the white plate theory. you know when you move into a new house and you need to buy all your furniture and bits. what’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of filling up the space? most people think alright i’ll just get a set of white plates, maybe paint the walls off white, buy a beige couch, keep everything neutral so everything matches, just like all those new builds you see popping up everywhere. the default is white plates. and that’s fine, but i think we forget that that’s not our only option. 

in the same way, you’re told to go to school, go to uni, get good grades and get a 9 to 5 job, marry the opposite sex and buy a house. and that’s fine for some but certainly not for everyone, and i don’t think people should look sideways at the people who might want green plates or purple plates or maybe they want to eat every meal out of a bowl! i think people should have the right to design the sort of life they want to live, whether that’s in a monogamous or polyamorous relationship, whatever gender expression they feel is right, whatever job and hours that suits them, as long as it isn’t hurting anyone else. but then the problem is that not everyone thinks like this and may enact policies that stop people from living the life they want for themselves and earning money is so damn difficult we’ve no choice but to sit in dead offices all day which tires us out and stops us from living a life we truly want to live. it seems like the only option is those damn white plates. but i think if we strip away some of those scripts and forget about what people think, we may not have our dream houses but we can at least have pink plates. is my analogy working here i hope it is lol.

anyway, i’m just really grateful for this little retail job and for my partner and everything that happened that allowed us to buy our little house in norfolk. i leave my house a few times a week for work and come back bone tired sometimes, but i still feel like i have more time and energy than i did working 9 to 5 at a job where i basically did nothing all day and pretended to work when i had to go into the office literally once a week. maybe that’s something to think about. how much freedom and time to enjoy life do you really have at your current job, the one that you “should” be doing, the one that impresses others. what if the job that really makes you happy is working in a supermarket or something. i mean it definitely depends on the place. i absolutely hated some of my other retail jobs so i get it, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. but when you find a good spot, it can make all the difference.

alright, i’ve actually been writing this over a span of two days so i’m gonna wrap it up. thanks so much for reading!

okay byeeee

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