Dept of burning burning irony
Piece in today's Guardian about the toll that the long hours working culture is taking on people (I could do without the focus on lurrrhve and rOHmance, because there are all sorts of other things that are being erased in people's lives by this culture - including things that might, perchance, in due course, lead to courtship and mating, but that's by the by).
But I could not entirely repress an inward cynical cackle when it kicked off with somebody who had had a stressful job with a charity, and found yoga helped her de-stress, and left to set up as a yoga teacher -
- which sounds to be a lot more stressful than a regular job, at least if you are not working out of a nice serene ashram with all found, I guess - At first, the work felt like a privilege, even though she was working a lot and not earning much. “There was a sense that, if you gave it your all and you did it with integrity and love and all those things, then it would eventually work out for you.” But recently she had a moment of realisation. “I can’t afford my rent, I have no savings, I have no partner, I have no family. I’m 38 and most of my friends have families; they’re buying houses,” she says. “There is a lot of grief around that. I feel like I’ve just landed on Earth, like a hard crash on to the ground, and am looking around and feeling quite lonely.”
....
[T]urning her yoga practice into her career meant giving up much of her social life. She was “knackered” at the end of a long day of practice and teaching - and the expectation that she would continue her education through pricey retreats meant, at times, that she was spending more than she was making. It was at the end of a four-hour workshop in a local church in 2018 that the penny dropped. A student came up to her and said: “You are not well. We need to go to the doctor.”.... She spent seven weeks recovering in bed, which gave her a lot of time, alone at home, to reconsider her career and face the reality of exactly how vulnerable she was.
This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/3221983.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
comments.