Purposelessness

Fighting purposelessness this morning.

My current line of work seems to be reaching its end. By my account, every company I have worked for has been purchased, gone out of business, or has been involved in an ethical scandal. Virtually all of the products I worked on prior to 2006 have disappeared. In a real sense, 8 years of work resulted in nothing - and the other 5 don't hold out great promise for success.

This knowledge makes the current job that much more difficult.

It's difficult to generate enthusiasm for something which personal history demonstrates will go into the ashcan of history with little fanfare and smaller impact.

It occurs to me that this is the moment of truth: when what one has spent the bulk of one's life on (intended or forced) has been revealed to be a purposeless morass of effort, how does one find the courage and purpose to go on?

Because life goes on. When I complete this, I will head off to another day of labor which holds no more promise of purpose than any of the approximately 4745 industry days preceding it.

I could, I suppose, try to put the spin on things that I am supposed to, that what really matters is God is in control and obviously I'm here for some kind of reason. My job is to endure and be fruitful.

But the unpleasant reality is that I don't feel that in my heart. All I feel is this aching void of another day of shifting papers, marking tasks as "closed", trying to pretend that this is anything other than what it seems to be: an exercise in purposelessness, a creation of things destined to fade or be packed away, forgotten except for the time involved in creating them.