Renting Space in Another’s Dream is Okay
Mark Brown
January 19, 2022
I have thought many times over the last 5-10 years about ambitions, dreams, employment and realities. The first 2 are important to give the inertia any good push has and the last 2 give direction to them. What I have found in answering questions related to those 4 ideas is that every decision made has a consequence. I have written a few times how my job allows me train like I do but not really gotten into it beyond that. This is the time and place to do it. When I came to the realization that I was essentially renting space in someone else’s dream my attitude towards it changed. The ability to leave work at work really is a blessing because it allows me to focus on things that are actually worthwhile. If one loves their job then good, but I have found that it isn’t necessary. What is necessary is finding something one does love and uses their job as a springboard to do it.
One of the central tenets to my recent total buy in to strength training is that the lifting matters the most. What that means is that everything else becomes slave to the goal of getting stronger. That requires an approach to how I make an income that allows me to do so. I was fortunate to get a job at the company I currently work for through a family connection almost 11 years ago now and never really regretted not really looking for another. I have tried some things outside of my job that in areas that I am good at but found the monetary results weren’t time and life investment. The main one was when I started selling food, mostly jarred sauces of different kinds, at vendor shows about 8-9 years ago. I gained a lot of cooking skills in a short amount of time and sold a fair amount but it was hard to do when it wasn’t my main hustle. I had a lot of marathon canning sessions, the longest being 11 hours for 29 pint jars of pineapple salsa, for a couple years that made me really question if I wanted to keep doing it. During fall and winter it was fine, but as spring and summer came the canning and the shows themselves really got in the way of golfing, which I really wanted to do more. What I learned from that experience is that it wasn’t worth the life investment of tying something I love doing, cooking, to my car payment or student loan. As much as I love to cook I have never attempted to make it more than a hobby I am serious about since. I don’t even really cook the much anymore. Work and lifting make it hard to really cook seriously on the weekdays.
My view of money and investment changed as a result of going through the vendor show scene and giving it an hard, honest attempt. There’s always been a lingering thought to perhaps doing an east coast deli or just a place that makes and sells my own deli meat because it’s one of the things I am best at but that feeling has passed. I went as far as to believe that the money is the poison pill when one ties what they love to how they pay bills. Money, no matter how I look at it, is the boss. I was already past believing the “if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life” line and well into the “if you do what you love, you work everyday of your life” reality by this time. I felt that my joy of cooking and making food for whatever event was best left untainted by a car payment. Tying how one pays bills to a hobby changes the parameters of the hobby by introducing a monetary component that wasn’t there before. It is for that reason that I don’t feel any internal push to potentially monetize all of this strength training information I have been accumulating into some kind of career. This is about as far as I am wanting to go with that information I have learned. I want to maintain the kind of freedom this allows me to have with topics to write about, discuss and help people along the way. Monetizing that in a main hustle kind of way would interfere with that by restricting the bulk of my content to that which monetizes well. Derek from More Plates More Dates and Greg Doucette have each talked about in Youtube videos about the struggle of content that is essentially reference material at its core. That material just doesn’t drive the views in the same way if they can’t tie it to something in the news that isn’t trending even though the subjects of PEDs, body transformations, etc are perfectly interesting topics on their own.
Up till 2020, I was more or less okay with my job physically and mentally. There were points of high frustration, especially around 2018 or so, but I never actually thought about moving on. A huge chunk of that is the reality that I would be taking a pay cut anywhere else I was going to work and that had to be accounted for. I bought my house in 2016. That mortgage payment isn’t going anywhere and I like where I live. It started off badly when the gyms shut down in Iowa in March 2020 for 6 weeks leading me to become a complete asshole. Those frustrations grew more untenable as the year progressed, even after I started lifting again. The warmer months have always been the source of many long days at work, but summer and fall of 2020 were plain destructive on people’s personal lives. Work days that were 12-14 hours long with 6-8 more on Saturday caused a lot of people to quit. It was especially catastrophic to the company from a worker perspective because a lot of those people who quit were in the 6-10 year tenure range. The company lost a lot of people who knew how to do a lot of things in the warehouse. Those who stayed had less faith in those running the warehouse I work in and it’s never come back, no matter what those with decision making authority do. The work environment was about as toxic as possible but here I am still employed by the same company. I did want to quit many, many times but the reality that it would have been harder to quit and find a different job than gutting through my current one. All the overtime did allow me to purchase all of the equipment I own in my buddy’s garage gym so some good did come out of it. The hours did also push my lifting sessions to absurd times, regularly finishing at around 11 pm, and killed my sleep and eating in the evening. I was an angry, terrible human being in 2020 but there is a significant part of me that is driven by the anger. The rage that is the fire that fuels 2-3 hour lifting sessions after 12-13 hour work days. It’s expensive energy, so to speak, but the work has to get done. You don’t get anywhere in strength training by skipping lifting sessions. Period.
Last year started the same as 2020 but a small change in the scheduling helped bring me to my current mental state. What made 2020 hard was the amount of injuries at work and the task that was being asked of the people I work with directly and I being ridiculously hard. It was a 4 person job being done with 3 people. I did essentially what I do now so I was getting the same a solid amount of conditioning and cardio in. That changed when a 4th person was added to the tote line crew temporarily to do half of the stuff I was doing, laying and stacking pallets, so I could focus on thing I couldn’t do when I was doing that, which is pulling totes off the conveyer line as they came down it. That small change removed a responsibility and made the job less physically demanding and mentally easier to handle. My Apple Watch was telling me that through the number of steps and calories burned. When the addition of the 4th person was made permanent in the middle of 2021, he decided he didn’t want to mess with the pallets so I got that back. I got those steps and calories burned back. That was when my mindset towards work became more positive. Hours were sane and manageable and I was getting part of my exercise in. There are still things that drive me crazy and ultimately those along with a real lack of mental stimulation that really dulls any love or like I have for my job.
The reason for my positive mindset on my job is that it has truly taken a secondary role in my life mentally. My job had been forcing itself into the primary position in part because I let it. That caused stress in my life that I resolved at the gym regardless of the physical price I had to pay to do it. My job is now just part of the day I have to get through to do the thing I really want to do. I don’t even like it that much but the tangential benefits gives me enough to hold onto to make me feel that’s it not a waste of my time. The one that matters the most is that I get paid to do my conditioning and cardio. It also stays in the building when I leave. Now more than ever because I don’t come home with the emotions I feel when I am there. Part of that is that any residual negativity gets eaten by the bar at the gym or in the garage. Another part of it is that I actively enjoy being pissed off. There’s just an energy that comes with that feeling. It bears repeating that it expensive because the best analogy I can think of for it is a bad energy drink. There is an inevitable crash at the end.
People reading this might well disagree with my concept here in this essay. I can respect that. I think this subject is relevant because of the unstable job market over the last 2 years. I have seen more than my fair share of people who lost jobs and got on where I work because they needed a job over that time frame. I’m not saying that “loving your job” is outdated. It’s admirable and commendable, but it is far from necessary. Renting space in someone else’s dream is perfectly okay so long as something truly worthwhile can be found.
Life Through Lifting 