I’ve been thinking about jobs a lot lately, and the absurdity of the whole charade. We live in a society where work is painted as this noble, honorable thing. But in reality, for most of us, it’s just selling chunks of our life for a paycheck. So if we’re going to trade our precious time on this planet for money, doesn’t it make sense to make that deal as sweet as possible?

Remember those job benefits they dangle in front of you like a carrot? Dental, medical, vision… oh, and the ever-so-generous “time off”. Like, “Hey! Thanks for giving us the best years of your life, here’s a day off – but don’t take it on a Monday, and for God’s sake not on a Friday. Don’t want to ruin the business week, now do we?”

But let’s talk about those juicy bereavement days. Now, if there’s one thing humans are good at, it’s having relatives. Most of us didn’t even ask for them, they just kind of appeared. Second cousins twice removed, that uncle who smells funny, the aunt who insists on giving you overly moist kisses on your birthday. Hey, they’re family. And, naturally, family members pass away. All the time! Think about it: if you stretched your family tree out far enough, you’d find that you’re probably related to Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, and maybe even that weird fish that was the first thing to crawl out of the ocean. So, I say claim those bereavement days for all of ’em! Grieve for the trilobites and the saber-toothed tigers. After all, weren’t they sort of our relatives too?

Then there’s paternity leave. Oh, this is a golden goose if ever I saw one. We live in a world where genders are fluid, definitions are malleable, and who’s to say you didn’t just have a kid? In some other dimension, alternate reality, or perhaps inside that bizarre dream you had last Tuesday. If your boss can claim that “team-building exercises” help the company, then surely you can claim that your imaginary child needs bonding time. And if anyone asks to see the baby, just say it’s invisible. Or maybe it’s at that age where it’s just very, very tiny and lives inside a speck on a flower petal. Dr. Seuss would back you up on that one.

I’ve enjoyed statutory paternity leave for four out of the last five years,’ he wrote.

‘I’m single and don’t have any kids.

‘Work has never checked for proof of an actual baby, but just to be safe I have a Googled random baby as my phone screensaver and change it every time I become a “Dad”.’

https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/lifestyle-buzz/man-with-no-kids-claims-paternity-leave-by-using-a-googled-photo-of-a-baby/ar-AA1fUNox

Look, the bottom line is: jobs are constructs. We made them up. We also made up money, time, and those rules about not wearing white after Labor Day. Seriously, who even came up with that one? So why can’t we make the rules work for us for a change?

We are living, breathing, thinking beings hurtling through space on a giant rock. It’s all a bit ridiculous when you think about it. Shouldn’t we be spending our time marveling at the universe, creating, dreaming, and, I don’t know, eating more ice cream? But since we’ve decided that paper with dead presidents on them is worth something, and that we should spend most of our waking hours gathering as much of it as possible, then shouldn’t we be, well, efficient about it?

The real object of work should be to gain as much money as possible while being as unoccupied and undestroyed by the system as we can. Because here’s the truth: Life is short. And I’d rather spend mine figuring out the meaning of the universe, or at the very least, enjoying a good nap.

In the immortal words of the modern philosopher: “Work smarter, not harder.” So claim those days off, grieve for your ancestors, enjoy your imaginary kids. After all, in the grand scheme of things, isn’t it all just a bit of fun?