End of my rope

I can't do it anymore. I wake up, and realize I have to go into work. And I can barely manage to do it.

Not because I'm lazy... I am a little bit, but I want my life to have purpose. Not because I'm burned out... I just took the best two-week vacation of my life.

It's the way work completely gnaws away at me every day.

The drive out to Reston saps time from my day and keeps me from exercising. Reston's an office-park suburb in the worst sense; buildings are far apart and unwalkable, there's tens of thousands of cars pulsing through, and everything from the landscaping to the architecture is brought into a conformist neutrality. The cars are SUVs or convertibles; the people are either unpleasant to work with, or so sapped of life and emotion that you wonder whether they're actually human. Vapidness and xenophobia rule the day.

The work is in support of our military. The same military being found increasingly guilty of human rights violations; the same military being used inappropriately by those in charge to wage warfare against an abstract enemy, and calling it "protecting our freedom." I'm glad the military is around to protect me, but that's not what its being used for, and I have a real problem using my knowledge and expertise to support that misuse. I don't expect anyone at work would find the concept of having such qualms anything but alien. I don't expect a lot of people I encounter during a typical workday would understand. Or care. Or let the expression of my misgivings slide by without missing a chance to call me un-American.

I fear all this is sapping the life out of me; I have to conform to this nonsense in order to pull in a paycheck and simply afford rent. I can't take it much longer. But would any job I could find in Washington be any better? The answer is probably no.