Private luxury: doing your own thing

[Did this piece for M magazine’s section on what the word “luxury” means to different people in an intimate, personal sense]

I have a friend who works for a bank in London. He’s doing well for himself but he thinks of his job as a necessary evil, something that must be survived for 10 hours each day while he tries to make time on the side for the things he really likes doing. His real passion, going back to our school days, is acting, and when I last met him he had just returned from a weekend trip to Ireland, to play a role in a short experimental film directed by a former classmate.

He loved the experience and couldn’t stop talking about it. “I wish I had the luxury of traveling to Dublin to be with those guys every week, he said, “or even just participating in three or four shows of a theatre performance in London each month. But it isn’t easy to juggle this along with the other stuff.” Looking at his eyes, I could see that the strain of the weekend was making itself felt. We parted after an early dinner; he was very tired and he needed to be at the bank – for “the other stuff” – at 9 AM.

It probably says something about the life I lead that such encounters come as minor jolts. At risk of causing serious annoyance, let me tell you something about myself: for the past seven years, my “work” has largely consisted of reading books, watching movies, and writing about them – all activities that I enjoy. There have, of course, been many commissioned assignments – which means often having to plough through less-than-engaging material – but after I established myself on my beat it became easier to pick and choose. Thus spoilt, I have to be regularly reminded of one of the most basic facts of human existence: that most working people in the world keep their professional and personal lives in separate, airtight boxes, and baulk when the two things chance to overlap; that they meticulously plan their weekends and weekday evenings (assuming they aren’t working late nights) and feel a bitter sense of loss if they don’t succeed in squeezing maximum utility from those precious pockets of “leisure time”.

Four years ago, I made another important career decision (with the help of a generous retainership offer from the newspaper I was employed with) and began working out of home, on my own time. Freelance writing may not be as lucrative as many other professions, but I rarely have to spend on books any more, and that’s where most of my money went in my pre-journalism days. It also means freedom from the ball-and-chain routine, freedom from neat and sterile office routines that make little sense to the writing life (what if the Muse goes AWOL between 9AM and 6 PM and comes calling at midnight instead?). It means being able to avoid the stress and the time-wastage associated with being stuck in Delhi traffic for over two hours each day.

I can spend quality time with my dog. I don’t have to shave every day, or every third day for that matter. Nor attend meetings or conferences, things that rank very high indeed in the long list of pointless manmade inventions based on the pretence that it’s possible to make sense of the world. Best of all, I don’t have to don formal clothes. (When I was a child, I wanted to be a vet. This partly had to do with love for animals, but I’ve come to believe that the real reason was the notion I had that vets weren’t required to wear ties or suits.)

And – to return to the all-important point with which I began this piece – there is no discernible divide between my “work” and my personal interests. I can spend my morning reading a great new novel by Orhan Pamuk (which is in fact what I did today), then watch a couple of films on DVD in the afternoon and evening (occasionally pausing to make little notes), and truthfully claim that I've spent the day adding value to my skill-set as a columnist/reviewer. My banker friend, who earns a lot more than I do, would probably agree that that really is luxury.

I see you turning green, reader, so here are a few crumbs of consolation: each of the benefits I’ve mentioned above comes with small minefields. It’s easy to become addicted to being anti-social. Getting out, even to go to the neighborhood mall, can feel like a chore. On the rare occasion that I do get into my car and travel a long distance, I find that my driving skills have deteriorated through disuse. Self-discipline is paramount in my line of work, and at times when it isn’t all coming together I find myself yearning for the extra shove that can only be provided by a martinet-boss. My dog is over-pampered and sulks mightily when I’m away for even a few hours. Power cuts, and visiting relatives who assume that because you’re home, you’re free, must be hazarded.

Turning something you enjoy doing into a career can be a tricky business in other ways; it can easily lead to a situation where you’re never really switched off from your “work”, and this can affect your family life. This is something I have to consciously guard against. My wife has standing instructions to smack me on the side of the head if things get out of hand. (Thankfully she’s a feature writer herself – albeit an office-going one – so she understands something of the compulsions of this life. But she’s afraid of discussing movies with me because I’m too “analytical”.)

All that said, would I trade this in for a regular working routine, or a high-paying job that I couldn’t be enthusiastic about? No way. Whenever I even consider it, I think back to a remote time in my past, a time when I had just graduated in Commerce from college and seemed set for a career in chartered accountancy (because it was the done thing, the inevitable thing. I’d been good in Maths and Accounts in school, so what else was there?). There’s a vivid memory of interning for my Articles in a middle-rung CA’s office, reading out and making tick-marks against debit and credit entries in an office ledger under the supervision of a genial man with whom there was nothing I could really talk about, while I secretly daydreamt of the movies I would rent from the British Council library later in the evening... if I got out in time.

When I think back to those days and reflect on the life I’m probably leading in a parallel universe right now, I can only thank my lucky stars.

Peter Joseph’s cult Internet film Zeitgeist posits a near-Utopian world (and a very improbable one) built on a high-technology, resource-based economy rather than the debt-perpetuating monetary system that all of us take for granted. One of its many conceits is a future where people won’t have to spend their lives chained to jobs (described as “paid slavery”) that they aren’t inherently interested in, but would find their own niches, adding value in little ways by doing things that are personally satisfying and meaningful to them. I like to think I'm already halfway there.