Stay Connected...?

I was walking down the road to the beach. The bus that I used to take to go to my previous job went roaring pass me downhill like a pouncing lion. On the side of the bus there was a huge tech related advertisement saying, "stay out of the office not out of the loop" (or something along that line). It is an ad for some cloud service office suite. For the readers who might not know, cloud service is a service that keeps your "electronic stuff" online so you can access them anywhere from any computer. Yup the days of carrying memory sticks, optical discs or floppy disks are well and truly over. This is one of the greatest technological trends developed in the recent years.

As our technology advances the convenience brought by it has made our lives so much easier. We have got used to everything available at our fingertips at our command. We are like a bunch of high-level sages who can command anything at will. The only difference is that instead of using a tome, we use our computer. Also the days of waiting for the alchemy pot to conjure the tonic we need is over. Everything is loaded (almost) instantly and waiting for more than two seconds for a screen to load is already too much. I am from a spoiled instant noodle generation who at one stage thought that food that takes time to make is "inefficient". I love what we have now and think that there is no better time to live in than the present. However seeing that bus ad suddenly made me think do I really want to stay connected with the office all the time? The idea itself is not quite that appealing.

As an actor and writer I do need to stay connected because job opportunities come and go like a snap of fingers. Your missed out opportunities could be other people's big breaks. That is part of the reason I joined the smartphone movement a few years ago. I just need to be “out there” all the time. I spun a cobweb of online profiles in the cyberspace so that all suspecting and unsuspecting jobs could hopefully come into my way. That, what I believe, is what I need to do as an independent artist. However if I work in an office environment do I want that kind of connectivity? I have always insisted to have my work life separated from my personal life. When I am at work I am there to get things done. However the moment I left the office I would want nothing to do with work. Having me connected to work or people calling me about work after office hours are just unacceptable. I did have occasions that I brought work home but most of the time was just an excuse to go home. For me if I want to bring work home it has to be something I have the passion for - and this would be acting and writing related. I am a firm believer of if it is an office job there is a reason for it to have "an office". Staying connected outside the office, as enticing as it sounds is nothing too appealing for me.

One of the things that sometimes puzzled me was that despite having better technology helping us doing our jobs as compared to my parents' generation we ended up spending more time working than appreciating life. I remember when my parents came home from work they were about us (that is a second job for them already I reckon) but nowadays we are about "getting this proposal done" or "waiting for a business call" at home. No doubt the nature of work itself has changed across generations but is it changing for the better? This is a question I sometimes have.

As a creative person trying to strike out a career in the creative industry it is not an easy thing, and I was well aware of what I was getting myself into. At some point I would need to get back into an office job so I could pay my bills unless a truly creative job came along and rescue me from the drowning ocean of job seekers. If that happens I might need to compromise and stay connected with those jobs because as an actor and writer I am maintaining my brand and my own business. However until that happens I would still insist that I am not staying connected to an office 24/7 as that bus ad suggested but instead trying to stay connected to the bigger world that I am living in.