The 8 Thoughts That Race Through Your Head On A Monday

1. The Blaze of Glory Resignation

Quitting on your terms is a fantasy you’ve had for months, if not years. In fact, there’s a decent chance you’ve spent more time on the job thinking about how to quit than you’ve done actual work. Which is a totally understandable impulse–turning the listless capitalistic machine on it’s head, if only for a millisecond, has become the new American Dream.

The creative freedom is yours here, but your desired exit (meticulously drawn out for the first few hours of every Monday) will most certainly involve a “tell it like it is,” middle finger-heavy sequence of bliss. See below:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Lh7Zg8WXwU&w=584&h=390]

2. The Bank Account Track Meet

If you quit now, how much money would you have to legitimately hold you over for the next eight months? Could you travel to Europe and have enough money left over to say words like “sherpa?” Could you rent a house in the mountains, live cheaply, and figure out how to live off the land? Could you just start focusing really, really hard on winning the lottery?

Tragically, you’ll know the answer before you embark on the calculations. And nowadays, the lottery won’t be enough to live off forever. Boo hoo, hashtag hard knock life.

3. Organized Religion

Sitting at an office, or doing some other resented task in exchange for survival, is the temporary result of an ontological cause and effect process that’s gone on for thousands of years. At jobs I’ve disliked, I’ve often asked myself how the world ended up getting here–how the de facto formula for human superiority is to dress up in starched clothes and bore over Microsoft Excel for a pre-determined amount of time that has nothing to do with how long the task will actually take.

My mind always goes back to organized religion, the first all-encompassing economic engine predicated on uniform obedience. The intention of religion may have been infinitely more noble back in the day, but in practice it was simply a way to maintain rigid order, and preserve the status quo. Staring at a computer screen is the new basing your entire day around what the Church says.

4. The Upcoming Event Fantasy

You may have a friend of a friend’s birthday party this upcoming weekend. Facebook has told you who’s attending, and who’s too cool to acknowledge that they’re attending.

Now that you’ve got enough information to properly prep for a desired hookup target, it’s time to motivate yourself with the proper imaginative fantasies. Aren’t all those motivational speaker types always hopped up on the fact that you’ve gotta envision success in order to attain it? Believe to achieve.

5. The Celebrity Encounter

I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who spends an unhealthy percentage of the day dreaming up situations where I end up randomly stumbling into celebrities, win them over with a fierce combination of wit and essence of general cool, and end up forming a lifelong bond.

Monday after lunch hour, your soon to be story of meeting Jay Baruchel on a Gondola at Whistler (followed by running into him at a bar, where you seal the deal) should be at all time high. Draw up the details. They matter.

6. Switching Jobs With Your Friend

Our friends’ jobs sometimes seem a lot more desirable than ours. This is mostly because we’re not doing them, but it’s sometimes because they actually are. In that spirit, forge out a good 15 minutes to think about what you’d be doing in his or her posh downtown office. Ensure your daydream places great emphasis on the fact that you’d clearly outperform your friend at his or her own game.

*Make sure to envision the picture he/she paints of the job–the one that’s slightly embellished, and glosses over the more miserable aspects. In other words, the one that doesn’t really exist.

7. Glimpse Into Retirement

I think about retiring in Aspen, Colorado a lot, because the couple in David Brooks’ The Social Animal retired in Aspen. Clearly this is what you need to do in order to be a aristomeritocratic acheivement beast, something I’ve based a lot of my 23 years around doing.

Because Mondays are all about skipping the journey in favor of going straight to the destination, Monday should be devoted to thinking about what over-expensive wood carvings you should buy for cabin decorations, and what music you should be listening to as you handcraft tomato soup. Is Florence and The Machine gonna be a respectable oldie?

8. If This Was Two Years Ago, I’d Be…

Eating breakfast at 11 30 am with my other roommates, deciding whether or not it’s really worth it to go to that 1 o’clock lecture.

(Of course I ended up attending. I just wanted to ensure I looked cool and responsibly rebellious, in an attempt to mask some sort of unaddressed insecurity. That’s what it’s all about.)