One
of the serious diseases prevalent in the world and the Arab homeland is the
"Comfort Addiction". To verify this all you need is walk down the
street to see the coffee shops’ regulars and measure the number of hours they
spend there. And if you noticed how some of the limited wage employees spend
their weekly and seasonal holidays, you realize that their majority don’t
consider such holidays an opportunity to release extra works and increase their
income, but rather to spend most of the weekends in front of the screens or in
the coffee shops where they waste precious time and money on titbits. The
prevalence of this disease is not limited to those who engage in physically
demanding work, but also those exerting intellectual efforts.
Some
manifestations of the "comfort addiction" disease are the widespread
misconceptions about the retirement concept. Throughout my career, I always
heard people in their prime forties chanting words such as attaining a
cumulative wealth to bring about early retirement. They did not mean merely
stopping their functional work. They meant to relinquish working entirely to
enjoy a leisure life. In this respect, they meant to dazzle those around them
with their wealth. I have always felt that anybody flashing this suffers
compiled problems.
I
advocate that anybody reaching his sixties to retire without a wellness excuse
is someone who missed the correct understanding of life. One feels life when he
practices life that is practiced by work. Thus, retirement expels him or her
from life. It is not a coincidence that the Arabic word for “retired”
(motakaed), meaning “die while sitting”, has almost the same synonym in
English: “gone away or gone off". Therefore I say, don't stop working as
long as you live. Never stop in order to give your life its meaning and
purpose, otherwise life becomes empty. As your heart never stops beating, do
not stop working. Extra comfort is harmful to health. Man should not be
permitted to sit back with his mind put to unneeded rest. If you sensed a
tendency for comfort, all you have to do is occupy yourself somehow. Men in
their sixties are always amenable to job opportunities different from their
original jobs. Thanks of the terrible transformation in communications, and
various Internet uses, innovative jobs have become so much more lucrative.
As
to those who talk about full retirement in the sense of suspending all
activities while still at their forties or even above, those people need to
rethink their understanding of life and work.
On
a psychological level, you won't be able to enjoy your night sleep unless you
exhaust yourself at work in your day. Everyone has an invisible sensor
measuring the degree of his yield as opposed to his ability to deliver. When
night comes, his sensor sums up his performance in comparison to his ability to
give. And no matter how skillful a human is in fooling others, he cannot
entirely deceive himself. Therefore, upon receiving a modest reading, he gets
grappled by a guilty conscience with feelings of remorse and anxiety, where his
invisible sensor reminds him of his drawback of not to have done more.
By
constant repetitions, these feelings will have a domineering effect over him.
As he gets used to it, he will not help but keeping to blame himself. This is
where one becomes prone to laziness, a human addiction that nurtures the
self-reproach into a permanent self-condemnation stripping humans from
self-respect that may turn into a mental illness. Hence, we find psychiatric
diseases more common among zombies. Whoever tolerates himself in lazing two
minutes every day will be predisposed to laziness most of his time in later
years. This is the killer disease with a cumulative impact ensuing on the long
run.
In
addition to correcting misconceptions about comfort, we need to strengthen our
understanding of the importance of extra effort. It is not enough to ask
ourselves to exert the effort required at both levels of study or work. We must
incite ourselves to make extra efforts before waiting for others to ask us. We
must take the extra effort, even if others do not ask us to do so. The culture
of extra effort needs to be consolidated in our Arab world in particular.
Those
who progressed in their working careers have done more than actually needed.
Hence, as I repeated in my conversations, if you work more than your wages’
value, you will find your future wages greater than your work’s value. Happy
people are more productive in their work: they make their co-workers happier,
they are happy to work with others and turn out to be the most creative in
solving problems. I had decided, on a personal level, that what helps me more
than anything in my life is not how long I will live, but how much I can work
in my life.