You are your own boss

A friend was recently telling me about her troubles with the people at the ARGE who are responsible for dishing out Hartz IV or 'long-term unemployment benefit'. She said that she wanted to say something in response to the man's rudeness towards her but, she said, she couldn't as "he was acting as my boss at the time".  She felt she had no choice but to be submissive. Her hands were, she felt, tied. He was, she said, "her boss".

Now as some of you may know, I am going to have the words "Albert bloody Camus ruined my life" chiselled onto my gravestone, because at the tender age of 18, in my last year of school, we had to read his book L'Etranger (The Outsider/Stranger - it has more than one English title). In those days, when you did a foreign language at A level, you couldn't avoid doing a few works of literature in that language, too. 

Albert bloody Camus is all about existentialism. Until I came across that philosophy, I thought life was going to be great. Everything would roll along smoothly. Everything would just click into place. And then - BANG! - along came existentialism and pulled the rug from under my feet. Nothing felt stable again. Basically, life is absurd: you live, you die. There is no meaning to life at all. There is no God guiding us, no grand scheme of things. You and not God are responsible for your life.

As I said to my friend who said that she had to do what the man at the ARGE told her, you are your own boss. Everything in your life is decided by you.

A lot of people I know have had unhappy previous lives - especially unhappy childhoods. And they are miserable because of that and cannot move forward because they are still in the grip of their misery. But no matter how much you dwell on that, nothing is going to change the past. Even with the biggest amount of sympathy, the facts of the past are indelible, immutable, fixed. 

The only thing you can do is to change how you deal with them. 

Think about Malala, the Afghan girl who was shot in the head on a school bus because she wanted an education. She could have just moped around for the rest of her life, saying how unfair that was. She could have meekly stayed at home and let herself be cowed by these bullies. What did she do? Well, she graduated from Oxford this year.

Or take the man whose story was told in the French film Les Intouchables (Ziemlich Beste Freunde, The Intouchables). Philippe Pozzo di Borgo was a director of Pommery when he became a diabetic quadriplegic in 1993 following a paragliding accident. He carried on working for a fair while after that, got married again and had a daughter (his first wife died of cancer), wrote a book about his experience, moved to Morocco and works for various charities. Did he just sit at home and bewail his fate?

The point is that they decided how to react to what life flung their way. They didn't have to go down any path that anyone else had decided for them. They were their own boss. They made the decision to carry on. Malala chose an education; Philippe chose to be mentally active and to enjoy life as best he could. He could equally have chosen to stay indoors with the curtains closed muttering "It's not fair, me being stuck in a wheelchair. It's not fair."

Even if you are employed, you are still your own boss. You decide to be employed rather than be self-employed or freelance. You decide the kind of education or training you want to go through to get a job. You decide which job to apply for. You decide to do your best to get the job at the interview. You decide to show up for work on the first day and every other day after that. You decide not to apply for a new job but stay in the one you have. You decide not to chuck the job in, sell everything and go and sit on a beach somewhere for the rest of your life.

Everyone has free choice. Including my friend who is fighting with the powers that be at the benefits office. Take the rudeness they dish out, or find another solution. But the choice is ultimately yours. You are your own boss. Your life is your responsibility.