We Live for the Weekend, But Are We Really Living?

If 5 days belong to work and 2 days belong to life, which is Saturday and Sunday, then when exactly are we living? Are you seeing what I'm seeing? You see, maybe the answer is very uncomfortable. We are living in a small space between our obligations. Actually, we are not designing our lives around living. We are designing our lives around working. Then we call this life. How does that work? And then we use the remaining pieces of our life to recover from the work. That is the absurdity.

Really, imagine someone gives a prisoner 7 hours of freedom every week and tells him, "Look, how free you are." We would laugh at it. That's not freedom at all. But when society gives us 2 days of freedom after 5 days of labor, we call it a normal lifestyle. How fascinating. The mathematics itself is revealing, right? There are seven days in a week. Five are heavily organized around productivity. Two are called rest, right? Saturday and Sunday. And even those two are often contaminated by the consequences of the other five.

This is not an accident. Work is not merely something we do. Work has become the structure around which we organize existence. How pathetic we all have become. We wake up for work, eat according to work, sleep according to work, travel according to work, take holidays according to work. Even relationships are sometimes scheduled around work. Right? We say, "I am free after 7." "I can meet only on Sunday." "I cannot come today. I have work tomorrow." And so on and so on. Are you seeing how we are all living? Actually, we are all not living. We are all existing. That's the truth.

Notice what happened. Work became the reference point of our life. We started scheduling our living according to our work. Life became the thing we fit around it. For me, this is where the philosophical problem begins. We often say, "I work so that I can live." But look carefully at the structure. If most of the week is sacrificed to work, and most of the remaining time is used to recover from the work, then the sentence slowly becomes, "I live so that I can continue working," not, "I can live." Are you seeing what I'm saying? That is a completely different statement, and we do not notice the difference because the system is so familiar. Really, we never question because everybody does it.

You see, a fish does not question water because it has never lived outside it, and we do not question our working week because almost everyone around us is doing the same thing. A child goes to school, let us say, then college, then work, then retirement. And somewhere between all this, we are told to enjoy life. But where? Where exactly should I enjoy life? Between the meeting and the deadline? Or during my lunch break? Or on a Sunday afternoon, right? Or for 2 weeks during a vacation? We are given tiny windows of freedom and then congratulated for using them. How terrible is our whole life?

Think about a person working all week. On Monday morning, the person is tired from Sunday. On Tuesday, the person is adjusting. On Wednesday, the person is waiting for Friday. On Thursday, the person is almost there. On Friday evening, there is relief. Saturday feels like freedom. Then Sunday comes. Sunday is like borrowed time. And then Monday returns. This cycle can continue for decades. And the strange part is that nobody needs to force us into believing that this is normal. We teach each other that this is normal.

A child asks an adult, "Why do you work?" The answer is usually, "Because I need money." There's nothing wrong with that sentence. Then the child grows up and discovers that money is needed for food, shelter, education, transport, healthcare, entertainment, blah blah blah, comfort, and security. So work becomes necessary. I'm not saying work is evil. I'm not saying the narrow-minded stuff. That would be too simple. Work creates things. Work feeds people. Work builds houses, hospitals, roads, machines, business, and technology, and so on and so on. Work can give structure to life. The problem is not work itself. The problem begins when work stops being something inside life and becomes the thing that decides what life is.

There is a difference. If work is supposed to support my life, work becomes a tool. If I organize my entire life around work, work becomes a master. And the irony is that we sometimes spend our healthiest years preparing for a future in which we finally have time. We are all fooling ourselves. We say, "I will travel later." "I will spend more time with my family later." "I will write that book or read that book later," and so on and so on and so on. Right? Or, "I will enjoy life later." Later becomes the most expensive word in the human vocabulary. We are all fooling ourselves because nobody can guarantee that later will arrive. Yet we believe as if the future has signed a contract with us. How idiotic we all are. We sacrifice Tuesday for Saturday. We sacrifice this month for next year. We sacrifice our 20s for our 30s, and 30s for our 40s, and so on and so on and so on.

All this is because people do not know who they actually are. People are blindly following what everyone does. You see, you are not this body and mind. You are not spirituality. You are not this. You are not that. You are not circumstances. You are not God. You are not this. You are not a tree. You are not anything. You are the self-aware reality. You are the screen on which the entire drama of this world is happening. This can be understood not by listening to me, but by turning your mind within. Once you turn your mind within, then you will understand that you have always been the self-aware reality. You have always been divine. And this is the truth. You are nothing but the awareness. But you confuse yourself with the body and mind because you do not question, or you do not sit in solitude and silence. Silence is very important because your true nature is silence. Your true nature is not this or that. Your true nature is absolute awareness, which is totally neutral. It does not involve itself in this world, but without it, nothing can be done in this world.