Sometimes plans come as quickly as they go and that’s the way of things really. It’s annoying, but what can you do? You just need to keep on going.

It’s a frustrating time and there is subsequently a lot of frustration. However, need to keep on going. Need to keep on keeping on. Soon rest will be at hand, but until then there just needs to be the continual, unending push forward and hoping for some sort of break through that will allow some respite.

Maybe it won’t happen and I’ll be expected to toughen up or keep on going, but let me tell you, after a good long while, it certainly gets harder to believe that any of this will end.

Now, I want to clarify here that I’m not necessarily complaining. There are things I’ve done to myself that have helped to put me in the position that I’m in, but there also are a lot of things that are out of my control. Such is the way of things and you just keep on going as eventually, maybe you’ll get to eat the whole cherry.

Maybe.

Things are tough right now and it’s a continual struggle, but what really pisses me off is the continual pressure forced onto people surrounding the idea that hard work will guarantee success. It doesn’t. Hard work guarantees hard work and little else. It doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be better noticed. It doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be satisfied with your achievements.

People like to ignore that there is a lot of luck involved in getting most places. Sure, you can mitigate luck by an amount that is variable depending on many different things. Hard work can be good in certain places at certain points in time and it can be rewarding, but more often than not you don’t necessarily get a say in your success until certain points and even then it might be pulled away from you.

Most of us don’t even necessarily get access to that success. A good chunk of us get told to keep working hard and keep doing everything at once and surely we’ll achieve that which we are setting out to achieve.

Much like telling students who need to work to survive that they need to prioritise their study over their need to work, telling people that working hard will lead to success is a fucked thing to say. Not everyone has the opportunity to survive on a small amount of work hours and not everyone is going to get far working hard.

We create pressure on people to succeed at younger and younger ages whilst simultaneously not doing enough to make sure that those opportunities to succeed can actually be reached without risking severe burnout and we don’t give enough of a shit to do more about it. But sure, if people work hard, then surely they’ll succeed. They’ll get far due to their hard work and not luck at all. Surely that’ll happen, right?

The time it took to write five-hundred words: 10:04:61

Well, I wasn’t expecting this to come out, but it started and so I stuck it out.

Written at home.