Are you living to work? Or are you working to live?

10-hour days.

4x a week.

I’ve never had a schedule like that in my life.

Until I became a bellhop/bellman, 8-hour days, 5x a week was the norm for me.

When I got offered the job 5 years ago, I thought to myself, “you mean I only get to work 2 hours more a day and I can have a 3rd day completely off?”

Sign me up.

It wasn’t all peanut butter and jelly though.

I struggled for months to get used to that schedule.

I can’t count the amount of days that I hit a brick wall after the 8 hour mark.

It felt like I got hit with a swanton bomb from the top rope.

Shout out to you if that rings a bell lol.

The job requires me to be on my feet a lot.

About 10 hours a day.

Although, I’ll be honest it’s more like 6-8.

And slightly less when it’s slow.

I help guests that have been coming back since the hotel opened in 1993.

And I’ve helped guests that are barely going for the first time.

I get to drive them around town which isn’t even that big.

It’s a small coastal town of about 1.5k people.

Mostly hotels and restaurants.

When I’m not Tokyo drifting the guests into town, on the rare occasion, I do get to build fires out on the beach for some of them.

Only if they’ve signed up.

I’ll be honest.

I started chasing a rabbit and now I don’t know how I got here.

But the point is this.

Originally, I took that position so that I could work less and have more of my life back.

And yeah, technically I’m still working 40 hours a week.

But something about working 4 days vs working 5 days a week just hits different.

And that’s the takeaway from all this.

Don’t get stuck in the trap of making work your life.

Something my mom said to me so long ago has always stuck.

She said “Alex, are you working to live?

Or

Are you living to work?

Woah, that’s deep.

I didn’t know Mexican moms were out here thinking like philosophers lol.

Anyway that’s all I got for ya today.

Thanks for reading and have a blessed rest of your day.

Alex “work to live don’t live to work Garcia out.