“When giving your child or wife a kiss, repeat to yourself, ‘I am kissing a mortal.’” — Epictetus
We like to think we’ll last forever. We want to believe everything will last forever. But that’s not the case. Everything has an expiration date: you, me, your siblings, your job, your colleagues, etc.
We know that but the most challenging part is being thoughtful about it. We live with the socially imposed taboo of death. Nobody likes to talk about it, and nobody does. That is what prevents us from thinking about how fleeting our existence is.
Thinking about death does not have to be an exercise in self-pity but rather a tool that allows us to focus our efforts on what is worthwhile.
Once you internalise this, you begin to evaluate priorities better not only in your life but also in your professional career, enabling you to make better job decisions. You will also start developing detachment. It’s not like you will not mind about anything. Instead, you will improve your acceptance of the events in your life.
There will be difficult moments in your professional career: your company got bought by another one, colleagues’ layoffs, bad feedback from your supervisor, a service outage at 3:00 am, discussions with that toxic colleague you know… Knowing that every one of us is going to die for sure, puts some perspective on day-by-day events like those and helps us accept them and bring back the focus on the important stuff: what depends on us.
An external service does their work and you can’t do anything about that, C-level staff do their work and you can’t do anything about that. your colleague would decide to leave the company and you can’t do anything about that, your toxic colleague won’t change the way he is and you can’t do anything about that.
Accept it.
Keep working and doing the best you can. That is under your control, that is what remains, and that must be your focus; your work, give feedback to your company, give feedback to the company which gives you a service (or change it if you are not happy with it), be clear with your colleague about her tone when talking to you, and the last action one can make always about all of this is to take another job in another company.
It’s okay to feel annoyed when something like that happens but you will have the tool to pass the mourning faster.