So the question is this: Do I expect too much from my workplace? Is that why I am perpetually disappointed, disgruntled and disgusted by it on a daily basis?

Answer: Yes, I probably do. Work is about making money - for yourself, for the powers that be, for the corporate man whom you enable. If money is the main goal, all else is secondary (read: collegiality, respect, basic human kindness). In many ways, it really seems over the top to describe a workplace of corporate professionals in this way. I am well compensated. I do not fear for my personal safety. I have an office, with a door, access to limitless office supplies (even those expensive little post-it flags I used to have to ration in school), I even have business cards (though I have given out exactly 6 - and even then only because my mother insisted on taking at least two - in the three years of my working life). I may be harried but not harassed. And yet, somehow, work has long been a site that breeds a peculiarly strong brand of abject misery that pretty much defies description, for me and for many of my peers.

Is it that we are a lazy generation? We all have shiny, happy resumes. We have followed the fast track in life to its logical, and yet absurd conclusion. We say please and thank you. We have done as we have been told. We worked damn hard to do all of these things, to measure up, to make it. And yet, none of us wants to be doing what we are doing. We want to be doing, well, there is no other way to say it - nothing.

Is it wrong to fantasize about doing nothing? Is dreaming of the promise of doing nothing slightly unseemly? It holds a forbidden, tempting, almost lascivious quality to it. Drunk on nothing. High on nothing. Turned on by nothing. Craving non-stop nothing. Everyone knows that nice girls don't do nothing. Mmmmm, nothing.

Perhaps nothing is such a tempting seductress, because our days have so long been overstuffed with so much everything. The big belly of everything stretches out the form fitting contours of a life. You let everything hang around long enough and you don't recognize the silhouette of your life, except in fleeting sidelong glances in a far-off mirror. And even then, it is always just out of reach. Everything scrambles, wears and distorts. Everything makes sure you are always short of clean laundry, buying extra pairs of socks and underwear just to make it through. Everything makes time squishy - always on your cell phone, apologizing for being "a few minutes late" - traffic, a call went long at the office, parking, the rain, forgot this, remembered that, lost the other. Everything hates planning - it loses your calendar. It burns your journal. Everything is always shifting in its seat, its ample bottom not allowing room on the bench for your dreams to sit. Everything is intrusive. It fights with you. Everything inevitably outweighs you. It can, if you are not vigilant, outmatch you. What is guaranteed is that with everything in your life, there is a perpetual call to arms, a state of alert, because there is always a fight waiting to happen. Waiting for a fight is almost more tiring than actually fighting. That's what everything does. Everything makes you tired.

When you are bone-weary tired, there is only one solution which the mind's eye (in the myopia of its fatigue) will let you see: Nothing. The siren song of nothing - it seems the only solution for the battle scarred, grizzled veterans of everything.

In our minds, we know that nothing is not a solution. In our hearts, it is the only answer.

The trick then is finding the ever elusive "in between" - to aspire to find a permanent home in the utopian warm nook of the elbow in between the stooped shoulder of everything and the open hand of nothing. It is there where we can simultaneously smile, laugh, love, pay our bills, keep our parents proud of us, and be blissfully, utterly, and unendingly well rested.

So there it is - the want ad of a generation --> SWF - desperately seeking Elbow for long term committed relationship