Why all Young People Should do Factory Work

weird ways it was life-changing

When I finished compulsory education, I struggled to get a menial job. After two months of constant failure, I eventually marched down to a local agency. Sure enough, all I had to do was fill in a couple of forms and they sent me to a factory.

At first, I was delighted because that meant I finally had a job. But on the first day, my enthusiasm for a job rapidly declined. Setting an alarm for 7 am, I arrived ready for work by 8 am.

My first and only task of the day was to put caps on bottles that went past on a machine. Sure it was fun for five minutes but bear in mind that I had to do this over and over without rest for almost eight hours. Talk about monotonous.

The day droned on as I experienced the most mindnumbing, mundane hell I could ever imagine. But in the end, I have a lot to be thankful for because of this god awful work experience.

It was probably the most insightful, eye-opening thing that ever happened to me.

When you are doing a dull and repetitive task, you have a lot of time for thinking. But my mind too was a place of hell. Absorbed in my own thoughts as I listened to the crappy background radio music, I had plenty of time to contemplate my life.

This contemplation was brutal but productive. For hours I was bitter and angry while I carried out these soul-draining, monotonous factory tasks, thinking things like:

“Is this all there is to life?”

“Am I going to be working here forever?”

“What’s the point of living anymore if life is like this?”

“Kill me now”

Go figure. I wasn’t having a good time.

Hours later and with sore feet from standing up all day, I plodded home at a snail pace. But during that 30-minute walk from the factory to my house, I knew this was no way to live.

And at that moment, things started to change.

Yes, I just moaned about the miserable realities of a factory job. But it was the best thing that happened to me for one significant reason.

For the first time, I took my life seriously.

The consequences of not taking school seriously are bad grades and afterschool detentions with your other degenerate friends. But the consequences of not taking your life seriously are far more grave.

When I was working that dreaded shift I realized that I needed to do whatever it takes to better my life, or else it would be a living hell and I might as well have been dead.

That terrible job was the very trigger I needed to get into action and come up with a plan to better my life and for that, I am grateful.

As of today, it has been almost a year since I worked at that factory. But since then my income has skyrocketed by doing security work, which I enjoy in many ways, and also get the pleasure of earning a little extra by having fun with articles. Thank you Medium.

So if you are a young and unmotivated person, then working in a factory for a short while might just be the kick up the backside you need to change your life.

Experiencing the sheer torture of such work was more than enough to start a fire within me that has taken me leaps and bounds beyond needing to partake in such an underwhelming, depressing and sorrowful way of earning.

So if you are unmotivated, unfocused and without a plan, walk face-first into the fire and go to hell for a week, or even a day. You may be surprised at how quickly you will come up with a means of escape because I assure you, the alternative is hell.