I first heard the term “is the juice worth the squeeze,” from one of my favorite movies “The Girl Next Door.” When I first heard it I thought it was kind of a douche bag comment made by the douche bag antagonizer in the movie.

You wanna be president? Lemme tell you the first rule of politics; Always know if the juice is worth the squeeze. You know what that means? It means you don’t steal my girl unless you’re ready to accept the consequences. – The Girl Next Door

And I didn’t think it really meant anything. I thought maybe they were using it incorrectly in the film. But it’s meaning and interpretation can go far deeper than the movie had time to explain.

It seems as though we as humans jump into activities and projects with a goal of creating comfort. This is obvious. The concept of activities and projects fall under the category of ‘work,’ aka the squeeze. The squeeze becomes a habitual pattern because it’s a widely accepted test to attain the comfort in life we so desire, aka the juice. But the juice is never really evaluated in terms of what it takes to get it.

Hence the question, is the juice…worth the squeeze?

We squeeze and squeeze at our jobs hoping that the harder we squeeze, the more juice we’ll have and the better it will taste.

But just because we can squeeze really hard to make more juice doesn’t mean we have to or that we should.

The book/movie “Fight Club” has an appropriate quote for my point:

God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off. – Fight Club

The quote is spot on. Except, television isn’t the only place that leads us to believe we’ll all live a life where our juice is squeezed for us or where the squeeze is easier and more fulfilling. And I’m not talking about movies, books, and music. I’m talking about real life stories we hear of people who are just like us, who fall into jobs and lifestyles out of pure luck, chance encounters, or some connection they have that we don’t.

We constantly see easier, cooler, and more comfortable lifestyles that other people are living. And we gravitate to those lifestyles because we gravitate to comfortable things instead of uncomfortable things. The proof of this is the obsession of celebrity. From posters on a wall to casual admirations by attending a concert to showing up a live taping or movie set and just water cooler gossip. Even if your idea of being comfortable in life isn’t being a rock god or famous celebrity, we still seek out positions in jobs and choose lifestyles that enable us to live more comfortable.

We work in these jobs we have because in order to survive in this society you need money. So we work harder and longer in the hopes that someone will recognize this and give us MORE money. To make it easier and more comfortable to survive. This is not how things were, we leave it up to strangers now to determine how hard and how great of a worker we are. They don’t know us. They don’t know our capacity for knowledge, our past history, and our struggles thus far. Before full-time employment it was up to the individual to prove to themselves that they could survive. If you survived and overcame a task this came with personal fulfillment and a greater sense of appreciation for your stake in the world because it would mean continued knowledge in how to survive on your own. Now, we’re still working to create our stake in the world, still striving for personal fulfillment and a sense of appreciation; but the pay off is different. We work for someone else. Not for ourselves. We work and our payoff goes to someone else. In my generation much like many people that are still alive today do not know what it is like to appreciate the personal fulfillment that comes when you accomplish something for yourself. I just know how to give more money to people who already have it. Even the projects I say I do for myself, ultimately, somewhere down the line those projects will pay and benefit other people. Everything I do, and everything I have done has been done for the benefit and survival of others. And possibly, (and probably), you as well.

There’s really nothing completely wrong with this. Doing something for the benefit others by itself is the most noble cause we can subscribe to. Every time we do something or learn something, ultimately in someway shape or form it’s benefiting or will benefit someone else. For century’s we’ve traded skills and knowledge for things we personally need to survive. That’s no longer the case, we trade skills and knowledge for things to help our society strive, and from that it helps others survive. Once we traded crops for tools or we traded animals for weapons. Today, since our society has evolved, we have more people producing crops, weapons, warmth, and other such necessity’s that our trading focuses on new necessity’s. Fashion, entertainment, college, t.v., concerts, restaurants, etc. The problem with doing anything in this day and age is not having enough juice and feeling as though the juice wasn’t worth was the squeeze.

Many people will tell you who work long hours and at intense jobs that they don’t mind the hours or the job. That they would go crazy if they weren’t working that much (or working at all for that matter). But those people have accustomed themselves to working a lot or accustomed themselves to working. They’ve accepted this way of living. They’ve accepted this is the new form in the evolution of survival. Either they don’t know or don’t care that they no longer work to do anything for themselves, or don’t feel as though they have a choice.

Half of me actually agrees that this current society and all it’s failings and all it’s pleasantries is supposed to be how our world is supposed to be right now. But the other half of me has a hard time accepting that. The current test of survival, working, might be the next natural step in this world but it might not. Because otherwise our bodies would’ve been more equipped to handle the rigors of our schedules. Instead we go to doctor offices to get anti depression medication, back pills, arthritis pills, penis enlargement pills, sleeping pills, eye glasses, aspirin, medication to battle ADD and many more. These could be signs that this is not natural. This could be proof that we create our own ailments. Could it be that our displeasure in our own lives is the result of our own doing?

Comfortable things create pleasure and it’s easier to survive when you’re comfortable.

I’ve always been a better lover as a bum than when I was employed. – Charles Bukowski

It’s been said that people who work “full-time” are less likely to be healthy because of lack of sleep, diet, and balance with other aspects of life. Which could also mean, their personal survival rate could go down as well as their offsprings. This brings up another good point, our children are our own personal means of survival. We set them up to be our vessels that will carry on the legacy we spent our entire lives making sure didn’t die out. So why would we create a future for them that would make it harder to carry out our history?

It seems as though humanity, collectively, will have a difficult realizing their effect on a future they will not be a part of. I wonder if this is because humans are obsessed with challenge. If that’s true it could be good and bad. By itself, challenge isn’t actually bad at all. In fact challenge is just another struggle to survive. But since our challenges have evolved because our society has evolved our challenges are still to keep warm, raise a strong family, gather food and breed but it’s all just roped together now. You can have all these things as long as you have money. And thats the new challenge, how much money can I get to remain comfortable long enough to pass along my experience to my offspring and make sure they remain comfortable so my influence and life experiences survive through the ages.

But that there lies an issue. Before money, (or rather, Before a system of strictly controlled not evenly disbursed concepts of monetary value), anyone could raise a strong family. Anyone could find food. Anyone could keep warm. Anyone could breed. But now, you need to have a certain amount of money in order to do so. The struggle to survive is based on how fat your wallet is. Which leads people to feel as though they have to work jobs they hate, put up with situations that go against their human rights, work more hours than they physically can, and sacrifice the time they could be spending on finding the avenues that would enable them to lead a much more comfortable self fulfilling life.

For me, the juice is not worth the squeeze. At least in terms of my current life status. I do not want to accept that the squeeze need be this difficult to attain the juice I desire. Not only do I not want to, I don’t feel as though I should have to accept it.

I know what you’re thinking, “wake up Dorothy, It’s time for work.”

But almost nothing truly significantly wholesomely comfortable came from complacent living and thinking.

I had the idea to write about this months ago when I watched The girl next door on television. After I watched it a million thoughts were popping up in my head. I kept thinking about how unfair it is, that I’m not living this character’s life. Silly huh? I watch a movie and suddenly and I can’t discern reality from fiction? People get committed for thinking like that. It really bothered me. It still bothers me. Because one man’s fiction is another man’s pipe dream.

Here is the reality: I was not born into a successful family, I was born into a middle class family where many of the family members never attended college. They don’t have connections to people who work for innovative companies, they don’t have connections to people in the position of power, they don’t have connections to celebrity or people who are widely recognized for flaunting talents they know will entertain masses of people. The family I was born into is successful in it’s own right. In many ways, my family is successful, I know I feel and they feel they are successful and in the eyes of others who feel they are less fortunate they are successful. Their struggle to survive has been less comfortable than others. As it will continue for generations unless the children ask, why do I have to squeeze so hard for such little pay off? And what can I do so I won’t have to squeeze so hard?

That is my struggle. My act of survival is to find an easier means of survival where the rewards will be sweeter and more plentiful for future generation of my family. Generations before me struggled so hard so I could live easier. I am going to do no different.

And if my motivation to help my family breathe easier is to strive for the life of celebrity or otherwise a “fictional” lifestyle, where’s the harm? After all, I’m just adapting to the changes in evolution. Why not at least aim for the stars, so I can at least hit the clouds.