What are we here for?

This is what I'm wondering right now. You can't just exist; you have to have money and credit cards and a car, etc. and the bondage to all of these things. I spend my days sitting at a desk at one job or another, or running errands that need to be done (depositing money in the bank, mailing bills, going through junk mail, cleaning...). Is this what my childhood was preparing me for? Is it what riding my bike through the sweet blue evenings of childhood summer was leading to? And dressing up for dance recitals, posing for pictures in satiny skirts and bright pink lipstick, receiving shiny trophies at the recital every June (which didn't mean anything, because everyone got one just for making it through another year of dance...). By the time I get home from work I don't have energy for anyting, let alone hanging out with my poor toddler...I just want her to be quiet and removed somewhere while Mommy collapses on the couch with a book of poetry or a magazine or a burrito and a beer. And that isn't living either, it's RECOVERING. It seems only if you have money, a lot of money, can you actually have life--filling your days and moments with things you want to do and choose to do, living on your own rhythms. Imagine waking up, puttering over to a cafe and sitting there reading and writing for hours, then having a glass of wine over a leisurely gourmet lunch, then taking a long walk...but maybe on some level all these things, too are just things to fill time--the time of existing, which none of us can bear without filling it with something. But that is going way beyond where I wanted to go in this thought. I just wonder, what exactly is the point if all your moments are spent just paying for something you deserve in the first place--to exist, to take up space on the earth among all the other earth-inhabitants, and to feel what is meaningful about that existence, to look for meaning. I guess we're all competing for resources but the resources aren't actually scarce, it's the system that makes them that way. Like, it's not as if I have to spend my days making spears so that a wild boar doesn't kill me on the open plains. But spending my days making money is THE SAME THING.

People say to find a job you love. I think that's bullshit. Who loves their job? How quickly can love turn to hate when you have to do something over and over or else there will be dire consequences? I am burnt out and tired and I resent having to devote my best energy (all the daylight hours) to administrative tasks, to busy-work, to driving around and around through traffic to do other tasks. I feel a constant anxiety that whatever I choose to do with the rare free moment isn't good enough, because there is so little unoccupied, unspoken-for time. I'm even starting to nurture fantasies about taking this summer off from work entirely and making some kind of big change to my work life after that, since a recent inheritance gives me a financial cushion (but then, any use of such money feels frivolous). It probably is true that I need to make more money so there is less sense of living-on-the-financial-edge grind, and find tasks that feel less compromising, and that things would feel better after that. But I still think we all deserve, for no reason at all (not because of our status or amount of money, etc.), to have the time to exist and search for ourselves and have wild pointless sexual encounters that never go anywhere, and write poetry about it, and eat too much dessert, and visit a beautiful place and stay in hostels and just breathe, and let the garbage bags accumulate around the side of the house and throw the recycling out the window for deer to graze on! and spend four hours choosing a shade of lipstick or an outfit, and look through old photo albums and cry, and tell someone to fuck off and not feel bad about it, and not say "I'm sorry" when someone is blocking the aisle at the grocery store, and light a lot of scented candles, and make a sculpture out of pine needles and spaghetti that represents a lost moment of our adolescense.