A Visit to Jockey Plaza

Our domestic helper and gardener came to our house today for their once-a-week touch-up of our house. We also signed the renewal of the lease for our house today, and also met up with a NGO that is a potential partner for our ImpACTS project next year.

Tomorrow is a public holiday in Peru. So, we decided to go out tonight with our friends Karen and Oscar, and Jose, a Christian psychologist who is a friend of Karen. We had dinner at a chicken outlet in Jockey Plaza, the largest shopping mall in Peru, before adjourning to a cafe for some coffee and fruit juice. We were hoping to catch a movie show as well, but none of the movies appealed to us, so we just went into a bookshop after our time at the cafe, where I bought a couple of magazines to read over the holiday.

In one of the magazines "Business in Peru - October edition", there was a special report on the profile of managers in Peru. Some statistics based on a survey of 1,537 Peruvian managers in 2006 include the following:

• The typical Peruvian manager stays in a company for 4.1 years on average
• The typical Peruvian manager works on average 11 hours a day
• 18.4% of the Peruvian managers feel a sense of fulfillment and satisfaction in their jobs, while 69.3% feel dissatisfied and unfulfilled

It is a rather telling sign that the majority of the managers feel a sense of lack of fulfillment. Clearly, remuneration and status alone cannot bring about a sense of fulfillment to a person's work. I am quite certain that laziness will lead to a man's ruin eventually, but addiction to work is the opposite extreme that many people in this postmodern age often swing to. Many people jump into the heat of the rat race and begin running without taking a moment to reflect on whether they are running on the right track, only to discover at the end of the journey that they are no closer to the finishing line, and have instead wandered into some limbo that is both eeriely lonely as well as devastatingly devoid of meaning.

Before we join the hordes of modern work addicts who have aimlessly run off the main running tracks of life, we should take a moment to step out of the cauldron of activities, and reflect on the course that we are taking in our lives. What is the defining purpose of our lives, and is it a purpose that takes on an eternal and timeless perspective that is bigger than our personal ambitions? Is our work moving along in parallel with the advance of this purpose, or is it merely touching the purpose from a tangential perspective? Socrates once said, "The unreflected life is not worth living." Perhaps it is time for all of us to take stock of our lives once again.