Work to live or live to work?

I know today's entry is kind of a late one, but I was busy all day doing stuff, and no, it wasn't work-related stuff, I was simply hanging out with a few acquaintances I hadn't seen or heard from in a while, as well as with my parents. In fact, the only reason why I'm home right now is to take a shower and change into something more fitting for the nightly atmosphere that I'll be diving into with the aforementioned friends in about an hour. If it wasn't for that I probably wouldn't have been able to write a blog today and my thus far perfect record of writing at least an entry a day would've been ruined, so yeah... random, much? I don't really know how I got here, as this isn't really what I want to talk about.

What I want to talk about comes from something that happened just a few minutes ago. I was driving home, just a few moments away from my doorstep, when I got a call from one of my oldest friends. I haven't seen him in a while due to our hectic schedules, so he wanted to know if I could spare some time to hang out with him sometime this week. My response, of course, was to tell him that we should hang out now, seeing as I was bound to meet all the guys tonight. I had expected him to say yes, buy as it turns out, today, Saturday, he was working, and he's still working; his shift won't be over 'till around midnight, at which time he will take an hour-long drive to get to his home, to sleep for around five to six hours, get up, shower, dress and head back out to work half a shift tomorrow morning.

When he told me that, I asked him right away if he was short of money (I know it's a bit rude, but that's the way me and my friends are with each other), but again, while expecting confirmation I was sorely disappointed. It's not an extra shift, it's just the way his work... well, works.

Obviously he gets a couple days off during the week and whatnot, but still, this got me thinking. I wouldn't take a job, no matter how good the pay may be, that precluded me from having some time to hang out with my friends and family every once in a while. Because the point of having a job, at least from my perspective, at this point in life, shouldn't be regarded as nothing more than a means to an end, a way to get by. If you want to have a career, that's fine, but you have to allow yourself some time to just live. For most people that's college, but my friend chose not to go to college, instead getting straight into working, and I feel like he's missing out on some things.

The age that we're in right now -- our early 20's -- is supposed to be a time of self-discovery. And I know it sounds a bit corny, but I really do believe that. This is the time when we learn who he are and what we want to become, and I feel that by constraining yourself with tight work schedules and routine, you risk stifling that process, and while you might not think much of it right now, ten or fifteen years down the line there's a very good chance you'll wake up one morning and realize that the life that you have is not the one you wanted, and then, it might be a bit too late to do something about it, and you're going to have to live with that.

I don't want to do that. I don't want to have that kind of regret. So instead of living to work like my friend seems to be doing, I rather see what life is like, and work is just a small part of the equation. There'll be time to chain myself to a career three or four years from now, but at the moment, I just want to work to live.