Setting Healthy Boundaries Can Help To Decolonize

I have noticed my workload increasing from my day job, and I am several years into my role where I typically do not bring any of the work home. This has made a huge difference in my life, particularly when I was studying in my Master's degree in the evenings and weekends. When we equate our modern jobs as a force of colonization, particularly when the job is involved in perpetuating Eurocentric colonial systems and worldviews, it is easy for the responsibilities and workload from the job spill over into other areas of life. This is particularly true when the individual worker is from a different cultural background, where you have to code-switch between your home culture and your work culture.

When the colonizing work, often referred to as productive work, spills over into other areas of my own life, I find that my ancestral identity and connection to its language and culture suffers. For example, I experienced a few months a few years ago when I was so busy with my day job that I had no time to even communicate with my own parents over the phone. This led to my brain losing the ability to speak in our language as effective as I used to. When I finally had time to spend more time with my parents and I tried to speak in our language, I found myself lost for words and having to search for vocabulary, losing fluency and memory in the language. I also know of numerous relatives in my family that can no longer speak our language, despite their ability to understand it when hearing it. I believe this is one way that colonization is still taking place today, as English and other European languages erase the Indigenous and ethnic languages.

Another way that modern work can colonize is by taking away mental well-being, groundedness, and sense of belonging. We are the succeeding children of our ancestors, the generations of past families. We have a birthright to live good happy lives full of contentment and leisure. But this is often not possible in today's world, where careers take a forefront and our personal lives take a back-seat. We spend less time learning and practicing our traditions and customs, in favour of industrial and corporate routines and practices. Such routines have not been known to our bodies and minds until recently in our genealogies. It is foreign and invasive. No wonder our generation is the most unhealthy with preventable lifestyle diseases, despite having the most advanced medical and scientific technologies.

This is why I continue to keep my piles of paperwork at work now, not bringing it home. But with increased digitization of work using cloud-based computing, it is very tempting for me to simply log into work at home to get some of it done. This is dangerous. I hope to leave work at work and honour the home life at home.