The Empty Cycle of Work and Loneliness in Pocatello

The Empty Cycle of Work and Loneliness in Pocatello

Lately, I’ve been wrestling with something that’s hard to name but impossible to ignore. My agoraphobia and anxiety are always close companions, but here in Pocatello, they’ve been louder, sharper, harder to quiet. For a long time, I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. Why does the thought of working a job here feel more like a slow suffocation than a step forward?

The answer came to me in a rush: because here, working isn’t living.

A job in Pocatello means 8 or 9 hours at work, then coming home to an empty house, an empty bed, eating dinner alone, watching TV or reading until sleep, and then waking up to repeat the cycle. That’s the best-case scenario. The other common alternative? Stopping at the bar, drinking just to pass the hours, numbing yourself before doing it all again tomorrow.

And the weekends—those “glorious” days off we cling to—don’t bring much relief either. They’re swallowed up by errands, appointments, and the catch-up list that can only be tackled during business hours. If you’re lucky enough to have two days in a row off, you might cram in an excursion, but you return exhausted, already dreading Monday morning.

The rhythm of life here becomes a pendulum swinging between work, exhaustion, recovery, and resignation. For a year of this, you’re granted a week or two of vacation—just long enough to overstuff with the things you’ve been too drained to do all year. That’s not living; that’s survival dressed up as productivity.

What gnaws at me most is the absence of flow—that natural hum of social life, of connection, of simply being with people. In Pocatello, it feels like the only social options are charity work, service, or family obligations. Those are good things, but where’s the joy of spontaneous gatherings? Where’s the organic social buzz, the expansion of circles, the spark of life that comes from friends just doing things together?

In other places I’ve lived—even in a small town like Pendleton, Oregon—people would get together, hang out, and create moments of connection. Here, that seems rare, almost nonexistent. Life collapses into compartments: work, home, errands, recovery.

And so, when I think of taking a 9-to-5 here, I feel a weight pressing down on me. Because it’s not just about the job. It’s about what it represents: the reminder of emptiness, of meaninglessness, of being caught in a loop of working, producing, consuming, without the hive energy of community to make it all feel alive.

That’s why I can’t bring myself to do it. Because I don’t want to live as a drone. I want to live as a human being—connected, inspired, and awake. 

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