Part 1 - What Is A Dream Anyway?
My whole life has been plagued by the rational. When I was younger people would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, as adults are wont to do when trying to negotiate conversation with a child. I, of course, would throw out whatever my child brain thought was cool, no matter how far fetched. I'd want to dig up dinosaur bones, be an astronaut, be a fireman so I can drive the big truck and use the big hose, work in a zoo, work in an aquarium, play a myriad of sports, become a video game journalist, and on and on.
Of course, nothing ever stuck. That's how I ended up getting a noncommittal bachelor's degree and working in a warehouse. But now, as one is prone to do when reaching a certain age, I've started to wonder how much of that not sticking was due to the fickle whims of youth, and how much was due to lack of support.
My parents, well meaning but, I'd argue, misled, saw fit to poke holes in every dream of my youth. They feared I'd become too whimsical, too deadbeat. A starving artist or a minimum wage ticket booth cashier or some such. They wanted me to have a "proper" career track - to go into computing, into business, into finance, into anything with a shot at making money. And in truth, I can't blame them. Their lives were forced by the winds of fate. They married young, had kids young, divorced young, were locked down young both in finances and in family. Their choices were stripped by necessity, guided by the urgency of the now. It's sensible, then, that their life lesson was two-fold:
- Don't marry or have kids before 30
- Get a comfortable job that makes good money
My father was an electrical lineman - one of those folks you see standing in the bucket attached to a truck and messing with power lines by hand. It's hard work and subject to external conditions: heat, cold, rain, hurricanes. If you needed power then he was out there, somewhere.
My mother was a nurse. First a prison nurse, which was brutal in its own right, and then an ER nurse who's shifts were unpredictable, long, and full of quite literal trauma.
These were not jobs they wanted. These were jobs of necessity. They jumped at a baited hook which satisfied a need and ended up caught on the line of drudgery. I cannot blame them for not wanting similar for their children.
And yet here I am, just as trapped as they ever were. Partly due to unforeseen economical forces, heavily due to the nature of capitalism, but also due to what I'll call a rational indecisiveness. Nothing my child brain could fathom was ever good enough: being an archaeologist took too much money and school for something that was far too niche, being an astronaut was similarly expensive and not guaranteed, being a fireman was dangerous and unambitious, working with animals was farcical, playing sports professionally was a pipe dream, and wanting to do anything with video games was a childish dead end to their minds. And they let those thoughts be known.
So my child brain was paralyzed, and sensibly so. I was being taught young that being a child was irresponsible, irrelevant. That one must dedicate themselves to a path of financially beneficial tedium. That contrary to popular belief, the dream is not to find a job you enjoy, it is to find a job that pays well, no matter how much you might hate it. But, of course, I was still a child. It seemed to me that the way I thought was, apparently, wrong, but I did not have the breadth of necessary experience to understand the way I was "supposed" to think. And so, when it came to careers, I didn't really bother.
Throughout my teen years and into college people would ask that age old question, "what do you want to do?" And my answer was always a genuine "I have no idea." I had learned, and internalized, the lesson that anything I wanted was, inherently, wrong. My career aspirations were flawed, as were my relational aspirations, academic aspirations, and so forth. I went with the current and crashed about at the mercy of the waves.
This was very unhealthy and led to some very dark places, but that's for another time.
I didn't put two and two together then, and I'm still not entirely sure that two and two fit perfectly together to make four now, but as I sit here in this warehouse I can't help but wonder how many choices I made along my path that were driven by the thought that my desires were foolish - that I must be rational.
First job out of college? Terrible. Soul killing. Why did I take it? Why didn't I just go back home and ride the generosity of family until something more beneficial came my way?
Well, many reasons, to be honest. But one of which was certainly that I simply needed to have a job. That was the next thing. That's what you did. You worked, you made money, you paid bills, you died. That was life. That was the rational next step.
Further back, in college, why did I end up with a meaningless nothing of a degree?
Well, I started in IT. Hated it. Had no desire to work with software, could not wrap my mind around coding, and eventually my grades started to slip. So I did what any good, rational, college student would do and started bouncing around majors, looking for the thing that worked - the thing that didn't totally kill my soul but also could make money. Eventually I burned out anyway and had bounced around so much I ended up with a general studies degree. As far as career matters, I may as well have not even gone to college at all.
What would I have done had I been encouraged to follow my interests? Hard to say. How can anyone know the divergent routes of a parallel past? Still, I can guess, and knowing myself I'd guess I would've ended up in history, probably ancient history. I recall even emailing my favorite history professor and asking his advice on pursuing a history major.
His answer? Don't.
So I didn't.
Another wave, another toss, another current.
So rationality failed me in college, failed me in my first job out, and definitely failed me in the job right after. By the time I decided it was a wise, rational decision to move to a bigger city with more job opportunities I only had $200 dollars to my name. I knew what it was like to not have a place to stay, to survive off of planet fitness showers and to sleep in the parking lots of dead malls. My closet was my car's back seat. That's where being rational had got me.
Things improved over time, of course. The next job lasted six years until I was laid off in the great tech worker purge. Yes, I did end up working in tech anyway. Yes, it was soul killing. And now I sit, as much by being wave-tossed as by being adamant I'll never work in a cubicle again, in a warehouse.
Did I need a degree for this job? Nope.
Would it have mattered if I went into history? Probably not.
Would I have had a happier time of it? Almost certainly.
And I guess there's the rub, because I don't really attribute the meager successes and reasonable gains I've made since my move to rationality. I attribute it, first and foremost, to sheer dumb luck, and secondly to just treading ever onward. I am no special person. I don't believe in pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. I believe that if you just keep going life will simply happen around you, to you, from you. So, if that's the case, why put yourself in a miserable position during its midst? Life is going to happen regardless, the currents will push you no matter how hard you try to swim against them. May as well at least build yourself a boat.
I'm stretching the metaphor.
It begs the question though, now that I've reached this conclusion, what would I want to do with my life anyway? And you know, I don't really have an answer to that. I've spent so long dismissing my goals and desires that I don't really even know how to identify them anymore. But maybe it's not too late to start.