Bobby Iacobelli
Aug 26, 2017 · 4 min read

Sorry man but I have to disagree with everything I just read because that was pretty much the exact advice you would have heard me preaching only 5–10 years ago. I still can’t say if I’ve gained more universal wisdom or if its merely relevant to my personal experiences. But first of all DO NOT GO WITH YOUR GUT. Go with your mind and plan the best you can and even though it sounds less AWESOME, having an exciting sweet kickass career isn’t a very good focus for your life and your family (especially if you have kids) and your parents approval kinda DOES matter. You can tell yourself all day every day that you don’t care about that kinda thing, but nothing will ever be as satisfying as making the people you love proud. Of course you should do it in your own terms.

Being a lemming or sheep or whatever is no good, but neither is being a rebel individualist who does it all his own way thinking this could actually lead to happiness just because you’ve decided to ignore society. That’s called the road to nowhere. The reason people try to give you advice who are a bit older is because they actually know some things and want to save you some time. While ‘society’ may seem judgmental and critical, it’s just made of a bunch of people that feel just like you anyway; insecure and unsure of themselves. But society and specifically your family and their closest friends can save you countless wasted years by helping you to see what’s important before it’s too late.

I’m far more concerned with my family, my wife and children and my career is what I do to support these people and our lifestyle as well as my hobbies and theirs. That dream career you can never really point out? Well it nagged me from the age of 14 to 30 pretty much. I swore there was something just perfect out there that I was meant to do but just had to find it. Well the people who say they found that are rarer then those hit by lightening twice while jackin it in San Diego .

9 out of 10 times it’s the most traditional things you can think of that you surprisingly yearn for. I always thought a house in the suburbs with kids in the local school and the same partner sounded like hell on earth by god damn was I wrong!! That conservative middle class nightmare is not only pretty difficult to attain if no one hands you much, but it’s also just a house to build your life and there just isn’t much out there that can even hold a candle to love. That’s far more likely to happen in your life at least once and far more common than landing an exciting dream job that won’t even keep u happy for very long without those people that care about you having your back anyway. So you certainly can’t do ‘happiness’ by tossing society and the people who love you and every conventionally good choice to the curb.

I think this is a common view in modern America where we have been taught that EVERYTHING is a commodity that must either be geared towards our ultimate happiness all the time or else it sucks and must be replaced. But these ideals have gone so far from modest improvements to expecting our “love” our “career” and everything else to be completely suited to our happiness and not standing in our own way or else we trade them out and will try to replace them until we become the shallow nihilistic husks we realize we always were having such a consumerist attitude about everything in life, even the things that were once considered sacred.

I love reading, playing in my band, my tech hobbies and writing short essays on politics and contemporary philosophy but I have time for that stuff after work. At work, it doesn’t matter what you actually do compared to who you work with, how bad the commute is, and how the perks and schedule impact your life.

Your life is NOT your job. People always had to work and it’s always been to feed themselves and shelter themselves and anything more has been considered bourgeois decadence and pointless masturbation, or as I see it, the kind of things that we feel compelled to do are the things that we label ‘hobbies’.

Focus on taking care of your self physically, of having an awesome sex life with your partner, try not to sweat the small stuff and get pissed if you miss the train, be a good human being and have manners when in public and have gratitude in private, don’t waste time judging other people, always try to improve yourself just a little here and there instead of trying to fix everyone and everything around you, because if you’re not happy it’s none of those external things most of the time, it’s you and your overblown expectations.

People so often today have this misguided view that they “Deserve” everything they want and deserve to be happy no matter what. But the hard truth is, we don’t deserve a damn thing! If we get 20% of what we want in life, and bust our asses to get even that, we should be happy as hell and show some damn tact and show appreciation instead of greed for more or complaining about it. Lastly, everyone seems to think they have the RIGHT morals and the RIGHT politics today on every side and maybe we should all stop trying to save the world and just stop being a bunch of self centered assholes and the world will magically fix itself when all the assholes disappear or their own accord ;)

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Bobby Iacobelli

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Web Developer, Entrepreneur, Political Junkie & THE Honest Cultural Critic.