How We Sabotage
Although I long for creativity — days spent writing and writing and reading and commenting, nights letting loose with wine and talking and deep conversations — I find myself rising at 6:30 a.m., driving to a financial firm and setting up shop there until about 5 p.m. The sole purpose of this day is to help solve problems so that this company can make money and be awesome.
I fill my days with meetings, process and vocabulary that I don’t want to care about. But to survive without becoming depressed about my weekday hours, I must care what differentiates the code 01_CE from 02_CR and I must stay alert in the four-syllable, five-word, non-descriptive meeting where we all nod along with each other.
Because I’ve decided to be here (apparently), and I expect to be paid. Because that’s why I work here. And what drives my desire for money is the dream that one day I’ll have enough to do the creative stuff I want to do.
But I am 30, and I’m coming up with all kinds of things to spend my money on in the meantime. To fill my nights while I wait to knight-in-shining-armor myself out of this job. I’ve perfected the art of the paycheck-to-paycheck life; I can fill a figurative shopping cart with the perfect number of items to eat up all the disposable income every two weeks.
How is it that I keep ending up working for giant companies that squash creativity — and somehow thriving? It’s terrifying, but I have to ask myself:
Am I just not made for the creative life? Am I supposed to drone myself to financial success and robotic emotions?
I’ve given corporate life a fair shot. I’ve tried and my fears about it have been confirmed.
People grow stiff. Companies with no face or personal identity become lordly. We work for weekends. We drink on Tuesdays. With each other, assuring one another that we’re more fit than our bosses. We drink on Wednesdays. Alone. Coming to terms with our apparent fates.
Have we given up? Why is pursuit so challenging? Why do we quash our own hopes — sabotage our bright futures? Really, why? What looks so shiny on the sidelines that we stray from the glimmer at the end of the tunnel?
It can’t be another form of happiness. It can’t. Because that’s not what drove me here. I was reluctant even to accept the job I’m in now. Money? That’s just code for safety. I don’t work to buy clothes. I buy clothes because the money’s in my account and I don’t know what else to use it for. Fear? Fear of the unknown, of pursuing a dream and utterly failing. Of waking up the next day and having to seriously care about the day-to-day of the corporate job because it’s the foreseeable future.
You see, it’s not the act of pursuit that’s actually scary. So long as you’re trying — well, young enough and trying — you haven’t sealed your fate. Your limbs aren’t locked and your brain’s still forming new wrinkles of knowledge. You are still hope.
Is it just a lack of awareness? Cognition? Recognition? The future sounds far away, but it’s tomorrow. It starts now. There is no line that separates the phases of one’s life and only self-imposed blockades.
Once I pay off my loans, once I save enough to live on, once I put in an admirable five years at this company, once I get promoted to show growth and leadership. It’s never-ending. But it doesn’t have to be.
Once, we had no concept of time. Waiting for a birthday to arrive felt like agony — the same as waiting for the bell to ring at the end of the school day. Everything was at stake all the time. And everything required immediate attention.
When you hear any — literally any — story about a person following an abnormal life path, it’s never an accident. People do not wake up one Tuesday and say:
“Woah, what happened to the 9-to-5… Now I’m a painter?”
No one does that. It’s only ever been the other way around.
So maybe it’s worth listening to those stories of people who went left when the world told them right. Maybe there’s some how-to book hidden in all these stories of successful nonconformists.
Whether they’re happy or satisfied with their choice is irrelevant to me. What matters is they got themselves there. They went to the market and came back with all they wanted instead of accidentally buying a frozen pizza because they inadvertently wandered down the frozen food aisle on the way to produce.
What intention. What determination. What perseverance.
The irony of knowing the true challenge of pursuing a nonconformist, likely non-lucrative and probably extremely hard life is that it requires all the elements we laud on the corporate side. Think of the posters that hang in offices, the acronyms we come up with for “Teamwork,” the personality tests, all the job descriptions you’ve ever read. They ask for an original, but they really want the carbon paper.
Because original thinking means change and “uncharted waters,” where we could all be wrong. We don’t know that this new idea is the right answer, and we could very well fail.
And isn’t that why we’re working these corporate jobs in the first place? Because the fear of failing drove us here?
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