Letter five: I sold my happiness for money and learned to trust myself
Lessons from a career without a high-school diploma
Dear Past-Micke,
I know that you’re dying to ask me about career. It’s one of the questions that you’re struggling a lot with. Career is so central to who we are. I’m an author, I’m unemployed, I’m a personal trainer, I’m a shoe salesman — how a person answers “so what do you do for work?” changes our perception of them. We identify so much with our job titles that we rarely answer that question with what we actually do, instead we say who we are. We repeat it so much that we forget who we really are.
Career is central to the trajectories of our lives. To you that trajectory is so unclear that it’s hard for you to dream of what you’ll be doing two years from now, let alone five. Most of your peers are attending this university or that, having made that choice that every twenty-year old is expected to have made at that point: what you want to be when you grow up. Nothing seems interesting enough to warrant spending a lifetime on it. That means you don’t have any concrete reason to get that high school diploma you lack, having dropped out of the last year. You don’t like to talk about it, partly because of the stigma and shame of being a high school dropout, partly because it inevitably leads to the question “why?”. Since you don’t know what career you’re aiming for, that question doesn’t have a clear-cut answer, no clear-cut defense, no silver bullet to justify a choice so irrational. And yet, I know it doesn’t seem irrational to you. There’s no clear-cut answer because there are many reasons, each resting on a complex network of decisions and events, each by itself not nearly good enough to justify the sin of dropping out of high school.
There was the struggle of coming to terms with your sexual identity, to come out to yourself and others. The disillusion brought on by the school system failing to to make sense not only of what you’re learning — you were always fine with that, trusted the teachers to teach you the right things— but why you should learn it. You understood the need for basic math, but not for the need to calculate derivatives. Every subject seemed so disconnected from the others as well as from the practical world. Take chemistry and physics for example, you know that both involve atoms but school built few bridges between them for you. The first time you’ll fully realize how it’s all connected is when you watch “Cosmos” with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, but that will be in nineteen years, almost a lifetime in the future from your perspective. If you only learn stuff to get good grades, what’s the point of it?
But high school did point you in the right direction, even if it still is unclear to you. This is where your first became aware of the internet, the first thing that seemed to be interesting from a career perspective. I don’t think many high schools in Sweden had computers connected to the internet in those early days, but your school did. A computer in the library caught your eye. It had a chat page open in a Mosaic browser window. Seeing real time communication in action like that lessened the gap between reality and movies like “Hackers” and “Johnny Mnemonic” (I’m sad to report that neither has aged very well). Shortly thereafter, you went to the newly opened internet cafe in town. Being the gamer you are, you quickly discovered Multi-User Dungeons, or MUDs. They may have been text-based, but it was an immense world where you could interact with both human and computer controlled characters. In 2004, Blizzard will release a graphic version of MUDs called World of Warcraft, but in 1996 you got hooked on a newly started MUD called “The Shadow Realms”. It became the perfect escape from the problems of your own world. It offered a universe where you could be someone else. In the meat-world you were a confused, gay teenager. In the Shadow Realms you were Ethan (what you lacked in imagination, you made up in crush on Ethan Hawke), the mightiest mortal sorcerer in that universe. I remember you checking your stats after a year: you had spent more than 1800 hours in the game. That would have cost a fortune at the internet cafe, but lucky for you, you spent so much time there that they hired you as an internet guide. In those early days, people came in to the internet cafe having heard about the internet, curious to try it, but most had no idea how it worked or what you could do. Your job was to get them started. It doesn’t seem much to you now, but twenty years later, when the internet is as integrated in our lives as electricity, it’s kind of old-school cool to have been an internet guide. The decision to drop out of high school doesn’t seem irrational to you. Even though you had no idea what the next step would be, what a career involving the internet could be, dropping out to work as an internet guide seemed like a reasonable choice.
There, you learned things that built the next step in your career. When you don’t know which direction you’re heading, taking one step at a time is the only way of moving forward. It will make for an interesting path, with fourteen full-time employments and two periods of self-employment in twenty years. From internet guide to support technician to programmer to team leader to project manager to personal trainer, back to project manager, to social media manager to digital strategist to head of innovation … each step will take you in a slightly different direction. Even if most adjoining steps seem related, together they will paint a motley pattern that will confuse both you and potential employers. When you’re navigating chaos, all you can do is navigate the current moment as best you can, and hope that some sort of pattern, something that makes sense of the chaos, eventually emerges.
The pattern I see, twenty years later, is you intuitively applying design thinking on your life. Your peers are busy pursuing specific career paths, you don’t even have a map of possible paths to take. When you don’t have an inkling about what you want to devote your career to, trying things out is a good way forward. With each job, you’ll learn skills and gain experience that will enable you to move to the next as soon as you realize that “no, this is not what I want to spend my life doing”. Luck and timing will be as important as skills, if not more so. But all the skills you’ll learn and all the experience you’ll gain have nothing on what you’ll learn about the value of time.
In 2007, you’ll start a rather well-paying job, and your first day you’ll find out that the other new recruit, who was supposed to be a project manager, quit before he started. They’ll ask you to fill in, as they’ll have more need of project managers until a new one is recruited, and you’ll reluctantly agree — even though you specifically said during the recruitment process that although you come from a position as project manager, you don’t want to be one anymore. One thing leads to another, and you’ll end up spending months in a position that requires you to be in place 40 hours a week, but you’ll only be busy for 15–20 of those hours. Even though the client will be happy with you, you will not be happy there. You won’t be able to shake off the guilt of not working hard enough for your salary. The job is okay, at best, but you’ll feel like you’re living for the weekends. Combined with rather dull offices, it will slowly wear you down. So slowly that you won’t notice the slip into dullness until Christmas break. On the morning of New Year’s Eve, you’ll be helping your friend Wille to prepare a New Year’s Party and you’ll talk about how happy you feel, as if color had returned to your life. That’s when you’ll realize that it’s the time off work, and having spent that time with family and friends, that had revived you from a slow slide into depression.
You’ll realize that the equation is simple: if you spend your work life living for the weekends, spend five days every week longing for the other two, and one of those two dreading the coming five — then you’ll spend 85.7% of your life waiting to live.
After Christmas break, you’ll ask your manager to be moved to your originally agreed-upon role. He’ll be sympathetic, but he will explain that they can’t move you from the client — a couple incidents over the year had made the client nervous, and they couldn’t rock the boat by removing a well-liked project manager. You’ll see it from his perspective, and it will make perfect sense. That’s exactly what you’d have said in his place. If you agreed, the client would get what they want, your employer would get what they want, and you’d get paid. But you’ll realize that you won’t get what you want, and you’ll give your month’s notice right there and then. You’ll give it knowing perfectly well that you have no job lined up, no savings to speak of, and bills to pay. But you’ll think that you will make do, you always had and this wouldn’t be any different. It’ll be like that first skydive — terrifying and liberating at the same time, but you’d rather live now than wait for the weekend, the vacation, the retirement.
That will be an important lesson about the value of time, and the first time you’ll explicitly trust your capability in your professional life. It’ll happen about six months after the Sitges story I wrote about in a previous letter, which is the first time you’ll trust your capability in your romantic life. When you trust your future self, and your future self delivers, self-worth grows. It’s during that period you’ll realize that only you are responsible for your happiness, and when you’ll lose all your superstitions and become a true atheist.
Trusting your future self will pay off. You’ll soon get a job at Hyper Island, where you will learn so much about yourself, like that you’re an introvert, how to lead yourself and others through change, how to give and take feedback, and how to own your mistakes without feeling completely worthless. You’ll learn that being considerate of other people’s feelings and taking responsibility for them are two different things. That job will be such a defining period in your life with so many insights, more than rewarding the risk of quitting without a plan.
You’ll become bold, trusting yourself and your gut feeling. When you do it’ll pay off, when you don’t you’ll curse yourself. It’s a gut feeling that will make you buy a ticket to Cleveland, which till lead to an amazing relationship and a period living in New York. As you prepare the move to New York, you’ll get rid of almost everything you own. You’ll only have the things in the two suitcases you bring over, and a few boxes you’ll save at mom’s house. At about the same time you’ll read an article in New York Times, titled “Living with less”. That article will plant a seed in your mind, a seed that will grow as you realize you could have gotten by perfectly with just one suitcase. Sure, the second has a lot of things that could be good just in case, but it won’t be worth the cost of lugging it around. After reading an article how experiences make you happier than things, you and Mike will make eachother a promise: not to buy gifts for birthdays and Christmas; to spend the money on experiences instead. (I admit that we both have cheated on occasion, but it’s one of the best decisions we’ve made.)
Life in New York will be hectic. Seeing people stuck in the rat race, competing over who’s busiest and therefore most important, measuring the importance in money while losing sight of true wealth, will make you realize it’s a city you love to visit, but hate to live in. Fortunately, Mike will feel the same, and you’ll decide to move back to Scandinavia. As you come back and pick up those three or four boxes where you’ve saved those few items you deemed important enough to store, you’ll realize that there’s only one item in there with any real value: a box of memories and photographs. The rest? Apart from a kitschy lamp depicting a UFO abducting a cow, I can’t remember a single thing of it. You’ll save that lamp a couple years, confusing the fact that you saved it with importance.
That’s when you’ll start thinking about when you have enough. How much salary is enough? How much savings? How many things? At what point do you stop chasing tomorrow, the weekend, the next year, that future in which things will be so great that everything put up with today will be we worth it? These questions may sound privileged to someone who has far from enough, but if those who are privileged enough never think of these questions, who will?
These are hard questions. I still don’t have a good answer to this day, but thinking about them has brought me closer. As you think about these questions, you’ll start changing things. You’ll stop buying things just because they’re cheap or on sale. When you buy things, you’ll think “buy quality, cry once”. You’ll visit mom more often, instead of that biannual trip with a mind so laden with guilt that you bring gifts to make up for it. This will make you realize that if time with you is valuable to someone, that means that you are valuable to them. Spending time with that person is one of the most generous gifts you can give. Isn’t it amazing that giving can be so rewarding at the same time?
This reminds me of the altruism/egoism paradox you’ve thought about: if being kind to someone makes you feel good about yourself, is that ultimately an altruistic or an egoistic action? If it’s egoistic, can you truly be a good person? Either answer sounds hollow to you, but logic dictates that ultimately, one of them has to be the right answer. I didn’t realize until now how important that answer is to you. It will drive that hunger for knowledge about humans, animals, life and the universe. Satisfying that hunger will eventually result in your friends nick-naming you “Mickipedia”, and later in that perfect storm.
But as for the gift of time: I’m sad to report that twenty years into the future, we have devalued that gift. The internet — the One Machine, as Kevin Kelly once called it — this Machine you see so much promise in, will be in everyone’s mobile phone (we call them smartphones), and everyone’s phone will be in their hands, ready to serve up entertainment, information, even wisdom… and distraction from the mundane. The default state for you in 1997 is offline, with access to the internet restricted to physical rooms that have a computer with an internet connection. In 2018, the default state is connected — as soon as our phones are on, we’re within the reach of this Machine. The smartphones look like black slabs of aluminum and glass. Like dystopian, black mirrors (you’re going to love that series) ready to relieve us of awkwardness, boredom, suffering, sadness. Of loneliness. We feel so connected as individuals, yet we are so divided as humans. We spend time documenting our experiences, our meals, our meetings, our adventures, creating a highlight reel of all the perfect moments in our lives, forgetting that every time we take out our smartphones, they make us aware of the moment and how perfect it is. Instead of being immersed in that moment, we share the perfection of it, chasing approval from others that yes, this really is a perfect moment. And when we look at everyone else’s highlight reels, we compare it to our unedited footage with all the mistakes, the embarrassing moments, the shame, the inadequacies, the doubt. But maybe posting more highlights will convince others and by extension ourselves that we, too, are perfect. So we keep our phones close at hand, ready to capture that next perfect moment we’ll experience. We still give the gift of time, but we aren’t fully present because part of our attention is in our phones. I’m sorry for tarnishing your shiny image of the internet, but hey, we’re still using it, so high as the price may be, collectively we get our value’s worth.
When I look back on your career, trying to summarize the most important things I’ve learned from it, one thing becomes clear: just like you feel that the most important things you learned in your school years weren’t the actual subjects, I feel that the most important things I’ve learned from my career years aren’t the actual skills. Skills and subjects can be learned, but insights have to be paid for with experience. Not until we’ve paid enough do trite truisms become invaluable insights. Take “money cannot buy happiness” for example. To you, it doesn’t feel true because you are worried by money. If having too little money causes worry, wouldn’t more money mean more happiness? It does, up to a certain point. One of those points will occur in 2003, right after the dotcom crash, when you’ll switch career from project manager and programmer to gym instructor. You’ll take a pay cut by almost 50%, but it won’t make you less happy at all. Another point will be quitting that job in January 2008. All those points will add up to an insight that I would summarize like this:
“The only valuable thing that everyone has the same amount of, is time. We confuse the fact that spending money can free up time (like being able to afford a laundry machine) with the illusion that money can buy time. So we spend more time chasing more money, when we should sacrifice money to free up time.”
Or, you know, “money can’t buy happiness” for short.
While money cannot buy happiness, it does buy power. “Money talks” to use another cliché. Money buys interest, attention, preferential treatment. I know you’d like to think that money will not make you compromise your values, but you’ll learn that everyone — even you — is susceptible to that corruption. The corruption doesn’t happen overnight, it’s more like water drops hollowing out the stone that seems impervious to water. The corruption is rarely driven by malicious intent or the will to do harm, it’s more like looking the other way and letting harm happen. We want cheap things, but don’t want to think about the conditions for the humans who made those things. We want cheap meat, but don’t want to think about the conditions the animals lived and died under. We want financial growth so that we can get our own cut of it, but we don’t want to think about the consequences of that growth for our planet. Besides, what can you do? It’s how things work, you didn’t make the rules. Hate the game, not the player, as the proverb goes. But how can you hate the game, and not yourself for playing it? It’s easier if you’re a somewhat successful player of the game. It helps turning the explanations for why things are the way they are into excuses, especially when those excuses are combined with the knowledge that nothing you do will make any difference whatsoever on the grand scale of things. It’s also much more convenient to follow the rules of the game, the norms, rather than to break them. This creates an illusion of being stuck in the rat race: as long as the system doesn’t change, you cannot change. You’ll look for that one change, that quantum leap that will fix everything, take us into a better system, forgetting that life is incremental: most of our movement forward isn’t done in leaps but in small, small steps. But every step feels so futile, like ordering a super-sized Big Mac meal and choosing a diet coke to make the meal more healthy. You want a solution that makes more of an impact than just putting lipstick on a pig.
But the important question is not “What do you want?”. Everyone wants something or other: a new TV, the perfect beach body, the latest smartphone, to learn a new language, more vacation… It’s easy to want, and when you want something, it’s easy to be envious of those who have it or know it. When you realize the cost and that you aren’t prepared to pay it, it’s easier to be happy for those who have, so the important question is “what are you willing to give up, suffer and pay for it?”. The perfect beach body means giving up a lot of good food and spending many hours every week at the gym. A new TV means cutting down on other expenses so you can save up for one. More vacation means smaller paycheck. You want a better world, but what’s the point of changing things, of paying the cost associated, if the changes don’t make any real impact? Wouldn’t people see you as a hypocrite if you start eating vegetarian, but keep flying? Wouldn’t you? If you can’t do everything, you may as well do nothing and avoid the risk of being labelled a poseur. But doing nothing has a cost that you are not fully aware of yet: when you don’t act according to your values, your real self becomes less than your ideal self, creating a disharmony from which anxiety flows.
I know you haven’t thought much about values. You know that humans have worth and that everyone is equal, but you don’t know why. Is it because that’s what grown-ups told you? Because the UN says so? Because it’s the right thing to think? And why is a human life worth more than an horse’s, or a blue whale’s? To ourselves, we are invaluable, but if aliens visited and asked, what argument could we give them that a human is more valuable than an elephant? Elephants recognize themselves in a mirror, which shows self-awareness. They grieve their own dead (and sometimes humans too). They show compassion and empathy. Is it IQ, then? We do put a lot of stock in that lone facet of intelligence. We even use it against each other. It’s not even a hundred years since Sweden forced sterilization on those deemed feebleminded. In Germany, the Nazis killed them. Both countries called it “racial hygiene”. I know we think we’ve moved way past that, evolved into more enlightened beings no longer capable of such atrocities, but I don’t think we have changed that much. We still use our narrow definition of intelligence as an excuse to dominate other humans and other life forms. I think that’s why most of the movies depicting superhuman artificial intelligence are dystopian. Remember when you saw Terminator 2 at the movies? You were one year shy of being legally allowed to see it, since it was classified with a fifteen-year age limit, but you looked old enough to sneak in. Skynet is still to this day the poster name for the evil artificial intelligence. We are afraid that if and when we build something that is like us, just exponentially more intelligent, it will do to us what we do to less intelligent beings. And speaking of worth: if intelligence is what ultimately decides value, the birth of an AI means humans no longer are the most valuable life form. But if it’s not intelligence that dictates worth, then what is it that makes a human more valuable than an elephant? What do we tell that theoretical alien visitor?
Values are what define your ideal self, make it clearer. The clearer it gets, the easier it is to see where it doesn’t match your real self, to see the sources of that anxiety — an anxiety distorts your ideal self even more. In this regard, ideal self and true self are same, and perhaps failure to be our true selves is the thing that defines ‘being human’; we are (evidently) capable of acting like Buddha or Gandhi, but end up acting like the Grinch more often than not. To me, acting according to your true selfs is what Marcus Aurelius meant when he wrote about living a good life:
“Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.”
Your true self is the same as mine. It looks clearer to me than it does to you, but it is definitely the same. I still struggle with acting according to that true self, but I’m working hard on becoming better at it. The better I become, the more at peace I feel, and that peace in turn makes my true self clearer. At more than one occasion, I’ve seen my true self completely undistorted. It’s hard to describe those moments, it’s like a flow state permeated with a feeling of wonder I haven’t felt since being a kid.
I’m not sure how I ended up here in a letter that began with career. Perhaps it says more about where I am right now, than where I have been, but on the other hand: the boat is much more interesting than the wake that shows the path it took.
Love,
Me
