2 and a Half Months Post Grad
For as long as I can remember I have always been asking the question “why?”, and recently I have been asking “Why did I decide to take a corporate job?”. I graduated college back in May and got a job in Atlanta. I then decided that I needed to travel for 3 weeks in Asia because I did not know when I would have the opportunity again as I had limited vacation days. I moved here just about a month ago and transitioning here has been both amazing and challenging. Work is slowly picking up, but it seems that at multiple points throughout the day I find myself going down a rabbit hole and questioning why I am in corporate life, or that this decision is now going to dictate what the entirety of my life will look like and I will not be able to make a change if I feel like it. I know that this is not true, but I get a panic attack halfway through the day and convince myself that it is. In some ways I feel a bit lost because I think “what is the point of doing this job”, and I look at my coworkers around me and I get scared that 10 years from now I will be in their shoes and from the outside, their lives seem the opposite of what I wish mine to be; filled with what I have coined to be “golf talk”. This, to me, is incredibly demoralizing. I don’t mean to say that how they’re living their lives is in any way bad, because frankly, I don’t know jack shit, but that is not what I want mine to be. And for the record, I do very much enjoy golf...
I guess the reason it scares me is because I fear that all of my passions and ambitions that I have gained throughout college of traveling the entirety of the world, creating my own business, and never living a “normal life” are slowly disappearing, or that they will disappear the deeper I get into the corporate mindset. You see, I am a big ideas guy, I often find my mind in the clouds of what I could do and could become (mind you the planning aspect of any of these ideas is almost nonexistent). I want to make life my b*tch. Obviously, we do only have one life so the YOLO mentality of my fellow millennials and Gen-Zers is present; but it is bigger than that for me. Over the past few years I have drastically grown as a human being (as most of us do during our college years) through many experiences I would not have imagined I would have partaken in prior to going to college. With those experiences, I have only grown more hungry to continue to break through the ceiling of what I think I can accomplish, which brings me to my main point: As much as I want to, I am scared to take big risks in my life.
Now, I am aware that I am 22 years old and, hopefully, have a lot left to live, but it seemed at a time when I should be taking risks, I did not. I took the safer route of the corporate route because it was the most logical. With that being said, I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity and am already taking advantage of learning all that I can while I am here. I want to use this as a catalyst so that when I am ready to take that leap and have a solid idea, I have the tools to be ready to do that. And in taking this job and making this move, I am taking a risk because I am relocating to a place where I know very few people in a city I have never lived in. I do take solace in that. But at the same, I feel that I am failing what my heart is pushing me to do which is go travel and continue to explore and learn from the world and see what I can make of myself. It is an interesting challenge and again, it has only been a month, but this is what happens when you have a mind that does not turn off.
I am not the first person to feel this way; in fact, I know many others close to me that do, but I do not want to be the person that doesn’t get off the train and goes to live life to its fullest. A few months before graduation I had this fantasy of figuring out a way to do a web travel series through the Himalayas and give up on getting an actual job. As the months went by, some of the people who I was planning this trip with slowly gave up on the gallivanting mentality that we imagined. And slowly, I did as well.
Perhaps my biggest internal conflict is the fact that my life philosophy has greatly expanded within the last year much of which is due to a brilliant philosophy professor that I took in my final semester as well as conversations with friends whose beliefs and opinions I greatly value. Much of the thinking was about the point of life, (which of course is completely ambiguous) but more specifically the point of an individual’s life. The deduction I came to, at least for now, is that life is not meant to be taken too seriously because we really have no idea when ours could end. This continues to push me to take that leap of faith and risk-taking chance on trying to create something based on what I love. And in the meantime, as I am sitting in a cubicle I find myself thinking what is the point of this, especially when my workload is minimal and I am staring at a blank computer screen. Although I do not fully embrace it, I think back to a 1971 movie that my friend Dylan had me watch called “The Point!” based on an album by Harry Nilsson. In this movie, the main character, round-headed Oblio, lives in a land where everyone has points on their head. He ends up going on a journey through his land and ultimately comes to the deduction that, “you don’t have to have a point, to have a point.” Now I found this movie to be very strange and at the same time quite intriguing especially because I am sure that a lot of acid was taken by the writer and narrator who happens to be Ringo Starr. The quote, however, rings true to me more and more each day.
When I begin to think about my existence and the present-day on such a meta-level, I ultimately end up just throwing myself into a mind loop; and thinking about one's daily life on such a large scale is incredibly unproductive because as much as one may try to plan their lives, the only thing that matters is the present moment and the further we get away from that, the less we are living our lives. I guess in summary, like most others on this earth, I am still figuring everything out and in the meantime just trying to see what this day will bring me. And although we can never undo the choices that we have made in the past, we can change the ones we make in the future because there really are no rules in this life (even though our society has convinced us there are) and we truly have full autonomy to do whatever the hell we want.
-T.J. Schrette
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