The American Dream

I was feeling contemplative today, and I wanted to put into words something I've been thinking about for awhile.

There is a pervasive idea in American culture that a successful life is one that is moving upwards. A successful year is one where your bank account is larger than it was the year before, and you've accomplished things in your work that have raised your prestige. If you're no better off than you were the year before, you're stagnant. If you have less money or prestige than the year before, then you're a failure. Or, at the very best, you've hit a rough patch in your life that you need to climb out of.

Regardless of what your specific pursuit is, you should always be moving up. I reject that ideology.

One year ago I was making a lot of money. I had a fairly prestigious occupation. I even turned down a promotion at one point that would have made me the #4 guy on the U.S. side of the company.

Today, a year later, I have about $100 to my name, no current income, and I just got back from an interview to be (essentially) a waiter. And my life is so much better today than it was a year ago. It's far from perfect, but I am happier than I've ever been. (Well, the last 3 months have been a bit of a bitch. But if you take an average of the last year and compare it to other years, this is easily the happiest I've ever been in my life).

I'm not an advocate of asceticism. I'm a materialist through-and-through. And we live in a capitalist society, so we must play the capitalist game. I'd like to hope that someday I can hit that ~$40k/year mark.* But I refuse to feel bad about the fact that I'm doing "worse" this year than I was last year. I'm happier, ergo I'm doing better.

QED

*$40k/year being a rough estimate of the amount of money a person needs to make in order to feel comfortable and safe.

I'm not an economist, but by all accounts the gold standard is unsustainable. And I hardly think the metric by which we measure our wealth is the root cause of any social decline.

I'm really talking more about how we view ourselves, and how American culture makes us feel about the balance of our own lives.

Economics is a different discussion, and one I don't think I've got the intellectual chops for. I have opinions, but they're weak and poorly supported. That shit is complicated, and a common sense approach tends not to work out the way you think it will. And everything is such a massive, interconnected web that a change that seems eminently reasonable, can have completely undesirable consequences.

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I would love to learn in more detail what was holding you back when you had that position and how you feel much better without it.

A big part of the problem was the amount of time the job demanded from me. It was 8-5, Monday-Friday, no real vacation time. I was usually waking up in a rush at 6 or 7, and not getting home until 6 in the evening. In the Winter that meant I walked into the building when it was dark outside, and I didn't walk out of the building until it was dark again. The job also demanded a lot of my energy. Physically because I had to spend much of my day running all over a warehouse on a very tight schedule. Emotionally because customers are assholes, and bosses are bigger assholes.

I don't want to try and paint my experiences there as some kind of "poor me" nonsense. Objectively speaking, I had it really good. I made enough money to support myself and my girlfriend in comfort with enough left over to save. I had job security. I was legitimately good friends with almost all of my coworkers, including my direct supervisor. In many ways, it was a sweet gig. The kinda job a lot of people would love to have. The kind of job more people deserve to have. But it was exhausting, and I'm weak. So I wasn't making as much progress with my writing as someone with more willpower would be able to.

I knew the whole time that my life was starting to look like a cliche. I'd started out with high hopes about what I would accomplish, then I got smacked down by real life. I got shuffled into a boring and pointless job that was too good to quit. My life was passing by underneath me. How long would it be before I just accepted the status quo?

(First world problems, am I right?)

Honestly things would still be going like that if not for my girlfriend. She basically told me to just quit, and she'd take care of our finances. So I did, and I've spent the last year writing every day while my bank account shrank. Almost exactly a year later (the last day at my old job was on the 25th of July 2014), things haven't worked out as well as we would have hoped. I wanted to be bringing in some more money with my writing by now, and Morrie didn't anticipate some of the financial burdens we've faced. So now we're making some sacrifices. I've gone back to part-time paycheck work, and we're looking at smaller apartments. But now I've got my priorities in order. Writing comes first, everything else is secondary.

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I spent my university time trying to finish my career for the greater good. Getting the paper. I envied my friends that were on the art side while i was in IT. Even then IT was vaguely chosen in the hopes I could somehow reconcile it with my love for forums and interest in building a proper website. I didn't know what I'd do once it was over. I had studied before because that was my duty but somehow the idea of joining a big company or how I'd be working wouldn't make me feel excited in anyway. It actually would make me feel anxious and unfit. like something I'd have to swallow just to be what I knew people around me expected me to be. It backfired and I dropped in the middle of a semester after a breakdown. I just couldn't pass my subjects, my head was elsewhere. At the time I paused it and I hoped I'd continue it here.

Between that and now I have learned different things about me and what I want. I now think it is a mistake to rush people into university when they don't know yet what they want to do. I think some work experience, a little travel , something that puts them open to learn more of what is out there is better than just taking uni for being the next step hoping ambition will fall on them like a thunder. I think that hurrying comes because of this mentality. Money is important and we all have things we would like to own but when it becomes the center of your life, above the people you care for, above your own self- fulfilling activities, above your own ability to enjoy the peace of being here right now that is not doing better. It becomes a cycle.

You're absolutely right. Every time I hear a highschool kid talking about how they don't know what to major in, I tell them the same thing: Take a gap year. Get a job. Figure shit out. It's better to take a little time now to find your place in the world than it is to blow your chance at higher education by rushing into things.

And they always say the same thing to me. "My parents don't think I should. They say if I take time off, I might never go back."

Bullshit. Your parents are dumb. They think you'll never go back because they still think of you as the child they had to force to go to school every morning. But you're not stupid, you want to take your college education seriously. Are your parents going to pay for 100% of your education? No? Then why are you going to let them force you into tens of thousands of dollars of debt when you don't even know what you want to do with it? I know it's scary, I know that you've never been given any training in how to do it, but you've reached a threshold in your life, highschool kid. It's time to make your own choice.

Most of the time, parents who try to force their children not to take a gap year are parents who never finished college themselves. They don't know what they're talking about.

By the by, Kaynil. If it makes you feel any better, I never got my piece of paper either. I ran out of money, didn't eat much for about a year, destroyed my grades, and ended up dropping out.

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I am right now at the age where I am becoming aware of my own mortality. There is a point where you realise you're not in the age bracket where death seemed like something unlikely and far. I am pretty sure I have a long while to go if I die of natural causes but I've seen enough of that sense of control being shaken unexpectedly around me to know things can change a lot in an instant. It has taken me to think, to really weigh what is what I value and what I want in life. I no longer feel ashamed or less of a person because I am completely happy with the idea of just making enough to enjoy the lifestyle I currently have, save up for emergencies and keep building my retirement money account. I just want stable job, time to write, doodle, keep this project which is very important to me and keep learning little things that makes me happy.

Yeah, we're getting there, aren't we? Scary shit. The fundamental tragedy of all human life is not that it ends, but that it knows it.

Nothing we do really matters in any kind of metaphysical sense. If we make ourselves happy, and love other people, then we're doing good.

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I don't know where I read that we can either consume what other people make or create things to be consumed. I am happy consuming other things but I want to feel i am also making a little something every day, maybe writing, maybe drawing, maybe trying a new language. Just going out and enjoying the sky. I never want to lose the ability to enjoy simple things in life. Someone I care for a lot once said to me he could no longer do something like sitting to see a sunset because he would just be thinking about the time being wasted on it. It made me so sad to hear it and still makes me sad now, years after. Because for many that wasting time is tied to the "Time = money" mantra. There is so much more to life than money.

I'm a lot like your friend, actually. I know it's not the best outlook, but I have a hard time accepting inactivity. If I'm not doing something or making progress on something that my fucked-up, broken brain thinks is valuable, then I'm going to hate myself later for wasting the time.

I'm trying to force myself to acknowledge that any time spent connecting with people is valuable, and I should never feel bad about that.

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I am out and question why are we as a race where we are. This moment where we're so different with our malls and our roads, with our professions and our inability to survive in nature's grasp if we were thrown out. With our paradigms and taboos.

I want to have some fun in the moment, whether at work, with my amazing coworkers I've had the privilege to meet, online on forums, at home with my housemates... I want to encourage myself to do, write that story, post that comment, try that weird thing while nobody's looking, buy that you have wanted for a while. Just be responsible to keep your job, pay your bills support your lifestyle.

A lot of this ties into my revolutionary inclinations. Toppling the bourgeois, breaking the corporate structure, etc. etc. etc. But ultimately I don't believe any of that will happen in my lifetime. We live in the times that we live in, and we need to make the best of what we have.

I feel like I could write 10 pages in response to you, Kaynil. But I should probably stop writing now, because this is already longer than any forum post that anyone has ever bothered to read. =P