It took me till I was 24 to go to college. Now I’m set with a great government job and I just have to hold the line until I can buy a house. I work to live not live to work. What am I doing with my life? Spending it caring about the people I care about.
For anyone who resonates with this comic remember two things: it’s never too late and your job won’t define your value.
That last line is the trick. We’ve been conditioned so hard since we were little kids about our jobs being who we are. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
This is something I became cognizant of pretty young. Late in high school I would answer that question snidely with a “happy”—it weirdly always pissed people off. But even so, I still struggled well into my late 20s with not letting that “Im wasting my life with this job” feeing creep in. I even traveled most of my 20s and was the last panel sometimes. Feeling like just spending the money I’d saved and lying on a beach every day and partying all night and country hopping was something I should be ashamed of.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad to have found a job I find interesting and fulfilling, but differentiating between finding something that challenges and engages me and defining myself by my title took a long, long time. At this point, the majority of my life. We’ve been thoroughly conditioned to not differentiate. Learning to is a revolutionary act. Fuck your capitalist value. Fuck capitalism.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
I’m 41 years old. I didn’t know the answer when I was 5. I don’t know the answer now.
I did have the answer when I was 5. I knew in my early 20s. Now I’m a year and change older than you and now I have no idea. It’s a lot more fun this way!
I did what I was “supposed to” until about 3.5 years into college. Then I dropped out, bumbled around trying to find meaning in what jobs I managed to sporadically have, and spent time in my marriage. In my early 30s now, newly divorced, realized I fell into doing what I was supposed to again, and I’m done with it
I’m moving to another country, I’m liquidating retirement to pay for college. In some ways it feels like I’ve lost so much but in other ways it feels like I get a second shot at the life I want and this time I’m a lot wiser
You did what you were “supposed to” from 18-21? Brave.
I’m not really sure what you mean by this but also your numbers aren’t even accurate to what I was saying?
What are we doing with our lives?
Dunno about you, but I’m waiting.
What am I doing about my death?
Life is just a big RPG. We acquaint with whomever, we deal with people who suck, everyone is an NPC until we find that one character. We level, we experience and we know our skills can improve or be hampered.
We then just die. But we don’t get a screen that tells us anything because it’s just blackness.
It’s a shitty game, no rules, no concrete objectives, shitty rewards…
It’s also a pay to win + subscription game full of micro transactions.
This state of affairs is known technically as the “double-bind.” A person is put in a double-bind by a command or request which contains a concealed contradiction… This is a damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don’t situation which arises constantly in human (and especially family) relations…
The social doublebind game can be phrased in several ways:
- The first rule of this game is that it is not a game.
- Everyone must play.
- You must love us.
- You must go on living.
- Be yourself, but play a consistent and acceptable role.
- Control yourself and be natural.
- Try to be sincere.
Essentially, this game is a demand for spontaneous behavior of certain kinds. Living, loving, being natural or sincere—all these are spontaneous forms of behavior: they happen “of themselves” like digesting food or growing hair. As soon as they are forced they acquire that unnatural, contrived, and phony atmosphere which everyone deplores—weak and scentless like forced flowers and tasteless like forced fruit. Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith—in life, in other people, and in oneself—is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time.
― Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Damn that hits different now.
