Another website another blog. Why? Mostly personal reasons. Comparatively speaking, with an epileptic personality complete with euphoric seizures and a real inability to plan for a career, it seems that I have now overcome my synesthesic propensity to want to jam as many diverse experiences as possible into my life and am starting to look long term. Before it was "you can always make more money, but you can't get your time back". Now, it's looking at my friends in their good jobs, proud of their work, and thinking "when I look back five years from now, what will I have want myself to have done?" And the answer is "start now and work your ass off to catch up."
It is impossible to describe the feeling of emerging from an extremely non-linear big-picture context-rich right brain vision of the world and looking back on my life and thinking "why didn't I invest in a career, what was I thinking?" It is not easy to take. An existential crisis to trump all such crises. The Emperor's New Mind. You feel like you screwed everything up and that you are a shame and disappointment to everybody who expected you to become successful.
However, I have found that the one thing that is comforting more than anything else is the quote by Albert Camus: "To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them." When I was at my survivalist job recently, I asked a co-worker that I knew fairly well how much of his life he remembered. He had been working there for fifteen years and had a problem with alcohol. "Not a lot" was his answer. My life, on the other hand, has truly been existential as fuck, and very memorable, so I guess I didn't do too badly. The anxiety of having to compete in this job market without experience is extremely daunting, however. I can only hope for the best, because staring down the barrel at thirty years of manual labour after all of the education I've invested in is an extremely difficult prospect.
Let's see what happens...
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