First Highlight in a few weeks, hope you all didn't miss me too terribly! This one's a doozy.790Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡv4mQZ9gSwH
I quit my job this week, which, in hindsight, may have been a rash decision. My boss was clueless and my manager treated me terribly, and I finally got fed up and walked away. Of course, the one flaw in my plan is that now I don’t have a job. I’m hoping to find something a little bit less menial now, but that’s hardly the point. Several friends have looked at me like I’m crazy in the past few days… why would I quit my job with no prospects on the horizon? One friend told me that I’ll probably spend the rest of my life pumping gas.
And he’s probably right. It would have been safer to stay at my job, of course. It was horrible, but it was steady, and for the next few weeks I’ll be even more broke and uncertain than usual. But you know what? I have an opportunity now. And besides: Even if I’m worse off now, I made my choice. Even if I’m broke, I’m free.
Cause really… if you cannot make any choices that are actually meaningful, even if that would mean choosing wrong and hurting yourself, do you really have any free will at all?
I see some of my good friends growing up around me, marrying girls they met in high school, getting “real” jobs in big banks in cubicles. They get up early, grind for eight or ten or twelve hours, then watch SportsCenter until they fall asleep. Sounds like everybody else in the world to me; no passion, no drive, just shuffling through life and looking for distractions.
On the other hand, I have friends that are a lot more like me. We play around with careers in music and writing, we spend too much time at the bar, and the list of things that we know we want to do with our lives is a lot shorter than the list of things we have already ruled out. Yeah, our lives are a mess. But you know what?
We’re free.
I spent a long time living for other people. Growing up, it was like I was the chosen one. I strove to do exactly what was expected of me, and I tried to live my life exactly the way my family and my friends and my teachers said I should. I was going to be a doctor! Or a big shot banker!
…I was going to be miserable.
So here I am today. I’ll be honest, I’m not very good at making plans. I don’t know where I’ll be a year from now, or a month from now or even really a week from now. All I know is that I’ll keep living my own life. I'll live how I want, I'll do what I want, and I'll keep making my life into a place that truly makes me happy.
If you tell me that I have no choice, that this is the only way, that this is too important to screw up, then I’m instantly suspicious.
Because if I can’t change my own life, if I can’t make any choices that actually have significance, then why bother at all?
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