Opportunities are endless in this generation so why you still doing things that worked decades ago?
In this case, that means following the standard life path. You know the one; go to school, grow up, get married, die after a few years of retirement when you're too old to do anything fun like going to the bathroom on you own.
I guess I can understand why that formula is so attractive for some people. A path that you can trust offers stability which many of us crave. Nobody wants to wake up every morning wondering where you're going to get you money for rent.
A few exceptions love their jobs. They're the lucky ones who you see smiling in traffic all of the way to work. Actually they're the ones motivated enough to leave early and dodge the traffic. The ones stuck in traffic are the ones who don't want to go to work because they'd rather sit in a stand-still car for a few hours than show up for work. That's why they always look so sad- every minute brings them closer to the place that they hate.
You don't have to be caught in this trap. There's another way. You just have to learn how to work for yourself.
It takes an uncommon amount of courage to pull yourself out of that trap but that's exactly what I did and I love myself for it.
I went through the traditional schooling system up until halfway through my university degree. I was just going through the motions up until I took a pause to take a real look at my life and see where it's headed. The path I was on would get me a great degree from a great university which would get me great career and so I should have been happy but I wasn't. I was miserable.
You don't know just how miserable you are until you take a look at how much you self-medicate. During my first year, I drank myself into oblivion. Monday - Friday afternoon were just hours between my next binge. When the weekend came the mandate was to pop as many bottles as possible and leave enough time on Sunday to recover for Monday's classes which I always attended. A brilliant system, methinks.
The problems started when drinking on weekends wasn't enough. Student night on Wednesdays became too attractive to ignore so Thursday morning classes were forgotten. Eventually I needed a way to get high every day but I couldn't handle that much booze so I switched to bud.
Bud killed any chances of making it to class. I became a total shut-in, smoking up in my dark room was more attractive than going out or socializing. You don't need to be told what happened to my grades.
The solitude did wonders for me though. The best way to figure out who you really are is to cut out the outside influences for a while and without those influences I learnt that I definitely wasn't an engineer. If not that, then what was I?
"I am divine love, everything in my life is working towards my ultimate good"
Thank the stars for the content freedom of the internet. How the else would I have figured out that I'm a god who literally creates the reality that he chooses? School never taught me that. They were too busy trying to convince me that nothing is in my control and I'm better off submitting. Can't believe that I actually fell for that bullshit.
"Your mind is like a powerful Ferrari. Most people are still running on first gear because they never learnt how to work a stick-shift,"
That quote right there changed my life. I was driving my Ferrari like it was a goddamn Vitz. What a fucking waste. The next obvious step was figuring out how to work that damn clutch.
But young padiwan, you cannot speed off into the distance until you have mastery over the steering wheel. That's what keeps you out of ditches, and the only way to control your mind is through meditation. So I lay on my bed every night at god-knows AM trying to calm my mind and ignore that goddamn itch. Why does the urge to itch always come up when you're trying not to itch?
After I mastered my mind the next question was which direction to take it in. The mad monkey in control before had me a on a path to misery so I took a hard turn headed strait for happiness, wherever that might be.
First thing I realized was that there'd be a lot of resistance. Friends are the first to doubt you for no reason other than they cannot stand to see you break free from the system. I love my friends but a dude's gotta change. We're all heading to success but my path is diverging. We'll see you on the other side.
My friends got used to my social rebellion (some even encouraged it) but my parents were a whole other deal. They had big dreams for me that involved a stable, reputable job with steady growth expectations.
Blegh.
The fact that everybody is going for that kind of stability is a sure sign that my chances of success would be lower. Working your way up the corporate ladder was a brilliant way to make a name for yourself last century but the 21st Century is a totally different beast. We've got robots designed specifically to handle all those mundane tasks. What we really need is innovative minds willing to go against the fold, and that's where I saw myself.
Employment was not an option. I realized this in high school when it became clear that I suck at taking orders. My entire highschool life was full of fights with teachers over my 'bad attitude'. I did the school work and did it bloody well but they wanted to see me sweat. They were also insistent and making me ignore my hormones and stop chasing girls. Ha! As if that was going to happen.
"Pussy über alles,"
My solitary stint as an employed individual lasted 2 weeks. I was selling bootleg movies for Media Kali and I had to be at work for 8 hours from Tuesday to Sunday at 300 bob per day. Absolute peanuts but I stuck it out for a fortnight because I wanted enough money to go for that year's Earthdance. You can see where my priorities were at the time.
When my dad asked me why I quit, I told him that was working so that I could afford to party and now that I was working, I didn't have time to party. My dad laughed harder than I'd ever seen him laugh before. He thought me a fool but what I learnt from that job is that I'll never work according to someone else's schedule. I work when I want to work, which is probably why those university timetables were more like suggestions. Thankfully, they don't count attendance in your final grade. At least I hoped that they didn't.
After you've convinced your parents and friends then you'll miss their griping because it's better than the 0.00000000 fucks that the rest of the world has to give about you. The world genuinely does not care and that is the most freeing realization in the world because if they don't care then they won't react, and if they won't react then you can get away with a lot more. Walk down the street with your left tit hanging out and you'll get a few pitiful glances. Walk down the street with both tits out and nipple pasties on them twirling round and round then you better be in Rio because you are in for some serious shit.
"The nothingness of the abyss will consume you,
Despite my unemployment, I want to be wealthy. I want to own half the world and lease the other half back to you.
Understand this, the path to true wealth is not in how much you make but how much you keep. You can become a dollar petanaire (thats 100,000 trillion) on any income. You just have to be wise enough to put your money in the right places and let it have little babies. Incest is a good thing when it's money doing the multiplying. The trick here is finding out how to bring in a lot income while doing as little as possible. Tim Ferris and Robert Kiyosaki helped me out with that one. Recommend reading for anyone trying to duck the 9-5 trap.
So here's to being professionally unemployed, and all of the joys that come with it. Cheers
IMAGE CREDITS: