As would any person's during the time they grow from a 25 year old into a 33 year old. However, continuing the self indulgent tone of a blog, I'd like to think my shift was perhaps more dramatic than most.
When I was 25 I was a year into experiencing intown, single-centric Atlanta and busy building a career in corporate recruiting. I had hightailed it out of social work a couple years earlier and was glad to be developing a skillset that didn't involve convincing adults to change their behavior. I wanted to help people but I wanted to do it on a professional level and I wanted a decent amount of money.
It was a perfectly respectable path and it helped me carve out an independent life for myself. I developed a great group of friends and professional colleagues. I was knee deep in the real business world and thoroughly engaged by the challenge and learning curve.
And so it went. On and on. After awhile the momentum shifted from achieving basic mastery to a sense of competence and normalcy. My role models were corporate executives. They were razor sharp, smooth, worldly, and smarter than me. They were able to digest, comprehend, and act decisively on information I could hardly put my arms around. It was somewhat intoxicating.
I'd read articles in the paper quoting CEO's and read their quotations aloud. I wanted to train my mind to be like theirs. I love philosophy and strategic thought in the business world aligns quite closely with a philosophic mindset. Even better, business world acumen is tied to success and failure in the real world and offers numeric, specific guideposts as decision making feedback. Philosophy departments struggle (or are legitimately averse) to quantify their musings. This was real shit.
But somewhere along this eight year path my mind started to drift. For a time I focused exclusively on increasing my income and improving my lifestyle. It worked. I got farther than I ever thought I would when I was in high school, at least financially. This is it, right? Time to shift furniture shopping from Ikea to Intaglia and Buy Design (mid scale Atlanta purveyors). Amstel Light or Bud? Easy decision. MLB Extra Innings-done. I wasn't wealthy by any means but I was comfortable.
I remember sitting on my comfortable couch watching a movie in my perfectly fine townhouse in my perfectly fine neighborhood with a great social scene around me. Why wasn't this enough? Besides the obvious conjecture something is seriously fucking wrong with me I realized I wasn't fulfilled. Recruiting is great, but is it who I am?
To make my point simpler, here's a quick story. At one point I volunteered to help high schoolers put out a newspaper called Vox. Part of the program was offering to let the students shadow you at work for a day. Sure, why not. I signed up for the program with a carefree attitude. Come on by, I'll show you around.
The program coordinator called me bashfully one day and explained our predicament. "None of the students were interested in learning about being a recruiter." What? Really? Oh. Okay. Yeah, I guess that makes sense. But it's actually really interesting and complex and.... It didn't matter. Those kids didn't give a shit. No one thinks "I want to be a corporate recruiter" in 11th grade.
It doesn't mean recruiting is a bad profession. Far from it. It just means that recruiting doesn't set high school students' hearts ablaze. You don't sit up all night reading recruiting strategies when you're 17. You sit up all night reading Catcher in the Rye or Fahrenheit 451. Things that resonate with a human being trying to understand the world and their place in it.
Anyway, at some point in the past three years I started putting all this information together. I used to think the traditional template of success in America was the only appropriate standard to judge myself by. If I wasn't trending towards getting married, having children, and advancing along the corporate ladder, how could I possibly define myself as successful? I would just fall behind and sit alone in my apartment jealously envisioning the happiness and success others who followed the template were having. They were lounging in warm living rooms, laughing near fireplaces, living the dream. I was watching Dave Attell stand up and deciding which bar to start the night at.
But then I shifted my thinking. Why should I live my life by a particular template that happens to be popular in recent history? Why should any particular template, whether the one I currently was a part of or the one I evaluated myself against, be how I judged myself? Why should I care what other people think? Hell, who's to say people living out this template would recommend it? Who's to say people in my template would recommend it to others outside of it?
The point is it doesn't matter which particular template or lifestyle you ascribe to. I'm not judging other people's lifestyles. I'm just saying it's incumbent upon each of us to decide what works for us and then follow that wholeheartedly. To live sincerly, genuinely, with purpose. If your ideal life is having 4 kids and living in a suburb, chase that with everything you've got. If it's not, then don't feel bad you're not following that dream. For me, I started to realize how much I loved comedy and now I'm finally doing something about it. At times it's terribly foreboding but as Hulu CEO Jason Kilar says, "There's nothing more intoxicating than doing big, bold things."
I just realized I could have saved all this time by saying "Different strokes for different folks." I guess what they say is right--nothing is original anymore. However, I don't think most people take the different strokes concept to heart. I think many of us assume what has been done before and what has been done by many is the default option. I don't think it should be. I think we should continuously re evaluate our lives to ensure we're living the life we truly want to live. Otherwise it's just...
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
And the people in the houses
All went to the university,
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same,
And there's doctors and lawyers,
And business executives,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
And they all play on the golf course
And drink their martinis dry,
And they all have pretty children
And the children go to school,
And the children go to summer camp
And then to the university,
Where they are put in boxes
And they come out all the same.
And the boys go into business
And marry and raise a family
In boxes made of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
to be stagnant is to be dead
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