Inertia, Apathy, and the Risk-free life

Yesterday I wallowed in the half-asleep lethargy brought on by cold medicine, the kind that says ‘May cause drowsiness. Do not drive or operate machinery.’ It was my excuse for bumming around the house, desultorily surfing the net, refusing a short stint to relief-teach at a nearby school, rejecting all social invites, being generally brain-dead, dull, negative, dead.

Of course, I was under the weather and needed to rest, but what came as a quiet shock was that my day of sick rest was no different from my usual day! I repeated the same pattern of time-wasting, committing to nothing, creating nothing, just hanging around and maintaining my current immediate needs like food, Facebook chatter, emails, picking up around the house, job-searching and sleep.

Clearly, one hits a minima at some point, and I think I’ve hit mine.

There is no risk in my current life. Inertia and apathy comes about when there is no risk, and no fear, making me slide comfortably down to sleepy la-la-land. Which makes me realize that everything I’ve done before worth anything has been motivated by fear/insecurity/deadlines… in other words, no simple certainty of success, or risk.

Somewhere along the line I’ve forgotten what risk tastes like, and was content to chug along. End result: end up lazier, narrow, smaller, flying under the radar. And it’s an exponential decline from there.

So how to drag myself outta that muck? Actually, I exaggerate. Things aren’t that bad, with jobs and social life etc getting somewhere. The problem of inertia and apathy is actually located closer to the heart – the lethargy I feel when questioned about what I love and what I want to do, and the quiet little very sian feeling that it doesn’t really matter. Contrast this to my previous post where I swore that I must must must find a passion. I think I’m facing a slide into the Quester’s Apathy, or at least a questioning of the belief that I will find what I love.

Note to self: beliefs are often almost religious in nature. By this I mean, no matter how much rational and reason prop it up, there will always be a gap and you got to take the last leap of faith and say, regardless of anything, I believe!

On second thought, isn’t believing, beyond rhyme or reason, but the pure act of will, actually the greatest risk of all? The thought that I will find what I love, and I will jump into the abyss after it (if necessary), and f**k all notions of money, prestige, expectations, opinions?

I am still uncertain about my appetite for risk in life, especially in such large ideological doses. So let’s start small again. More in another post, on how to structure my day-to day life to bring about practical and manageable risk, and eliminate inertia!

Passion, and Responsibility

In the time-honored field of career counseling, they always tell you to ‘work from your passion’, because if you do what you love, any job becomes enjoyable, you’re willing to put in a lot more work, and hence that brings about a bigger chance of success, not to mention all the good stuff like personal fulfillment and growth.

Well, after quite a bit of soul-searching and equivalent avoidance, I realised that I don’t know what my passion is. Everything so far in my life has come very easily – the sequential progression through educational institutions, the various achievements. I never had to think about what to do, and naturally focused on the short-term objective of ‘doing what I’m doing now well’ instead of asking ‘why am I doing this, what do I want to do, and how do I do it?’ That’s not to say I didn’t love what I was doing, but that it wasn’t a conscious choice, it just happened.

So, in this day and age, where people are solidly divided into two camps, the practical ones and the idealists, what’s preventing me from following the former and chasing indicators of success like respectability, status, achievement, and wealth? Answer: I am, at heart, an idealist.

An idealist without a passion exists in a spiritual vacuum, like a chicken without a head (or heart). Not happy, and fundamentally frustrated. Toss in my perfectionism and you get inertia.

(Of course, there is a distinct possibility too, that subconsciously I do know what I would love to do, but am not willing to consciously admit it lest it withers under the glare of cold reality. But that’s the subject of another post)

So, goal time. I will instill in myself the belief that:

I will find what I love. I will keep searching and never settle until I find it.

I have to take the personal responsibility of laying the groundwork, looking for, and actually defining a passion to align my life with. Nobody’s going to present it nicely on a platter. In fact, passion is probably not found, but chosen. After all, where I am is the combined result of all my past choices. Where I will be depends on what I choose now.

With that, somehow I think I can rest easier. The stakes are lower now. I’m not looking for an eternal spiritual marriage with my career anymore (which hung me up over the past few months). I’m just looking for a job, while I dedicate myself to fulfilling all these idiosyncratic idealistic tendencies.

And if it comes to be that if I can’t define it soon, I ought to take heart in this quote by Joseph Campbell:

“I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive. “

So, Live!

Career Angst

Oh, career angst!

Jipei, Amy, Miranda and I have been playing a game of Gmail tag where we mope about our mutual aimlessness with regards to careers and general life direction. We stare at all our college friends who are in graduate school or some job they’re invested in emotionally, not just physically, and feel the insecurity traitorously overshadowing our supposed carefree and exploratory twenty-something lives.

Which begs the question. Why? Everyone says this is the best time to be indecisive, with the lowest opportunity cost. Nothing to lose, don’t consume much, tons of energy. We’re educated, supposedly bright, personable and nice, have lots of friends. Why this career angst that threatens to overshadow any past achievements or notions of self worth?

I’ve been thinking about it, and it seems that while everyone consoling says that ‘don’t worry, the stakes are low at this age’, there is a simultaneous perception that actually they aren’t. And that’s because this attitude is usually perpetuated by people comfortably secure, though slightly envious/uncertain, but not enough to exchange their security for our purported freedom. It is a fact of human nature that the grass is always greener, so that we peripatetic purposeless profligates can envy you your stability, and you can envy us our lack of structure and then pat our heads and tell us it’s all right.

So anyway, why are the stakes high?

First, people identify. Fresh out of college kids suddenly lose the identity of a student and are grabbing around for something to fill the vacuum. Since motherhood or family comes later, right now that identity is tied up with what you do. Also, those of the idealistic ilk (hello, world!) take this way too seriously – a job isn’t just a label, it’s got to be a calling. There has to be authenticity, meaning, purpose etc, else you’re selling out.

Next, the workplace isn’t the same old static arena it used to be. Jobs are more temporary/contract, new jobs come out all the time, new skills need to be learned, employers expect you to hit the ground running, job descriptions are getting increasingly specialized… the general chaos and exclusivity makes it rather intimidating for new liberal arts college grads with general skills. Maybe that’s why more savvy peers pick the straight and narrow, and hop on the secure path as fast as they can.

Third, time is running out. Again another aspect of human nature – to compare. If so-and-so you grew up with is earning a lot of money/getting a PhD early/starting a family etc, and you’re still hanging around not having a clue in the world, it does feel like you’ll soon be left behind. Soon your best years will be behind you etc etc, and you frantically try to find something, anything, ignoring the little voice saying ‘this won’t be right for you anyway’.

This leads us to #4: success versus fulfillment. Actually, external success and internal fulfillment, and where the twain does meet. Everyone knows it’s easy to confuse indicators of success with personal fulfillment (eg. nice house/high status/great network vs satisfaction at a job well done) and we turn up our idealistic noses at those who choose the former over the latter… but what if an upbringing in a supremely materialistic/success-obsessed society and a very liberal, almost hippie education makes you want BOTH? But! because of your identity crisis (see #1) you can’t quite figure out the first step, or don’t see how the two fit together. Don’t you just kind of end up having….neither?

See, the stakes ARE high. Hence decisions are difficult because we can’t deal with making the wrong decision because we’ve made the stakes so high for ourselves.

Whew! Now, how to work around that? How to deal with fears, identity issues, expectations, perceptions etc etc? It’s not just a job anymore, playing on this stage called ‘career’ is a life! How does one decide to enter the stage – with a splash or with a whimper? Does an entry even matter? Can a understudy become a star? Can you switch characters? What if the stage lights fall and interrupt the flow of the play? (okay, the metaphor is wearing thin)

And I suspect any resolutions are the subject of another post. Off to explore Somerville and find me more fun cafes!

Gradschool Blues….

I am susceptible to a rather ineffectual combination of envy and apathy.

Envy might be attributed to living in city that really is a huge college town, and being surrounded on all sides by students, professors, bookstores etc the squirming organisms of life that populate the big drafty ivory towers of universities. I miss being in a petri dish. I mean the academic bubble. (Hanging around two biologists affects my language, and Claire’s worms are actually very cute) I miss the general lack of responsibility a student has. Having no fixed routine, but stressed to the faultlines every other day over some new crisis. I’d take that any day, that willing, meaningful busyness, over a 9 to 5 braindead employee chained to a desk. Heck, sometimes I’d take that over just being a bum sitting at home and indulging in fun novels and reality tv. The problem being, if I am not kept busy by some constraint/deadline/threat of failure, I am very liable to dissolve in a puddle of languor, lethargy, straight-out laziness.

I am so apathetic! This is unlikely to change until I find some purpose in my life, or some fixed target to aim for. Which brings me back to the gradschool problem. The question is this:

Am I wanting to go to graduate school because 1) I don’t know what else to do, I like school and its culture a lot, all my friends are in school, I hate having a real cog-in-the-wheel job or 2) I’d really like to study physics/theater/literature/language (fill in the blanks) and believe that gradschool is the next step in my imagined ideal career?

As much as I hope for the latter, it’s quite clearly the former right now. One main reason being I can’t quite decide what I want to do in life. I’m having problems narrowing down the boundaries to encompass some small related grouping of fields that gives me enough flexibility to play with my interests but enough specialization that I can actually find some sort of training for it.

One always hears that if you like too many things, you have to give up some of them in order to move forward. Playing with possibilities is great, but only one possibility becomes reality. Right now I’m a clump of superpositioned photons waiting for the wave function to collapse. Waiting, and realizing that it isn’t going to happen unless I choose to myself.

Gone are the days of an easy structured path, from school to school up the academic ladder. If I have already (and indeed I have, pretty unconsciously, but quite certainly) renounced the traditional way of good school -> job in finance/law/engineering/medicine -> accumulate money/house/car/husband/kids, then any deviations have to be self-marked, and consequently marked with uncertainty. How envious I am over those who have some vested faith in an absolute belief! But fundamentally, I think I distrust that more than anything else. Maybe I like it the hard way, having to make choices and carve out a path. And I might end up in the same place as everyone else but at least I was the one who walked along the path, wide awake.

Or maybe I’m a passive-aggressive control freak, patching together a destiny, Frankenstein-style.

Scary thought.

I’ll believe I’m just confused, and am allowed to be confused for a few years more. In the meantime, I really ought to check out more grad schools.

Cheers!