Are you supposed to have dreams at 36? Isn’t that for children? Wasn’t that supposed to be killed in primary school where they teach you what you should do and how you should do it?
What about us who don’t fit into that mold and who still think that this world has more to offer than show up at work, show up at home, get paid once a month, repeat? We don’t belong to the grownup world because we refuse to fit in, but we don’t belong anywhere else, either. Except maybe in Neverland?
We could either be pathetic, eternal adolescents who are trying to turn their dreams into a reality or the pathetic eternal obedient slaves who are trading their time for money. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
What’s interesting is that we already live a dream life, but unfortunately, that dream is not ours. I’m quite sure that there is at least one person in this world who would gladly switch places with you, or me, or someone else, but unfortunately, although we’re living a dream life, that dream is not ours, and there’s nothing you could do about it. Or is it?
I often wonder if that kid who spent so much time daydreaming about the future ever thought that life is going to look anything like this? I doubt that this was ever a part of the plan, at least not the part of my plan. I can’t even say for sure if I’m that same boy, or whether it’s even OK to be a boy when you’re this old, or is it better to come simply to peace with your faith and accept that you’re a damn captain who’s gonna keep running away from that damn crocodile with the ticking clock inside him; and that clock is ticking your time, ticking it with no damn purpose.
Life never turns out to be the way we want it to be, and it’s neither predictable, at least not as much as we’d like it to be. Life is not a chess game and its pieces are not moving in a predetermined trajectory, but its outcome definitely depends on your moves, and these moves are the only thing you have in control. So, choose them wisely.
What exactly do you want from life? That’s the real question?
Whatever your answer may be, work on it and hope for the worst, because the probability of success in anything, even if you round it up to six or more decimals, is equal to zero. Find your happiness at work because that’s the place where you’re going to spend most of your time, whether you like it or not.
Perhaps I’m feeling bad because I can’t find happiness working as a dispatcher or whatever the description of that workplace is at the moment. I’ll never find happiness at work that doesn’t require writing or some other creation.
Yet, I’m still doing it. I feel zero pleasure working at that job, and I feel even less pleasure when I receive my paycheck. Everything I earn is spent the following day, and until the next paycheck, I give up on anything that I can humanly give up.
What’s the point of all of this? Mere survival? This is not the life I’ve been dreaming of and hoping for, but if we look at it closely, I haven’t been making the right moves all along, have, have I?. But, who has been?
Again, I’m well aware that there are plenty of people who would gladly switch places with me, and you are free to do it, just so you know, I’m looking for a job that only I can do and nobody else. If you have it, I’m willing to trade, but I doubt that you do.
It’s depressing to know that you might never succeed as a writer, but what else could you do? Life doesn’t care much about probability because, if it cared, you wouldn’t even exist. The probability that your mother meets your father and the probability that that sperm hits that egg in a given moment is practically zero, and yet, here you are, because the sperm did what the sperm does the best.
And, that’s the whole point. Do what only you can do, the best you can and hope for the worst. Find your happiness in work, but that work needs to be the work only you could do, and nobody else.
And, how are you going to know that it’s the work that only you can do?
Well, if you keep doing it even though you know that your chances for success are slim, if you keep doing it no matter what, then you know that this is the job only you can do. Everything else is just masturbation.
Don’t anchor yourself at some bullshit job in which you can’t find any real pleasure, instead do what only you can do and hope for the worst.
The worst that comes from that line of work is way better than coming to an end and asking yourself – I wonder what would’ve happened if I tried that thing… the thing that I dreamt of as a little boy?