[416] Unhappy with Your Riches

I think I’m going to change my tune a little bit and say that I am indeed searching for something. Often people tell me they hope I can find whatever it is. The idea of looking for something hasn’t really sat right with me. The things people tended to associate happiness with once they were “found” always seemed like something of a lie or short-sided. When I think about what I’m looking for, it basically sucks to think about because I can’t really give it to myself.

It’s one thing to desire a kind of job, for example. It’s very tangible and there are often guidelines you can follow that assure you you’ll get there. My “inevitability” idea that practice plus time tends to equal a polished version of what you were practicing makes a goal in that vein feel incomplete. There are certainly a lot of really cool jobs that take a lot of study and expertise. People make plenty of claims about the happiness and fulfillment they get from working on what they’re passionate about. That’s fine, but it doesn’t really sit right with me in our current climate.

Let’s quickly move through a few ideas I’ve already talked in detail about. I’m interested in too many things. More to the point, I’m interested in what ties them all together. I describe this as being concerned with culture. On top of leaning towards a “big picture,” I feel little to no, or very particular, motivation to “prove something” as it were. I don’t have significant financial obligations, very many people I respect who expect anything out of me, and have worked myself to literal exhaustion and nearly passing out in previous projects.

But how does one go about expressing their interest in “everything?” How do you look for it and is it even possible to define or find?

I think it easiest to describe how I envision the process by starting with something small. Let’s take gun violence. It’s important to note, I even relate to it as “small” deliberately. It kills about as many people as influenza and pneumonia a year, but you’ll never see as many images of people coughing as you will memorials and photos of dead black kids. If you’re awake, you’ll have noticed presumably every possible angle you could engage with the topic.

Whether you start discussing police training, America’s general “gun culture,” not-so-passive racism about poor people’s accountability and sensibilities, the ease of access, the various kinds of weapons, the state of mental health care, militarization of police…the list goes on.

What bugs me is that I think I see something that supersedes the mess of “national conversation” that manifests as pointed ignorance in comment sections and “news” sounding chambers. Rarely, if ever, does the mass preponderance of conversation center around economies. Rarely, if ever, does a conversation revolve around the environment or reasons that stem beyond a very, what I consider small-minded, idea of culpability.

So I want to be an economist, psychologist, or sociologist? No.

I see a general “bad philosophy” from certainly a ton of people, but from my window of the U.S. I’d want to be someone who could address that. I want numbers to drive an ethos and not in the way we worship money. This can go wrong like Bill Gates responding to education numbers or right like Bill Gates responding to the number of people who die from malaria. I think his driving ethic remains “more noble” than your average rich person who doesn’t need to know anything more about charter schools or vaccines than the numbers they’ll return on a quarterly earnings report.

Take Elon Musk in how he talks, and why he’s in business. I think “he” needs to be national policy. Where’s the department for making sure more people like him exist? Or, how do you get people to recognize and appreciate what he’s doing? Creating and investing for the future because it’s right and just and profits come second. He’s acting in good faith towards the whole of humanity.

So I want to be in promotions or marketing? Perhaps ambassador to the world of lefty moral elites? No.

My first, and kind of last, idea I’ve managed to have to be like Musk is to go into business for myself. It feels like I need to create an engine. Here we can use an appropriate car analogy. If you think of big car manufactures, your grandparents might be prompted to say they built “just fine” engines that got you around, are immortalized in certain models, and spoke to the industrial backbone that made America dominate. The actual history and consequences of that engine are less than ideal.

We built an economy around combustion and fossil fuels. I could build my engine in all sorts of ways. I could exploit pyramid structure themes. I could work 22 hours a day in any number of jobs. I could leverage myself monetarily and through enthusiasm and smooth talk bolster my numbers and research. I could dye myself in the wool of endless sacrifice and scrape together some machine that you’ll presume, as it took so long and much effort to get, is fundamentally worth taking pride in and bound to work.

I say this because of firsthand knowledge and accounts of what people say as you’re accomplishing things. They say them regardless of how you feel about what you’re doing or how you get there. It’s not always mere politeness. They’re reflecting the simple themes their culture has imbued. Whether it’s the almost spiritual righteousness of achieving in business or their uplifting faith in your temerity, it’s not a conversation of tempered expectations.

So this leaves me with an overt concern with all the pieces and circumstances that create my engine. To think how often you hear “war is good because it fueled our mission to the moon!” I find this horrifying, and not because it’s speaking truthfully about the circumstances of the era.

What I want to create takes a lot of moving parts. And learning directly the amount of things you need to create and run a coffee shop and delivery van, let alone build a framework to struggle with “culture,” is humbling and sobering to say the least. In a way, culture is the run-off of dominating power. And if most business power comes from operating in the shadows or manipulating politics, now the problem seems even more complicated.

But, what if you manage to find a way to wage one angle of your battle in the realm of ideas? My diminished hopes for the reach and capacity of language notwithstanding. What if you catalyze people to think like you or approach problems in a way that depersonalizes it? Make them realize they’re after the same sorts of things you are and that maybe their depression, anger, or hopelessness is conditioned. What needs to be created in the mind before you start playing in the real world?

Because that’s going to be the driving force. That sense, you can build to last. Whether it’s a charismatic leader who bleeds into every level of a company or a group of individuals who feed each other’s motivation and creativity, there are places you can “take the temperature” of culture. The scatter-brained nature of social media will always be “the struggle” more than the pulse.

So, I’m looking for more people “like me.” When I need money, or, significantly more than someone in my economic circumstances can expect, I do everything from drug studies to yard work to save up and experiment in business. The long-term planner and humility in me recognizes this as inefficient and something of a mockery of how I desire to operate. I do things “now.” I pick up the phone, or resolve the problem or read as much as my eyes can take about something in order to move to the next step. Employing that habit “alone” is not getting me where I want to be. I’m not culture, and dislike the thought of being on some kind of self-satisfied island complaining about or ignoring the parts I see as problems.

It pains me to think that in order to find the kind of enthusiasm and free time required is the purview of college. Unfortunately, much of the enthusiasm came from naivety and hedged betting. And my forays into employing from that pool are proving fruitless and stressful as well. If I picked, literally anything, I could find people with open arms and endless thoughts they’d love to share. Because I want something big and abstract and hard, it’s fundamentally alienating; even discussing it prone to ridicule, let alone confusion. I can’t expect to change knee-jerk reactionaries when I have no counter-culture to introduce them to. And I can only take so much solace in knowing I’m not actually alone as long as we’re failing to even discuss ways beyond our circumstances.