[872] Opportunity Cost

I should sleep. I want to sleep. There’s apparently too much on my mind.

I went on a work ride-along this Monday. The girl I was with said she paid for college selling pirated TV shows and movies to the Christian college kids who weren’t allowed to indulge in modern media. Stories like this, beyond being hilarious, highlight this dirty little fact and “secret” to success. It’s almost an accident. Why couldn’t I make thousands of dollars selling pirated material? Lack of initiative? Lack of sheltered youths? Or is there something deeper going on?

She’s not in the pirated media business anymore, obviously. It was making her considerably more money than she is making now. I suspect many of us can think of one or two similar opportunities in our own lives to make more money. At what cost? She enjoys helping people in her social worker role. Granting kids access to media is not the same thing as helping someone navigate how to get food.

I’ve recently written a detailed description offering parts of my land up for rent. 14 people have saved the listing. It’s been shared 5 times. I need 1 person with a little money or know-how to get the often lauded, poorly understood, “passive income.” Intuitively, I think people know what I’m after more than the money. Spiritually, I think it’s all-but lost on our psyche and culture at large. Do I want rent? No, I want enough money to free up my mind to watch TV, read, and play music. I want to be free from the obligation to constantly be busy instead of exploratory. That’s easy to understand.

The cause and effect mechanisms for participating in society are broken. The only thing you can rely on is your screen. The words pop up as you wrote them. The show streams when you click. Your paycheck isn’t going to match your time and effort. Your friends aren’t going to fit the romance. Your hobbies have morphed into coping strategies because you can’t afford therapy or medicine. You also try not to think about how you wouldn’t need therapy or medicine were you plugged into something that more holistically accounted for you and what it meant to be alive.

I have a pretty consistent habit of saying how “beyond” or “absolutely” dejected or angry I might be at something, right before proceeding to do it. The displeasure has to be voiced. The option to deny any obligation has to be entertained, accepted, and realized as an absolutely free-to-make choice before I capitulate without clenching or headaches. My mind is constantly doing the math and weighing the psychological impact. Do I have an overwhelming desire to quit? No. I didn’t even at DCS, I had to to protect myself.

So goes it with the land. I’m not rushing headlong into completing the little projects because nothing is weighing on it. I’ve “won” those battles. What’s the next most important thing? I’ve given myself a small list of things to do in “retirement,” but for the time being, I need a consistent source of income that more than keeps my head above water. I need to be a wage-slave. I need to pretend, excuse me, “be professional,” as though how I’m going about my time is indicative of my best behavior or ideas.

That sucks, has always sucked, and will suck into the future. Meanwhile, I hear stories about making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from my neighbor who has been a trucker since he was 14. “I don’t know where it went, but I made it.” Money is ambivalent about whose possession it is in and whether it was spent on guns or food. Money as an extension of ambivalent power means you’re simply at the mercy of its influence. You’re not entitled to it. We use phrases like “earn” when it comes to money. We beg. We negotiate away our morals and sense of dignity.

I absolutely want to “level up,” and be the kind of old guy I heard bellowing for the desk attendant at the hotel today. I want to roll up in my expensive camper and truck, be decked out in rich old-guy pseudo camper gear, and make my voice known. It’s a cliche and entitled place, but I bet he also has really good healthcare.

Mostly, I don’t see enough of the spirit I’m after. Even the people I thought had it the most are kind of falling off my radar. I don’t wish to return to some “feeling like a kid again” with a fervor for doing in spite of the direction it’s taking. But I do want the memory that has pushed me this far to remain a hot one. It still matters. The problems are the same. The experiments are still interesting. The obligation is still there. No amount of money by itself is going to buy what your life means to you or the kind of relationships you wish to form.

One thing I absolutely have to stop doing is playing the debt game. I chose a living room over financial peace of mind. My credit for the first time ever said “excellent” having read that I paid the card off. It’s by no means insurmountable, even in the next month or two, but it’s debt. It’s letting the bad team in the game we’re at the mercy of take extra shots.

I don’t know what the mix of “all of my time in a job” plus “the benefits and freedom of hustling” looks like. I really want to know. I don’t want my days off to look like times to sleep and escape. I don’t want to think about how dark it is by the time I get home each night. Maybe in a couple months I’ll have renters, a massive series of paychecks from comfortably covering everyone’s missing hours, and this dopey boring sentiment that was preventing me from sleeping will be one of the most glossed-over entries when future archaeologists dig up my blog.