Settled in for the snow-day-ish, let's begin.
I was a touch unsettled at the prospect of lunging into debt, attempting to get my truck fixed, for projects we're attempting to prepare for spring. I, again, forgot that I should be receiving a tax return, a stimulus check is coming, and I hadn't calculated a paycheck. I should still be “even” within $100 or so dollars over the next month, as opposed to being shackled to my job for a minimum of two.
I'm exploring how to get different certifications when it comes to doing I.T. work. I told my supervisor I plan to leverage not only the good work and efficiency I'm building into their visit system, but my proclivity to learn new things and change on a dime to see if my company will find the wisdom to pay me what I'm worth. She supports the plan. At the same time, I'm finding a kind of pace and resolve for how I engage in my job duties that I find eerily similar to the “comfort” or “familiarity” I found at DCS that had me clinging on for 2 years.
I compare that feeling to the endless fervent desperation to get things done and be “on” that I've managed to, more or less, subsume to what I'm considering a patient wisdom or beaten-into-me humility. Is there “something” you could be doing every day in service to your goals? Depending on how broad or specific your goal, sure. Is it worth it? Can it be assessed in the context of other goals and obligations? These questions are where it starts to get complicated.
My goals have certainly changed over the years, I believe on the whole for the better. Where I might have one day just wanted to be “generally rich,” I have a deeper appreciation for maintaining a contented-enough head-space from which to work in. I like when things feel personal and meaningful on my own terms. I've stated enough that I could pay the bills with a McDonald's-esc job, but I have yet to apply to fast-food in spite of my many points of disillusion about social work. Practically, I'm married to some form of devil for the discernible future, and this one pays a touch more.
I think actually living through all of the sacrifices and negotiations to get to where I am now has taught me considerably about how to prioritize things. I've trained myself to appreciate the good fortune I have when my car gets stuck a mere 5 minute walk from my house and I can pair music with my stride. I recall the images and expenses before I could look at my camera feeds and see projects completed or in-waiting. It makes me think about how difficult the transition from talking out of your ass about hopes and dreams and wrestling with the reality can be if you haven't experienced the work or are simply unwilling to do it.
The disconnect between generations I think embodies the space where discussions about work and what constitutes it takes place. The privileges afforded to generations previous are now weaponized resentments for what they feel is slipping away. My generation had to cope with their entire sense of being in the world systematically attacked. Add the baggage of our country's racial history and sexual inequalities. Add the financial crashes and useless exploitatively expensive degrees. We're broken as fuck and rarely want to admit how beyond meme-i-fying our medication regimens and prompting our celebrities to talk about their own mental health issues.
Say you're not generally as good as me at finding a process to ride through your insatiable desire to comment or bitch about things. Your struggle becomes tantamount to poverty. It's a poverty of spirit if nothing else. You can't be blamed, and much like things aren't going to change if you simply never get the money to afford your basic necessities, debated as they may be, there is no environment, self-help book, or series of interpersonal interactions that's going to magically show you the way to cope or “progress” through your feelings. You might know there's work to be done, but can't define it, never get the tools, and never be able to afford to keep things working over time. Your emotional break-even point is to drag yourself through the day and stave off the worst consequences while you still manage to meaningfully suffer. It's a suffering in service to a broader negligence and disregard for your being, and ironically resentful that you want the bare minimum.
My funds tend to stay “even.” My money is in my land and the potential of the tools I acquire. I rarely have the cash or am not buying things on credit. I liken this to how Amazon runs its accounting, never showing a profit, hiding its money in numbers games. Of course, I'm not making money like that, but I think an underlying logic holds true to both. My money is attempting to service a long-term vision. I don't go into debt for debt's sake, it's overwhelmingly an investment on what I can continue to do or do in a bigger way. My truck, for all of its headaches, has enabled more, considerably so, than it has cost.
I trace back what I'm doing to various pivotal points in how my perspective is being shaped. I don't get the tiny house without a place to put it, way to transport it, or credit card to buy it when I don't have the cash. All fairly large, for me, bets and long-term stories that combine into the “easy” and “quick” decision today. That house/shed is going to save me untold hours in the future attempting to build something like it, let alone the cost of materials for which I have an intimate understanding. An intimate understanding, again, born of a willingness to do the work on my room extension and other projects.
The experience chasm only grows. I'm not 22, extra insistent and incorrigible about spending every waking minute in pursuit of my latest idea, cost be damned. That time taught me a lot, not least, it isn't sustainable. Sustainable healthy practice takes a level of commitment and work that is considerably more than we culturally have a notion of. Individuals certainly take on projects or educational pursuits and remind us of the dedication it takes to get certified or promoted, but on the whole most of our future talk is reduced to a kind of bar banter. We shy away from the work knowing it's hard and we've loaded on years of baggage before the idea of voluntarily adopting ever more.
It's hard to find it simply within yourself to pursue anything. You know what your bottom really looks like, and it's a fraction of what you've put together so far. Most of us could be some level of quasi-vagrant if any movie-esc apocalypse scenario played out. We wouldn't like it, and some of us would be overly dramatic, but we'd do it. When you compare that potential reality to the fed, warm, superficially communal and riddled with distractions environment you currently occupy, why fight for more? It becomes an intellectual exercise and boundary pushing that, evolutionarily speaking, is meaningless without an outward compelling force. Why divine reason-enough for manifesting yourself beyond familiar bubbles?
I think the question by itself is an overwhelmingly compelling argument for complacency, whether people understand it as such or not. “Complacency” is a word that doesn't pack a connotative punch given what I believe can be understood about the drama and degree of consequences. It's disguised as a genuine sense of comfort, or worse, “conservative.” It suggests a state of being that is, by default, not doing enough accounting for the constant state of change that we're all experiencing. We don't seek to remind ourselves of this or we'll almost immediately remember that we're going to die and our decisions matter.
I worry about success. I think people are going to drive themselves even further away. I consider what I'm pursuing now a dream-like opportunity that has been clawed away from a reality perfectly ambivalent of my existence. No series of “opportunists” are jumping to be a part of what should be our creation. Why? The excuses are infinite and personal, comfortable and complacent, familiar and in keeping with a baggage story they haven't chronicled in almost 900 blogs.
It can be complicated joining forces or negotiating goals and budgets, but it's absolutely necessary. The level of “risk” it takes to build what it will take to survive is only mitigated by a shared burden and vision. If we can only martial those forces in service to insurrection and war, we're absolutely fucked. Whether we want to make the decision to face that head on, now, together, or be forced into a permanent isolation that kills us slowly, and then all at once, is one presented in every moment. We have individual countries or examples of who we know we'd rather be more like. Adopting our share of the work is to wrench the culture from the hands of the violent and negligent. Are you living in the world you feel comfortable dying in?
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