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My first piece of advice would be to not listen to dickheads like Tony Montana. I too come from Australia, and in his "advice" I see the same kind of petty, small-minded, casually-xenophobic, suburban, small-c conservatism that made me leave the country in the first place. It's the mentality of an aspirational class of people who take pleasure getting an AmEx card (Visa isn't quite aspirational enough), buying as many banal consumer items with it as possible (big screen TVs, culturally-barren package holidays, dinners at overpriced Italian restaurants etc.) and then patting oneself on the back for "working hard" and paying it back. It's a mentality of valueless, self-righteous entitlement, fostered by 6 years of education in some mediocre, fee-paying Anglican school, the prevailing ethos shat out by 11 years of the most miserable, uninspired tory government to ever grace God's good Earth, and the irredeemably foreshortened perspective that only a lifetime ensconced in the soul-crushing banality of Australian suburbia could ever engender. It's a world of self-imposed exile from non-materialistic values, where children with active artistic interests are lauded for dropping them in favour of "earning coin" and where driving a BMW at the age of 35 is mentioned - with oblivious sincerity - as a major life-goal worthy of serious pursuit. These are grim, miserable people, who find virtue in living grim, miserable lives, and who deride anyone who has chosen to live differently as "dopey children" - the vacuity of their own lives is proof enough that they are not worth listening to. How do I know all this? Because I spent the first 26 years of my life in exactly this environment. I grew up in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, where people have made a Faustian pact to give away culture and the potential for meaningful self-determination in exchange for shopping centres, parched front lawns and an endless parade of creature comforts. All of my friends from school (including myself) went to university to study Commerce, IT, Accounting or Law - I can only think of one from my group of friends who went onto study anything different. What's more, I think that we (certainly I) did so more or less unthinkingly - middle-class school boys just went on to study these things, there wasn't much scope for alternative choices. So I muddled my way through a largely useless and completely unfulfilling business degree, then worked in a couple of tedious office jobs that made me miserable just to think about them. During this time I was living at home with my parents, because rents in Melbourne (to say nothing of the property prices!) are insane, unless you want to live an hour from anywhere worth being. But I stuck at it for a while because prevailing wisdom suggested that that's what people are supposed to do in life, and that to hope for anything better was sheer childish naivete. Eventually, I decided that I needed to get away for one last break before submitting myself to the inescapable drudgery of a lifetime of work and taking things seriously, so I decided, without much planning or expectation, to move to Prague to teach English for a year. It was about 3 days from the initial inkling of an idea to buying the plane tickets. Six years later, I am still here, and I can say - without any hesitation - that it was the best decision I've ever made. Here I have a good, relatively well-paying job that I enjoy doing: nameIy, I work with a radio service which broadcasts news to nations with unfree media. Working here with journalists who sacrifice so much on a daily basis to deliver important information to underprivileged parts of the world also makes me feel - however vicariously - that I'm doing something worthwhile. I have a great quality of life here, with many great friends from all over the world, and a number of hobbies that I never would have even dreamed of pursuing in Australia. In short, by ignoring the kind of unthinking, petite-bourgeoisie moralising offered by unthinking, petite-bourgeoisie moralisers like Tony Montana, I actually found myself happy. I don't offer this information to brag about how good my life is, to suggest that I have anything resembling a perfect life, or even to suggest that my attitude to life is worth emulating, I'm merely using it as a corrective to the kind of advice typically offered by miserable, unfulfilled people about how miserable and unfulfilling life "in the real world" should be. Virtually none of the things I have now were planned, nor did I have to work myself into the ground to get them. I just decided, after leaving Australia, to pursue what made me feel like I was living a worthwhile life, and everything just kind of fell into place subsequently. I still needed to work for it, of course, but it feels much less like hard work now that I'm doing something I actually enjoy. Was I just lucky? Perhaps. But sometimes you need to put yourself into a new situation where it is possible for luck to actually have an effect. If I had stayed in Australia, and pursued the life that I expected to have but never really wanted, then all the luck in the world probably would have failed to make me happy. My second piece of advice, then (and I offer this with the caveat that anyone who tells you how to live your life is typically less interested in helping you than they are in lending justification to the decisions they've already made in their own life), is that if you're unhappy with what you're doing, and don't see a future for yourself on your current path, then just do something - anything! - to break the circuit. Do it without expectations: just follow the brighter path. People put so much focus on destinations - on the expectation that they will finally be happy once conditions x, y and z are fulfilled - without realizing that life is actually nothing but paths, with nary a stable destination in sight. As soon as you feel like you've settled somewhere, there's another decision to be made, and off you go forging a new road yet again. This is a function of something known in psychological circles as the "Hedonic Treadmill", which suggests that the fulfillment of any given wishes can only make you happy for a short time before your happiness levels inevitably revert to baseline: there is never an "I've made it" moment, you have to keep moving somewhere. At the risk of sounding trite, there is so much emphasis placed on delayed gratification - I will be happy at point y if only I do this at point x - that people sometimes forget to be happy in the present moment. Everything they do is just preparation for a future happiness that may never arrive. Why not put more stock in doing what makes you feel fulfilled now, rather than presuming that fulfillment is something that can only be achieved after so many years of needless self-sacrifice? Isn't this irresponsible? What about the inevitable obligations of adult life? Am I just a big man-child living a life of delusion, and who will be crushed once the responsibilities of adulthood finally begin to set in? No. Another piece of advice: these obligations have a way of finding you, without you ever needing to go to the trouble of seeking them out. I'm in a long term relationship now, with a girl a met at a time when I would have been just as happy to have spent a few years playing the field. Marriage and kids are around the corner. We have a mortgage on a great place near the centre of the city, and recently finished some major reconstruction. If you had told me four years ago that I'd be in this situation now, then I would have laughed at you: these things could not have been further from my mind. Yet these "adult" things happened - naturally, organically - without any need to put any parts of my life on hold in expectation of them. They are not millstones around my neck, but pleasant things that I welcomed because everything else in my life was going smoothly. So if you feel bad because you don't yet have the accoutrements of adult life, then don't worry: they'll come on their own, whether you're ready or not. In the meantime, do anything that might help you to feel more accomplished, and don't fall prey to the petty blandishments of those who wear their myriad obligations as a badge of honour. Greatness may require obligation and suffering, but that doesn't make self-imposed obligation and suffering inherently virtuous or worthwhile. Just do something that is likely to fulfill you, the rest will follow. Blurred fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Jun 29, 2016 |
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Jun 29, 2016 17:00
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 20:42 |
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