It’s so unfair, yet we promote it everyday.
You spend the better part of your life working for someone else. You put in the hours, sometimes you’re lucky to only have 40 hours, but most times you find that you’re leaving home in the dark, only to arrive back at your house in the dark.
Man wasn’t meant to live this way. I’m convinced of it now.
It’s time you take charge of your own destiny. Burn your own path through the forest of life.
“Ok Wayne, what’s wrong with you? Someone piss in your Cherrios this morning?”
Nope, nothing is wrong, and everything is quite alright. Yes it is.
The world isn’t operating correctly today, sorry. Try back tomorrow.
What I’m talking about is what society has burned into every school kid since the first day of school. You go to school, you do well, you get your diploma after 12 years of that.
Then it’s off to college, maybe another 4 years, maybe more. You get a degree in some subject that you think you’ll enjoy until you retire.
What you find however, when you leave college it’s a completely different world than what you thought it would be. You find that many people are assholes and will undermine everything you do just to further themselves if you’re not paying attention, leaving you to rot in their dust.
You slave for 40+ years for a company (or two or more), and you do good work. Then the shit hits the fan and you’re out on your ass. They didn’t even bother with Vaseline when you got screwed.
You’ve just lost your one and only source of income.
If you don’t have anything bringing in alternate income, you can really be hosed, and we both know, it can come at any time for any reason. You need only to be ready for that eventuality, because it will happen to everyone at some point in their lives.
It’s time to step up to the plate people. Start taking charge of your world, your income, your lifestyle, your habits, your sins and your marbles. Don’t leave your destiny up in the air because you didn’t plan for these eventualities.
If there is any one thing that should be forced down the throat of every school kid, it should be the ability to learn. The ability to train yourself. The ability to make yourself new again.
If you are unable to teach yourself new tricks, you might as well be dead or on your way.
Lessons from a movie theater
I just watched Avatar the other night and it was incredible. Aside from the simply hopeless feeling that I got for mankind from the movie, I did take one thing away, but it had nothing to do with the movie. It happened at the ticket counter.
I asked for two tickets for Avatar from the nice lady in the window. As I poked my nose closer to the round hole in the glass, she asked me “Are you a student?”.
My reply shocked me. It was so quick, and felt as if it was waiting for this one moment in time to be said.
I replied “I’m always a student. The day I stop learning is the day I die.”
I was stunned, did I really just say that? It sounded wise and perhaps on the verge of being wise-ass, and perhaps I’ve heard it before from some famous poet or quotes master. For whatever reason, my brain was being kind to me and connected some wit together to be able to respond like that.
Wit or not, it wasn’t the typical “Yes or no” she was expecting.
My friend and I watched the movie, and the rest of the evening was pretty uneventful. Aside from the depressing reality of human-kinds corporate machines ability to be completely insensitive to the well-being of others, not much happened.
Push yourself to new heights, no one else will
If it isn’t obvious already, what I’m trying to say is that you need to keep pressing your own envelope. You need to keep learning new tricks and doing things that will further your own education and understanding of life. The day you quit learning is the day you die.
If you succumb to the trends that society has built for your over the ages and follow their rules, you run a great risk to end up hurt, broke and perhaps destitute, leaving you to wonder where it all went wrong. Even when you become one of those high paid corporate drones with a college degree, you’re still at risk.
The only way to break away from this possible future is to keep learning and pushing yourself to new and greater heights. Keep teaching yourself new subjects, new ideas and concepts and pushing your own agenda on your own time.
Don’t let yourself fall into complacency once you find a nice job and have a stable level of income. That’s akin to being a vegetable on a gurney…you may not be dead, but you sure aren’t living!
Have some projects that you work on once you’re off work. Don’t fall into the TV for your nightly programming (unless the show happens to be Lost, of course), the television is societies way of reinforcing all the ways they want you to be, a good little drone.
It takes hard work, but the rewards are worth the effort. More so than the effort of 40+ years making someone else rich, but the rewards are very much worth it.
So take some time today to think about what you really like doing in life. If you enjoy doing something, build on that, find ways to make it the one thing you do in life outside of your cushy 9 to 5 job. Double up your time, and eventually you could double up your income, and your security and piece of mind.
By the way…
As my friend and I were ordering at the snack bar, he noticed that we just paid student rates even though we’re not actually attending any “school”.
I guess it always pays well to be a constant student.
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Wow, you can’t be more right. I just found your blog from somewhere and you speak some truth, man. I mean, if you look at the big picture, you begin to see things in a different way.
You begin to see that even money itself, is merely an illusion that keeps the wheels of the world churning in motion, but really, it is NOT the be-all and end-all of life. But the question you probably have to ask next, is why is it made out to be so?
And then you see lots of people who had all the money in the world, being really miserable (read certain celebs who are no longer with us today), and you next wonder, what more proof you need? Anyway, this just my 2 cents.
Darrin|Modern Street´s last blog ..Interesting computer stuff you may not know
says:
Wow, I’m kinda shocked at the reaction to this post.
Dan, I just don’t know where to begin, and I find myself agreement with everything you said. I might not elaborate enough on some things, and it’s nice to see that level of passion for a topic. And you’re also very right, you can’t blame society at large, albeit a great stress reducer since it goes ignored most times, nor can you blame schools.
Great avatar btw, is that your kitty? Thanks for taking time to write that. It’s very thought provoking.
Thank you all for kind words and thumbs, and welcome new folks too! It’s late here, and have to hit the hay quick!
Cheers ya’all!
Hey Wayne,
Thanks for your inspiring words. I would only take issue with you about one thing: Society does not burn conformism into every school kid. In all my years of school, I cannot think of one time that I was told to conform and become a slave and work day-and-night so that someone else could get rich. Blaming society or the schools for getting this conformist message is a bit of a cop-out.
Nobody tells you to conform, though I admit it’s easy to fall into that comfortable trap. TV can pacify us. So can a big paycheck. To be sure, there are assholes in the workplace that abuse you and undermine your work and undermine your self confidence. Boo hoo. Schools do prepare us for this environment, but you have to take the right courses. Management courses are filled with information about how to deal with a difficult work environment. From my own personal experience in the workplace for nearly 30 years now, I’ve run into a lot of assholes, and I see how they operate. The self-confident and self-respecting subordinates find somewhere else to go and leave the assholes behind. The assholes are then left with people that have no direction and no self confidence. Needless to say, they get sub-optimal results from these unmotivated subordinates. It ought to be a crime to have such a perspective on one’s own life, but unless you’re willing to allow the government to legislate attitudes, you can do little to help. The weenies who stay behind and continue to work for these assholes deserve what they get. And I don’t want to hear their complaints.
What society DOES do very often is encourage the notion that nothing is our fault. It’s always some other guy’s fault that we are in the sad state that we find ourselves. Governments often reinforce that notion by making allowances for people who are lazy. For example, my son is now in “college prep” courses in high school. At first, I was thrilled that he’d attained such a level. Way back when I went to high school, “college prep” classes were for the guys who were smart and driven. But during a parent-teacher conference, I happened to get in a discussion about this topic with one of my son’s teachers. She said, “No, virtually all classes in this school are college prep. We want the children to feel that they’re succeeding and going on to college.” The really advanced classes are now called, “Honors.” College prep is a joke, it turns out. It’s a very cruel joke, because it artificially impregnates one’s mind with self confidence, rather than making him or her work for it and deserve it fairly. Cold, hard reality is different, and by the time that the “college prep” student realizes the joke, it’s often damaged his self esteem.
Bottom line: Don’t blame the schools. Don’t even blame society. If people cower like slaves in this society, it’s because they’ve made slaves of themselves. They have nobody else to blame but themselves. Sure, you could argue that it’s easy to be a slave these days, but that’s no excuse for not rising above it. If you allow a person the luxury of an excuse, then you’re just perpetuating his problem.
Best,
Dan
Dan´s last blog ..Router or Switch?
This is a very motivating post, Wayne. It can be hard to get inspired, but it really comes down to just taking one step at a time.
Taking that very first step can be the hardest one – or at least it seems like that. Constant observation and learning can unlock new paths.
John Cena Gamer´s last blog ..Captain Lou Albano dies – wrestler, manager, actor – dead at 76
says:
– As I poked my nose closer to the round hole in the glass, she asked me “Are you a student?”
This was hilarious. lol.
When you mentioned that most people spend their lives being slaves, it sort of reminded me about how indignant I became when I realized that this was true for me some time ago. There were good days when I was still part of the contributing workforce of the economy, but when the mental torture outweighed the fun times, the alarm clock suddenly went off.
Society is a very complicated structure. It’s sad that we can’t experience utopia right now, but I strongly suspect that we’re slowly getting there. It can’t be avoided that many people will spend their whole lives sleeping, but there’s probably a purpose to that. Probably…
Excellent post, btw. Three thumbs up!
Ryhen Satch´s last blog ..How To Reclaim Your Mind’s Power
That’s the reason and purpose of college. Or at least it should be. College means that you can learn anything. But you don’t need to get a degree to be educated. William Lear the inventor of the Lear jet only made it to grade eight.
At present I can take comfort that the asshole boss got laid off right after me and his boss got the ax right after him. I am at present reinventing myself, taking classes, and preparing for yet another turn in life’s road.
Always the student.
Demeur´s last blog ..A few random things
Many of us learned from our parents and grandparents, who lived through the Great Depression. They taught us to find a “stable” job so we’d be taken care of.
These days, the shift has been frightening and exciting. There are so many options and life-long employment no longer exists (not even in Japan — yes, Theory Z is dead). We almost have to take a mercenary approach when it comes to getting paid.
There’s no reason why even if we want to be employed that we can’t earn supplemental income through various revenue streams. We’re surrounded by more opportunities than we can handle. It’s just that not everyone sees them.
says:
Heh, that drone job is paying my bills right now. If I wasn’t doing anything at night, I’d be broke as a church mouse.
Sometimes all it takes is for someone to read about it, and maybe they’ll start making changes for themselves. It’s got to come from within, otherwise Christmas might be incredibly different, hahaha
Thanks for visiting Valentina! My best to you this year and the years to come too!
Hi Wayne,
Found you here via Caroline’s blog.
You are so right – easy to become complacent with life when you get a job and the income is there like clockwork. We have become such a jobcentric society that increasingly we give up our lives to work for someone else, to make them rich, yet, few take the time and effort to work as hard for themselves. The problem is that in North America at least (and much of the “first world”) being a drone can pay well and the demand of self to do better drops.
I could get on that soapbox with you … lol …
Congrats on earnings.
Best to you in 2010 and beyond.
Valentina
Valentina´s last blog ..Five Easy Blogging Milestones To Reach