Longtime readers may remember that time I kvetched about how every job I wanted as a kid was met with "that doesn't pay well," as if getting rich was the only thing that ever mattered about one's daily project:
me: "that doesn't pay well" and other things my parents said that confuse me now
Today, I was journaling out some uncomfortable feelings (as you do), when I wrote, "I am tired of wanting things I don't even respect."
Then I wrote it down a second time, block quote style:
I am tired of wanting things I don't even respect.
Most of my life, I have hated myself for not having a "conventional" career (9 to 5 corporate glass tower business card rise to the C suite). I've castigated myself for never being "conventionally" published (Big 5 NYT bestseller Oprah's book club literary novel). I've loathed myself for not being friends with "conventional" people (whoever my family members think is better than they are and/or lives the kind of life that would solve all the problems my family thinks they have). And I've dragged myself daily for failing at these, because I was convinced (by said family) that having them would earn my family's admiration. Hell, their *notice.*
I don't actually respect a single one of these things. I've beaten myself up for not achieving them. For years. Yet I don't even respect them. I put so much energy into yearning after what I don't respect that I had none left to *do* the sort of things that might have allowed me to achieve conventional successes.
This turned into a new page in my journal titled "So What DO I Respect?" This page is very full, but it boiled down to three things:
1. deep thought
2. process knowledge
3. the event horizon of mastery
(I'm calling it "the event horizon of mastery" because I have managed to learn "mastery" is not a destination, more of a mathematical point beyond which one spaghettifies....wait that's a black hole event horizon. "Mastery" is when you're into the 80 percent of the work that gets you the 20 percent of the results.)
And that brought me back to last year's blog post. Because every job/hobby/career/aspiration/pastime I ever said I wanted - every one that "doesn't pay well" - demands deep thought, process knowledge, and event-horizon commitment.
Those are also the three things I was told again and again that no one would ever pay me for. That if I committed to them, I was looking at a lifetime of penury.
This says something extremely sad about the adults surrounding me in my childhood.
It's also prevented me from digging too deeply into anything. Because what's the point when no one's going to support you for thinking, knowing how things are done, or getting really good at doing them? Might as well just stick around long enough to do a job most people think is good enough, then move on once you get bored. No reason to care or make friends if it's all going to be ripped away from you.
And it was all ripped away from me. Twice. Once when the summer camp to which I'd devoted seven years of my life got new leadership who were cult-leader-esque abusive, and once when the recession kneecapped my fledgling law career. Not only was I told that nobody cared if you were good at stuff, *but it came true,* twice.
Hell, it's still true. I have a very specific skill set - one that helped make a few SaaS companies into billion-dollar startups in the previous decade. Yet no one will pay me for it today, because no one will fund the kind of tech R&D my writing focused on. It's LLMs that can mimic sycophantic middle managers or it's nothing. There is no endeavor, once monetized, that capitalism won't hollow out and take a chunk of my soul with it.
So the problem isn't how to make myself respect that (I can't). The problem is how to stop wanting it anyway. Which was always only, really, about wanting my family's regard. Which I'm never going to get (that's a whole other can of worms). It's about how to spend as much time as possible on things I *do* respect, with people I *do* respect. Sure beats hating myself.
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