There was this calculation that they kept asking us to make in our heads back in the high school days, which was that the farther along we got toward—or in—higher education, the richer we would eventually be.
Of course it’s now clear that that was entirely incorrect. In fact, it goes something more like: every day of higher education is a day’s worth of income you will never have; every year of higher education is a year’s worth of income you will never have. And if you go “as far as you can go” in higher education, you also go “as far as you can go” toward economic disempowerment.
I don’t think this was intentional deception. I think this was a bunch of people who grew up with the G.I. Bill thinking that digital watches were still pretty cool.
— § —
First work week of the year is now done.
Work continues to have this weird quality for me, this sort of ontological bewilderment that I still haven’t overcome as I realize that what you do at work is both:
(a) the substance of your life, and
(b) generally of no substance whatsoever in the modern “white collar” world
— § —
I am watching this Los Angeles fire coverage and it strikes me again just how badly I misjudged everything over the course of my life. So many people with so much to lose. I don’t have much to lose at all, despite having worked long hours my entire life at “highly skilled jobs other people can’t do.”
It also dawns on me that if I am ever to have anything to leave to my children, or to experience for myself (say, my first ever vacation—I have lived an entire life without ever having one), I am going to have to start over and/or start anew and do something entirely different from what I have done thus far.
You can’t get to there from here. You can’t become financially secure doing white-collar work. Not as such.
The question is: am I (literally) exhausted? Do I still have it in me? I keep thinking and acting like I do, but then days pass and then weeks pass and then years pass and I don’t:
(a) leave my job
(b) exit my career
(c) start a new business
(d) change anything at all
I have told myself I’ll do this when the kids are grown, but by the time the kids are grown and gone I will be that much older, and it now strikes me that I might feel differently once the kids are grown, as they will still be in need—it would still be a disaster if my current career were to crash and burn.
Not a moral disaster or a philosophical disaster, just a financial disaster. And as distasteful as it is to say, in the real world of today money is more important than morals or philosophy.
We all know that to be true, or we wouldn’t still be employed at all. But oh well.