So here we sit on a Saturday morning at 8:00 am, a single adult man. Professional job, many skills, nothing in particular pressing. No children and no spouse here to commandeer and consume energy and time.
It should be a moment of freedom and even release, a chance to pursue just about anything that tickles my fancy.
Instead, it’s likely to be spent doing not much of anything but paperwork and housework. I know this going in, which is not comforting. I don’t know how to get out of it.
Because the money’s all tied up, the job market is precarious, the friends are, to a one, not local, and I have a dog of a variety that really can’t be left alone and that, at the moment, can’t even be left at daycare for medical recovery reasons.
Therapists and self-help authors have this two-word trope that they use to launch marketing pitches for their advice: “Feel stuck?”
Well, let’s be honest. Hell yes. I feel stuck.
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The thing that most characterized me when I was younger, the thing I was most about in my teens, my twenties, hell even mostly in my thirties was never putting myself in a position to feel, or be, stuck.
I was one of those people facing the opposite risk. I was avoidant. I wouldn’t be tied down. I wouldn’t commit to things. I didn’t want to make promises. I did’t want to tie things up or tie things down. The primary goal was to ensure that the future was always open and that my will always had a canvas to paint on.
So how is it that I have ended up stuck to this degree just a couple decades later?
Freedom in the modern world, the ability to act in any way at all, comes from just a few sources:
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Economic resources—having money to spend
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Social resources—having people to call
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Personal resources—having time and energy that are not already committed
I don’t have any of these. The money is all spoken for until the day I die. If I had another 50 or 75 years to live instead of another 25, it would still likely be spoken for until the day I die. Now just starting there, it’s easy to jump to “you’re foreclosing on possibility for no reason” but the thing is:
I also don’t have people to call. And finding new people to call and building new relationships and networks requires money and time. And we already talked about the money, so let’s talk about the time and energy.
I can’t even leave the house today. Many ways to lay this out. The house—continues to age at a rate faster than I can repair it. The same with the cars. I have piles of urgent tasks that are key to my future well-being. Taxes. Legal paperwork. Managing my student loan situation through the current policy crisis so that I don’t end up in the catastrophic, Kafka-esque situation that the Trump administration wants borrowers to be in for punitive reasons. But also I can’t leave the dog anywhere, and the dog is in a cone so I can’t take the dog anywhere.
All three of the axes above are just locked down today. Absolutely locked down. And if you don’t have any room to act within the realms of money, people, or the structure of your own life process, you really just don’t have any freedom to do anything but let the clock tick.
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There is only one answer, of course, and it’s the one that nobody likes and that also creates social opprobrium and future problems. Something gets sacrificed. For example, all of the following are simple solutions, from one perspective or another:
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Stop paying debts and just walk away
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Just quit the job and go on as many forms of assistance as I can claim
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Say “screw taxes” and “screw the student loan paperwork”
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Just let the house and the cars rot
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Drive the dog over to the shelter and put her up for adoption
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Throw caution to the wind and just walk out the door and straight into the nearest bar to meet people
I mean, taken this way, there are six dozen ways to shake out some more freedom. But the thing is, all of them are temporary, i.e. they would enable movement today, and maybe even for a few weeks, but they would create significant problems in the future that would make life even worse, and that would leave me absolutely hating the me of today for refusing to just do something simple, easy, and lazy and stay home doing the expected things.
All of this sounds so juvenile, and so low-IQ. Like, an adult professional who is well-liked at work and has graduate degrees and lots of physical resources (computers, telephone, network connectivity, reliable transportation) ought to be able to figure this out.
But I am so f*cking stuck. And I have been stuck essentially since the divorce. Extended stalemate. I think this is why people do the thing where they just quit on everyone and everything. Like that—that I could probably do. Liquidate everything I can over the course of a few days, then empty out all access to capital, buy a plane ticket and grab my passport, and disappear forever into the streets of some low-functioning society where I’ll never be found, under a new name.
It’s like resigning in chess, or flipping the board over. You just throw your hands up and say “I concede. I lost!” and then start again.
But I know I won’t do that. So, it seems, I won’t do anything.
Happy Saturday. Sunday will be the same. And at the end of the weekend when they ask at work what I did on the weekend and other people are talking about ski trips and concerts, I’ll be talking about paperwork and house repair by myself. Again.