I write a lot about going after what it is you want, not hamstringing yourself with insecurity, doubt or manufactured worst case scenarios. But what if you don’t have a sweet clue about what it is you want? What exactly are you supposed to do then?

Photo by Robert Scarth

Let’s start at the very beginning (I’ve heard that it’s a very good place to start). If you don’t know what you do want from life, you can at least try to figure out what you don’t want and what won’t make you happy. It’s a little bit of deduction meets a dash of Occam’s Razor, wherein you keep identifying and rejecting what you determine you don’t want (via trial and error) until you’ve exhausted all possibilities and all the that remains must thus be what you do want. Destiny by default. Replace passion with process of elimination. After all, isn’t that how Michelangelo wound up chipping away at the marble to reveal David (or apocrypha would have you believe)? I kid, but not really.

Yes, this wisdom flies in the face of romantic notions of having a calling (get bent, Max Weber) or being a born whatever (actor, singer, sanitation engineer), but the point is to stave off the paralysis of indecision that being in your twenties and not having a solid trajectory can give rise to (Okay, so you don’t know what you want? Let’s start with what you don’t want and work backwards!) and to get out of the mindset that you should both know and be well on your way to your fulfilling your one true purpose by the time you graduate high school.

More than likely, these do-not-want moments will take you by surprise. You will test out an idea or be faced with an opportunity that seems fist-pumpingly appealing at first glance, only to realize, when push comes to shove, that it just doesn’t feel right. Maybe it just leaves you cold, or has downsides that you didn’t anticipate or maybe your stomach actually starts to hurt at the thought of  going back to school for graphic design or relocating to Alaska for that sweet research gig you beat out 120 other applicants just to get an interview for. Listen to these cues, cross this path off your list and proceed to figuring out what the next likeliest option will be.  Forget about saving face. Cut your losses and chalk it up to a learning experience and not a reflection on your judgment. Don’t try to convince yourself that you can learn to like it/him/her/Februarys in Anchorage. Going down with the ship by committing to a career/relationship/life that you’ve realized isn’t what you want (even if you don’t know what that is) isn’t noble and it doesn’t build character. It simply throws up another road block along the path to finding what does feel right. And really, don’t you want to get there as soon as possible?

A few months ago, a younger friend asked me what growing up was like, what it felt like to be an adult. I can’t remember exactly what I said, but no doubt it was something facetious and possibly flippant (and most likely I was hanging out in my pajamas when I read her email – that seems like a safe bet). I had actually forgotten about this conversation until I was out for a walk last night and Landslide came on my mp3 player. Whenever I hear it, I always think about the fact that Stevie Nicks was a mere 26 when she wrote it and the precociousness of singing about handling the seasons of your life and children getting older, etc. at that age. But man, she really nailed it, didn’t she? The song has aged beautifully (notwithstanding the fact that it’s butchered at least twice a season by blankly smiling 18 year-old American Idol contestants) and to hear current-day Stevie Nicks sing it in her worn-through voice just drives that poignant point home.

Image by ahisgett

All of this being a long way of justifying the fact that I’m going to be equally precocious and finally get around to answering the aforementioned question, potential eye-rolling from my future fifty-year old self be damned. Couldn’t be any more cringe-worthy than having sung back up for Taylor Swift at the Grammys (Sorry, Stevie, but that was beneath you).

Susan Lucci, Stevie Nicks, And The Sum Total Of My Wisdom On Growing Up

Because there isn’t a destination, it really is all about the journey

My mother has been a fan of All My Children since before I was  born and I grew up with the characters. Now,  I only ever see an episode of it when I’m home visiting once or twice a year. I remember remarking to her at Christmas that I couldn’t believe that character A was now in love with character B, his former mother-in-law. But to my mother, who watches the show daily, this didn’t seem like a leap at all. She was privy to all of the months of plot progress and groundwork that led up to this and so it made a certain sense to her as a viewer (actually, the mother-in-law in question was THE Erica Kane, so that should have been all of the explanation I needed). Growing up  happens in the same way. You don’t suddenly wake up one day (if ever) with a burning, out-of-the-blue desire to get your cholesterol tested and to outfit yourself in pleated Dockers. Growing up is an incremental (and in some cases, glacial) process of adjusting, shifting, reorienting and tweaking that ultimately gets you to a place where you’re okay with you. You can take stock and realize that, yeah, this will do. You eventually stop caring to ask whether you’re there yet (how about now?) and realize where you are and who you are is good enough or has all of the component parts to be good enough if you care to organize them in the best order and/or apply a little elbow grease. And you eventually reach the point where you feel ready to take all of the energy that you’ve spent scouring every dark recess of your psyche (buffing it to a shine? looking for cracks? trying to find your lost contact?) and channel it outward. You start to wonder just what would happen if you took yourself and the way you are as a given and started applying all of that formerly self-analytical power to something other than your own navel.

You realize that being universally liked ain’t gonna happen (unless you’re Betty White)

You stop clenching your fists, holding your breath and approaching every interaction with that goal. You put your best self forward (or sometimes you just settle for not being a total misanthrope) and let the chips fall where they may. Being understood becomes more important. Do you get where I’m coming from? Grasp my point? Can I do the same for you? Okay, then we’re in business. Anything else is a bonus that we come to appreciate the rarity of only when we realize how truly serendipitous finding a simpatico someone is.

You start working with what you’ve got vs. trying to figure out how to upgrade or replace it

You can strip things down to the studs, but the foundation isn’t going anywhere. You can only ever be a healthier, saner, kinder, stronger version of yourself, that same self you were born with x number of years ago. You can’t make yourself taller and smarter and able to run an Olympic 100 M in 9.78 seconds. You can spend a lot of time wishing for these things, but they aren’t going to happen. Your lot is your lot and pining for someone else’s is, to my mind, a criminal waste of precious time (that only gets more precious as you age – Think about being 40 or 50 and still looking over your shoulder or worse, over someone else’s). As you grow up, you’re (ideally)  increasingly able to frankly and compassionately assess the hand you were dealt and figure out how best to play it.  Beats pouting because you’d rather be at the roulette table instead.

You figure out that ruining your life is hard work

You can make poor choices, choices that hurt you, that devastate others, that lead to consequences and repercussions, but short of one that results in your immediate death (don’t touch downed power lines, y’all!), there is always something, no matter how small or insignificant by others’ standards, to salvage from the ashes. Maybe it’s as intangible as your personal dignity, your ability to sleep at night, but until you ultimately draw your last breath, you have the opportunity to save something. Destroying any and all possibilities for redemption is a hard slog, you have to commit to it 100%, you have to devote your all over the next 50 or 60 years to squashing every possibility for betterment or peace of mind. That takes dedication. Isn’t it easier to simply acknowledge that one poor choice or even a string of them doesn’t define you entirely? As you age, you come to realize that very few decisions are black and white/all or nothing calls, no matter how monumental they might feel in the moment.

You accept that life isn’t a pissing contest

Easier said than done, yes? It’s not about reaching some untouchably Zen place where you never feel the stab of envy or jealousy again. It’s about realizing that happiness isn’t rationed. Someone else’s good fortune doesn’t mean that there’s less out there for you. It’s about realizing that what you truly long for is mostly likely your own  idiosyncratic version of happily ever after, not simply the ability to slip into someone else’s shoes and appropriate theirs. And it’s about realizing the futility of wanting something simply because you believe you’re supposed to want it or you’ve been conditioned to want it. If I had to sum up my overarching goal with Gen Meh, it would be to encourage people (my peers) to do the (sometimes unpleasant) work of stripping away all the woulds/coulds/shoulds to discover their personal convictions and then to have the courage to defend and pursue these convictions unreservedly. That’s why I’m here, folks. Well, that and landing a sweet book deal, obviously.

Don’t ever get involved with Lindsay Buckingham or Adam Chandler

Speaks for itself.

Today, I was thinking about a conversation with a friend that took place a couple of months ago. I asked about her job and she remarked that she could see herself staying there for the rest of her career and being fine with it. I remember being completely taken aback. This wasn’t a reflection on her job, but a reaction to the oddity of hearing someone my age speak about the long term. Twenty or thirty years might as well be to infinity and beyond for most of Generation Meh.

Photo by ronnie44052

We talk about the future, but it’s in vague, nebulous terms – buying a house someday, starting a business, paying off our student loans. It’s not so much concrete plans as an acknowledgment that time will continue to march on and some stuff will obviously happen in the interim between the all-too-vivid now and the yet-to-be-determined then. In a way, it’s comforting. There’s always the possibility of improvement, a change in fortunes, a rising tide to lift all boats. Maybe even soon. Soon-ish? Someday?  Being relatively young, believing in better times ahead (at least at the level of the individual, best to take an ostrich-like approach to collective fate) is still plausible. After all, we were promised robot butlers, weren’t we?

But as much as the idea of the eventual comforts us, investing in it lets us off the hook in the here and now. There was a neon sign on the Tex Mex restaurant near my old office – Free Beer Tomorrow. But the weak joke is on the patrons, of course – that mythical tomorrow never comes and the drinks are never free. It’s just a string of todays that lead us further into the future that we believe will be better than the present but aren’t actually taking steps to create.

And yet, things are pretty tenuous without that American Dream infrastructure, aren’t they? Sure, there’s the tantalizing freedom of being able to collapse the tent, pack up your wares and move on, move out, move up at a (figurative) moment’s notice, but there’s also the worry that, without roots, a stiff wind could upend everything and you’d never find all the pieces or be able to put them together in the right order again.

So, for the moment, Gen Meh has set up camp in our individual way stations. While we haven’t figured out the future, we also haven’t committed to the present. We know that now is not enough. Now will not suffice for the next 20, 30, 60 years. But we haven’t gotten much further than that. One foot in the present, one in the future and both eyes on the clock. And that’s where the fear creeps in. It reminds me of a (misinterpreted) conversation I had with someone once upon a time. I mentioned not wanting to just let time pass, to eventually find myself staring down the barrel of 30 and not be able to account for the years that got me there. I’m no proponent of five-year plans and scheduled existences, but I understand the nagging fear of becoming a Rip Van Winkle in your own life, the fear that if you don’t or can’t get square with the here and now, to assign it some (any?) intention, endow it with a greater purpose, that you might very well wake up one day to realize that you’re in a hot air balloon drifting three hundred yards over a Kansas wheat field with no recollection of  having untied the cord or thrown the anchor out.

Oh my, how did that happen? is a pretty poor substitute for carpe diem, isn’t it?

Here on GenMeh, I like to mix pragmatism in with the pep talks, so assuming that you’re theoretically on board with the just because message in my previous post, how do you move from nodding along to actually going out and, ya know,  doing stuff?

Photo by ontilnow

The trick to countering cowardice/natural reticence/an overabundance of fretful caution  is surprisingly simple. If you want to take more risks*, you need to reframe how you evaluate the risks. Stop asking why and start asking why not. When you’re contemplating a decision (joining an ultimate frisbee league, asking out the girl who sits two rows back and three seats down from you in Advanced Spanish, applying for the Peace Corps, etc.), don’t think of reasons why you should do X, take the decision as a given and simply debunk any arguments against it. The burden of proof is on your cautious side to provide a persuasive argument against the activity, not on your bold self (which for many of us might not be so bold in the first place) to convince you to pull the trigger.

Think of weddings. The officiant doesn’t ask those of us in the pews to brainstorm good reasons why the bride and groom should actually go through with the whole marriage deal (Jared will make a great father someday! Kim is a wizard at budgeting!), he or she simply asks if anyone has objections or can show just cause why the pair shouldn’t get hitched. The decision is taken as a given and it’s up to the bride’s first husband (presumed dead in a horrible fire and now unrecognizable due to the reconstructive surgery) to come barreling down the aisle at the eleventh hour to prevent the bigamy in progress.

It’s much easier to logically refute objections as to why you shouldn’t do something (But maybe that dude in my Spanish class who just asked me out is a serial killer? Hmm… but would a serial killer have such excellent dental hygiene and be so comfortable with eye contact?) than it is to require yourself to list five compelling reasons to support the implementation of any out-of-the-norm decision. This isn’t an exam. The universe doesn’t offer partial credit for showing your work, kiddos.

So, why not? And why not NOW? Get back to me once you’ve come up with an airtight reason. And FYI, irrefutable is a hell of a lot harder in practice than in theory.

* And by risks, I simply mean anything that falls outside of your well-worn comfort zone and not, say,  base-jumping off the Chrysler building. Baby steps, people. Baby steps.

I love when an idea, inspiration or theme pops up in different places in a short period of time or when I see/read/hear variations on the same general notion and then get the uniquely nerdy pleasure of pulling them together into a unified perspective. Recently, I was at dinner with a group of folks and the topic of volunteering came up. One member of our party scoffed at the North American practice of giving away our labor for free. In her homeland, she told us, people might be socialists, but they expect to get paid for their effort. Point taken. And then there was this piece by a True/Slant colleague that got my brain churning. I agree with her point that an outlet like the Huffington Post relying on crowdsourcing free content from byline-hungry college students is crass, but I don’t sign on to the idea that the only writing worth doing is the stuff that nets you cash in hand.

Photo by Dan Callahan

The logic behind her stance is pervasive, though. Get a job, get a better job, get a promotion, get elected, get a girlfriend, get rich, get invited to an Oscar after party. Purely altruistic cause-based volunteering aside, the deciding factor when figuring out whether or not to undertake a project or activity is what the pay off will be and that pay off is measured in (relative) money, power or fame. And if it doesn’t contribute to one of these bottom lines, it ain’t worth your time. Unless you see a clear path from inspiration to near-instanteous monetization (the most emetic word in the English language, FYI), your business idea is useless. I refer to it as a Socratic bastardization – forget about the unexamined life, it’s the unprofitable life that isn’t worth living. Why take a bellydancing class when you could be front row at one of those Rich Dad, Poor Dad seminars? Why learn to silk screen when you could be hitting the golf course (that is what ambitious young go-getters do, after all)? Unless it has a hook that will land you on Oprah or pave the way to a book deal, forget about blogging*. Doing things for fun, free or without an eye to the immediate pay-off or incentive is for suckers or for the self indulgent.

Except that it’s not. Not every choice we make needs to be subjected to a rigorous upwardly mobile cost/benefit analysis. Doing something because it sounds like fun, challenges your brain, or just gets you out of the house on a Tuesday night when you might otherwise down a bottle of zinfandel and drunk dial your most recent ex is perfectly valid. Not every action needs to be vetted to see how it contributes to your personal brand (and if you’ve never heard of personal branding, please say a prayer of gratitude to the deity of your choice. Go ahead, I’ll wait). Your whole existence is not a cosmic job interview or college application. You’re actually supposed to spend it engaging in activities and pursuing choices that you believe will make you happy (and sometimes being spectacularly wrong in the process) or help you become a smarter/stronger/braver person vs. ones that you think look good on paper or help you get ahead as you stand around like that actorly cliche, one hand on your hip and demanding to know what your motivation is (How about feeling something? Is that good enough?) It’s okay to make typos, scribble over bad ideas or doodle pictures of T-Rexs in the margins. Forget about C.O.D., life is meant to be undertaken on spec. I repeat, LIFE IS MEANT TO BE UNDERTAKEN ON SPEC.

Maybe doing X will lead to Y, or maybe it will lead to B instead or straight into a brick wall or a U-turn. But of all the reasons not to do it (illegality, the chance of bodily injury, distaste for public nudity), the fact that you can’t clearly see how it will help you get ahead or that it might undermine your carefully constructed public persona (constructed for the purpose of being as inoffensively appealing as possible to those to whom you give the power of judgment over you – employers, potential partners, the gov’t, that really snotty barista who rolls her eyes at you every morning when you ask for your latte to be extra hot) shouldn’t be amongst them.

Now who’s up for eloping to Vegas? I pinky swear we can have the whole mess annulled in Reno 48 hours later.

* Here’s where I tell you that I don’t make money from GenMeh, not even loose change from AdSense. In fact, this site cost me a pretty good chunk of coin to create and manage. But it’s my platform, my theoretical test bed, my performance art. It’s where I practice my craft. Do I expect that my online writing will open the door to other online and offline opportunities wherein I don’t have to snag all my statistical data second hand from the Pew Research Center? Absolutely. Is that why I write here? Absolutely not. It just happens to be a more dignified medium than a soapbox in the town square next to the dude yelling something incomprehensible about the impending Rapture.