Generation Meh

Last summer, I went to a workshop for a government funding program for business start-ups. First, I prepared. I did weeks of research. I had my business idea all planned out. I made an appointment to speak with the appropriate bureaucrat (he was both totally cute and utterly obliging – two very rare traits in paper pushers) to see if I qualified for the program. I filled out the relevant paper work. I showed up to the workshop 15 minutes early.

And…I already knew, could do or had done most of the aspects to be covered in the program. I have an undergrad degree in business. I know project management and marketing and financial reporting. I knew long before the hour was up that the excruciatingly baby-stepped out process this program entailed wasn’t for me. The monitoring, the check-ins, the progress reports, the slow and steady implementation format from which there could be no deviation, it just wasn’t gonna work. All that prep for nothing.

On the trip home, I mused about why I had thought that this was going to be the way to go in the first place. What about entrepreneurial moxie and risk-taking? Why I didn’t just dive right in with my idea instead of assuming that copious hand-holding, a dozen pros and cons lists and a better super safe than even moderately sorry approach were what I needed?

It’s a diligence thing. A covering your bases, doing your homework, polling the audience kinda thing. Maybe it’s the world we grew up in or the fact that technology means that you can more or less take a real-time straw poll (via Facebook, Twitter, etc.) on any decision you’re contemplating, but damn do we ever love to seek input and gather information and insulate ourselves against loss and risk and, god forbid, collateral damage to our personal brand. Isn’t waddling through life swaddled in 62 layers of psychic bubblewrap flipping awesome?!

No, no, it isn’t. Debating, researching, and agonizing everything to death doesn’t lead to better decisions, it leads to resignation. You don’t so much decide as simply give yourself over to what you’ve come to accept as inevitable after exhausting every what-if and yourself in the process. By the end, you’re so worn out and overloaded on facts, stats, arguments and outsourced input that you don’t actually have any energy left to muster emotional attachment to the matter at hand. Forget about instinct, all your gut can do is try to stave off an early ulcer. There’s no frisson of excitement and unknowingness, because you’ve made it your mission to eradicate it. To what end? Making a better decision? Making the best decision? Making the decision that can be most easily undone should you change your mind or have it changed for you?

When did the right thing become the most researched thing? And when did getting what you want get so needlessly overwrought?

I’m thinking back to a piece, the first piece I wrote for GenMeh about being your own expert and how relevant it still is and how many people still don’t get that and just stand around waiting for the universe and its cool kids to pick them for the kickball team instead of saying, “F*** it, I like tennis better anyway.” This is what happens when you think of it as a game and decide that someone else makes up the rules and that the best you can hope for is to memorize those rules, eat, sleep and breathe them until no one knows them better, can apply them more skilfully, can suss out the loopholes to squeeze through. How can I fold myself up small enough to take advantage of this teeny, tiny opportunity? you ask. How can you fit your whole career on two pages, your entire romantic history in the time that it takes to drink a latte, distill your brain into 140 characters or less, make yourself thin enough to slide right through the bars.

It’s slumming it and selling out and deep down you know it.

You’re better than this, better than nickel slots and the kids table at Thanksgiving and a sense of self-esteem that can only conceive of “entry-level” and “people much more experienced and successful than me.” Please stop doing that. Stop scheming up ways to get the universe to notice you and invite you to the prom because that’s your idea of validation. Stop buying your ambition in the children’s section. Stop picking at the carcass because you think the first bite is destined to go to someone bigger and better and stronger and that leftovers are your lot.

Do it for no other reason than it makes me so sad to think that you still believe kickball matters.

We’re waiting at (not in, not by) the car. I’m sitting in the back, wilting in the heat. He’s standing outside, eating an ice cream sandwich shaped like a fish, leaning forward so he doesn’t drip on his shirt. Improbably, there is country music on the radio. Something about pina coladas. He’s not listening to the lyrics or he would ask me to explain what a pina colada is. My job is the words. Write them, speak them, break them down into more familiar parts until they make sense. He says that I look like a rich lady and he looks like my driver. I tell him that rich ladies don’t get frustrated trying to figure out child safety locks.

He asks what kind of car I would want if I could have any car. I say that I don’t know. He persists. What kind? But not a Chevrolet. You can’t name a Chevrolet. I tell him that I don’t care about cars. Just something safe and fuel efficient. He sighs at my lack of imagination.

We play the question game a lot. I lose every time. I am too literal and I don’t embellish my answers enough. Where would you travel? What is the best kind of music? What is your favorite vegetable? That one, I passed. Finally. Yellow beans.

“Okay. Beans are okay. I like beans, too. “

Then, later, “That ice cream was not very good. What kind of ice cream do you like?”

Recently, someone called me successful. I laughed. I quite literally own nothing but the contents of one Samsonite suitcase and four cardboard boxes (most of which are filled with papers) and a laptop that’s about to give up the ghost. I’m not married. I don’t have a family. I don’t own any property. And I can’t even make it until 5:00PM without all my makeup smearing off.

But I do have a good job where I make business deals and finesse contracts and bat clean-up when stuff goes wrong and I  get well praised for it. I write for Forbes. I have no debt and I take excellent care of my skin. I make people laugh. Last week, an old man told me I was really beautiful*.

It’s all relative. My failure. Your success. Your vice. My versa.  Who can say definitively what’s thriving vs. just surviving?  What would have seemed incomprehensibly dull and stultifying to your 16 year-old self turns out to be a pretty sweet deal when you hit 40.

Of course you already know there’s no ambition ceiling. As soon as you have a little, you want a little more. And when you have a lot, you can imagine having and doing and being  a lot more. When you have nothing, making the ends meet and being able to knot them off is a $#@%* triumph. When you’re living the proverbial good life, a renovated kitchen is all that’s standing between you and perfection.  Maslow had it down cold. If there’s not an obvious need or gap, human nature is such that we’re gonna create one just to give ourselves something to chase down, to long for, to believe in.

And forget about the mythic ideal of balance. Just because you get 110% of your RDA of Vitamin C, doesn’t mean you can’t still be woefully iron deficient. After all, you can be the richest woman in the solar system and still fight a (very public) 25 year-long battle with your weight.

So, if you feel like the world’s most awesomely-successful-on-paper failure or most fraudulent success story, you’ve got a lot of company. Like, say, most of us.

*No, he wasn’t angling for my spare change, thanks for asking.

What if “carpe diem” really means “Better you than me, sucker”?

I think about that sometimes. I’m not entirely sure where the line between genuine encouragement and dirty secret schadenfreude is. But I bet it’s a lot blurrier than you think.

What if the people telling you that you should quit your job because it’s creatively unfulfilling or that you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur (you don’t) are the kind that, when things are on an even keel, would stand up and rip the life jacket off and tell you to toss the oars as far as you could throw them? That doesn’t seem responsible or prudent, does it? That seems feckless and selfish and immature and like someone who gets bored when there’s not enough drama and has to go and make mountains out of molehills and get everyone at each other’s throats and then just stand in the corner smirking while surrounded by a five-alarm melee. Don’t tell me that doesn’t feel good once in a while. Like pushing your shopping cart into the corral as hard as you can and hearing it ricochet off all of the other carts and pretending it’s an action movie explosion as you stride away without looking back, not even once.

Or maybe it really is just nudging you out of the nest so that you can fly soar like everyone says. Yeah, that.