Generation Meh

You wouldn’t think it if you looked at the bottom of my purse, but I’m not much of a collector. A person who can’t be bothered to throw out empty packs of gum or appointment cards for a haircut that was four months ago, yes, but not by nature a treasurer of valuable or sentimental things.

Ideas are the exception.  When I read Gina Barreca’s piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education, I recognized myself. I am indeed an idea hoarder. I cling out of the belief that the time for these ideas will eventually come. Circumstances will align, the perfect collaborators will appear and I will finally have an unsullied block of time – and the accompanying energy – to devote to a given brainwave.  No matter how impractical, never-to-be-acted-upon or out-of-vogue a bygone creative whim might be, I am loath to part with it. Someday, I might use rolls of drawer lining to make it look like one of my living room walls is wood-paneled. I might start to develop that coaching program that combines international travel and encouraging women to take more risks. I might finally, finally submit that book proposal about battling your quarter-life crisis and winning. Someday.  Maybe?

These unexecuted plans and projects are a security blanket. They make us feel creative and inspired and purposeful. Ideas represent potential. They represent opportunities and alternate futures and hypothetical riches and a better state of being. They’re your ace-in-the-hole, your Hail Mary pass, your retirement plan. Giving up these ideas means giving up all of the hope we attach to them. It feels like giving up on yourself as a doer and not just a dreamer.

But the longer I hold onto these scraps of half-baked plans, the worse I feel. When I realize the domain I bought with the best of intentions is about to lapse unused or I see someone else celebrating a book deal when I’ve yet to start approaching agents, or when I think about promising joint ventures that started out hot and heavy only to fizzle when both sides got wrapped up in urgent day-to-day tasks, I feel like a failure. Sure, I’ve accomplished other things in the interim, but those pale in comparison to what-might-have beens that didn’t happen.

I have to let go and so do you. I’ve been hoarding these ideas because I’m afraid I won’t ever have another good one and because I’ve been too stubborn to admit that I’m simply not cut out for some of the things my brain dreams up.  Not only am I closing myself off to new bursts of inspiration (which will come; they always do), I’m also associating creativity with disappointment and failure (I could have done x, but I didn’t). By letting go of old ideas and plans,  you also start to separate yourself from the weighty guilt that comes from being confronted with unrealized ambitions in the form of others’ successes. It feels freeing to stop trying to nag yourself into action. It takes a lot of strength of mind to admit that while an idea is good, you don’t feel called to pursue it strongly enough that you’re willing to invest the resources required to bring it to fruition. There’s no shame in making new priorities.

But that book proposal? Oh, that will get done.

A piece in the Wall Street Journal caught my eye the other day – a third of New Yorkers are now spending over half their income on rent. Think about New York. Think about what an amazing city it is. Now, think about handing over 50% of your pay check to a landlord every month.

It reminded me that everything comes with a catch, a fly in the ointment, a little bitter with your sweet. You get offered a great job, but it means you have to move to a suburb of Bloomington, Indiana. You meet your perfect match, but she’s committed to being child-free. You can grow up to be an artist, but you still have to work retail. Even when you get what you want, you can’t control the form it comes in or the baggage it brings with it.

Being happy is  so often about making difficult choices and being content with and accepting of the outcomes. It’s sitting down and doing the hard math – do the good things outweigh the bad things in this situation? If they do, you just might have to accept the downsides and trade-offs as a corollary of being an imperfect person in an unfair world.  We’ve all got a little sand mixed into our sugar.

The goal is not to have it all. The goal is to have what makes you happy. But you also have to accept that that happiness won’t be a 24/7 kind of deal and that everything comes with a cost. You can haggle and bargain all you want (and you should), but whether you’re paying in dollars, time, energy or forfeited opportunity, there are always going to be bills to settle. Once you get your head around this reality, finessing what you’ve got (vs. gambling on the possibility of a yet-to-be-discovered better option) starts to make a whole lot of sense.

So, yes, you can live in NYC, but it means sharing a three-bedroom apartment in Greenpoint and never having more than $50 in disposable income to your name for the foreseeable future.

The choice is up to you.

What would happen if you actually accomplished everything you thought you should? How would you feel then?

One of my wisest friends asks that question after I tell her about how I almost ruined this weekend’s trip to NYC with my single-minded focus on doing and seeing everything possible in the shortest amount of time, getting overwhelmed by the possibilities, not pursuing any of them and then getting angry at myself for “failing” at taking a vacation. If that sounds ridiculous, it is. And if I sound like a less than swell person to travel with, well, just ask the non-platonic person in my life. He didn’t abandon me at the base of the Empire State Building, but would have been fully justified in doing so.

I tend to think this is a particularly Millennial affliction and not simply just my neurotic cross to bear. The idea of having limitless potential with which many of us were indoctrinated from an early age means that you can be anything you want when you grow up. It also means that, by its very nature, it’s impossible to fulfill. You can’t reach the limit of limitless, but damned if I (we) don’t try. Ambition is an excellent quality to have, but ambition without focus, without perspective, without self-care will grind you into the ground. Trust me. Last month, I interviewed Ben Folds, I wrote a 10 000-word ebook for Forbes and Hyperink in a week and I spoke on NPR about commencement speech wisdom for the class of 2012. I felt accomplished for exactly six and a half minutes and then went right back to my default state of wondering what was next and fretting over needing to do or be more. Exactly what goes into “more” is left infuriatingly undefined, obviously.

And my trip to New York ended up falling prey to that mindset. Never mind that I had to get up at 3:00 AM on Saturday to make my flight, I should have pushed myself to head straight to Coney Island from LaGuardia. And there was no reason I couldn’t tackle the Met, the MoMA and a Broadway show in one day, is there? And meet friends for drinks afterward? Yes, there is – it’s called sanity. And also, the limits of your body and the 24-hour clock.

There will never be enough time and enough energy and there will always be too many mountains. This is the truth. You (and I) cannot do all of the things and be all of the things and have all of the things. It is not possible. Not in this lifetime and not in 10 lifetimes. And believing that it is (with just a little more effort, a little more time, a little more motivation) is not only maddening, it’s an exhausting, disordered way to run your existence. It means that you can’t appreciate the things that you do achieve because you always have your eye on what’s next. It means you can’t set goals, because you can’t narrow down your focus to only one or two big projects and be content with those. It means that you always feel  ravenously hungry and unfulfilled. And it means that you are a lousy person to vacation with.

When your answers to What would happen if you actually accomplished everything you thought you should? How would you feel then? are “nothing” and “still unsatisfied,” you know you need to make some changes.
Just not all of the changes and not all at once.

Today, I was a guest on The Craig Fahle Show on Detroit’s WDET. We discussed this article and some of the wisdom from the speeches and how it could be applied to new grads or to anyone trying to figure out their balancing act (career-identity-relationships-carbohydrates).

I jotted down a couple of points I thought I’d mentioned if asked, but didn’t end up referring to my post-it  during our little chat. One of them, however, bears sharing in this venue:

“You don’t have to wait until you have your life figured out to get on with living it.”

You can hear echoes of that in the commencement speech Ellen DeGeneres gave at Tulane and in the expert advice in this piece from a fellow Forbes contributor. Very few of us have the luxury of not starting a project until we have perfect information, of removing ourselves from a context until we’re able to assess every variable objectively, of waiting for the perfect opportunities, perfectly timed.  Self-actualization and slinging coffee at Starbucks aren’t mutually exclusive. You can work toward what you really want while working retail. Rocking a two-piece swimsuit doesn’t really require shedding the proverbial last 10 lbs.

Sometimes, the worst thing you can do is wait. There are bills to be paid, people to meet, mistakes to learn from. It’s okay to start writing your script without having an ending in mind. It’s fine to take care of today and tell tomorrow to take a flying leap. We all need to start somewhere. It might be the bottom. It might be the middle. It might be way out in left field. But it should definitely be now.

P.S. I’m working on an e-book for Forbes on the subject of job hunting in the era of social media and I’d love your input. If you have burning questions about how to navigate cover letters and job applications in our bright new digital world, please send ’em my way!

Last week, I wrote this piece for the lovely Ellie Di over at Headology. And while I’ve realized holding a gun to my own head as a means of increasing productivity is a practice I need to ditch, the flip side of what I wrote there is also true –sometimes, you need to go back to what you know works – the tried, true and road-tested. For me, that’s meant two things lately – hitting the gym and retooling my writing.

I am tired y’all. I make jokes about having a parasitic twin sucking all my energy away. There is no amount of sleep that seems to touch this. And I’ve been here before. What worked then? Being consistent about the gym, taking my iron supplements, eating more protein. It didn’t add up to a perfect solution, but it definitely made a difference. So, that’s what I’m doing now. More dumbbells. More kale.

The same with writing. I know what works. I know where there’s a gap in the coverage. I know what people want to read. Instead of attempting to reinvent the wheel, I went back to basics – writing about a mix of topical stuff that pulls in lots of casual traffic and in-depth discussions that draw on research around issues related to being young (and, depending on the day, female) in Corporate America. Guess what? My numbers soared and my OMG, WHAT SHOULD I WRITE ABOUT? stress dropped.

It even applies to vacations. Sure, JF and I could go somewhere brand new in June, but we loved New York in December and we didn’t get to see even a quarter of it, so why not go back and check out a few of the things* we missed on the first go round?

Innovation isn’t the be all and end all. Constantly revising, revamping, upgrading and branching out because you think it’s a hallmark of personal growth is misguided. There is a world of difference between being stuck in an unsatisfying, unrewarding rut and continuing to refine the talents, interests and expertise that bring you happiness and success. If it ain’t broke, why are you trying to fix it? And if it is broke and you know what fixed it in the past, why don’t you try that as your first plan of attack?

If getting more protein and going to the gym makes me feel less like a boiled slab of tripe, why would I waste time contemplating a paleo diet or flirting with the idea of acupuncture? If you look great as a redhead and the hair color makes you feel like an awesome Valkyrie, why would you consider dyeing it ash blonde just because it seems more on trend? If you always order the pad thai and you always love the pad thai, who the hell is anyone to tell you that you should switch it up and sample the green curry?

It really is hard enough to find things and relationships that work consistently. If you have those in your life, keep mining them, keep celebrating them and keep eating your leafy greens.

*Things that include Coney Island and tickets to see The Colbert Report. And if you think I’m not freaking out about the chance to ride the Wonder Wheel and stand, like, 10 feet away from Stephen Colbert, you don’t know me at all.