Your perfect life sucks, and so does mine
We’ve all heard that phrase, “I’m just going through the motions.” Sounds terrible, doesn’t it? When someone says that, we think they’re depressed. Something’s not right — maybe. But we all feel like we’re going through the motions sometimes. That’s part of adult life.
I’ve got my dream job — professor/writer. Thanks to Medium, my total earnings are charted for about $80K this year. Sure, my student loans take a big bite out of that. But at least debt doesn’t kill my primary income anymore. Also, I’ve got a spouse. A house.
Basically, I don’t have a reason to complain about jack shit anymore.
But negativity’s like the flu. We all catch it. We become infected almost every day. We see plenty of advice about tuning it out. I’ve written some of that stuff myself. But how do you actually function when negativity strikes?
Negativity never goes away. You don’t reach a moment in life where everything suddenly feels dreamy. You have to cultivate a certain kind of discipline to keep the manure of life flowing.
So that’s lesson one. Nothing will ever free you from the manure. Accept the manure. Love the manure.
Ponder manure for a moment. Sure, it smells awful. It looks disgusting. It’s gooey. I imagine it tastes pretty bad. Not a selfie moment.
But without manure, we wouldn’t have corn.
And without corn, no tortillas.
You see where I’m going with this….
Taco Tuesday, that’s where I was going.
That’s what some people mean when they say they’re “going through the motions.” They’re managing the shit. Doing what you must doesn’t feel fun. It doesn’t bring immediate reward.
But you have to manage your shit in order to enjoy a good harvest.
God, I’m so on point with my metaphors tonight.
Managing your shit doesn’t make you miserable. You don’t need some major life change. You don’t need to blow your credit card on a spontaneous trip to Hawaii. You don’t have to track down the dad who went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back. You don’t need to reconcile with him, in order to discover some hidden meaning in life. Fuck that guy.
Trust me, the thrill of your dream job wears off. You get used to it, spoiled maybe. People who make above $80K a year don’t see a huge increase in happiness thanks to their salary. You have to adjust that estimate a little bit for people with student debt. But the bigger idea holds.
Every dream job comes with a price. For me, I have to teach on days when I’d rather stay home drinking gourmet coffee. I fret over lesson plans. I spend some Saturday afternoons grading papers instead of making love all day on an island. I answer dumb questions over email at 1 am. Every week, I fall into a pit of existential despair over the state of higher education. I wonder if I’ll have a job in 5 years — if tenure will matter anymore. But I still wake up and do my job. In my spare time, I plot little contingency plans, like Batman, for when higher education might unravel. Meanwhile, I live. I thrive.
Achievements are fleeting. Anyone who’s played a computer game knows this much. You level-up. A little icon appears on your screen. You have new abilities, powers, or spells that you didn’t wield before. Initial high ensues. You smile and allocate your hard-won experience points. A few minutes later, you’re hellbent on reaching the next level.
RPGs are actually great life-coaching tools. Life unfolds almost exactly like Diablo III, minus the swords and armor. You spend a lot of time fighting demons. Sometimes you get a raise, a promotion, a new opportunity. Example: Just this past week, I got invited into a much-coveted, secretive little position on an international conference planning committee.
The next day? I spent that in my office yelling at a computer.
Such is life. I allocated my experience points, and then I focused on my next level-up. That sounds exhausting, because it is. Nobody gives a shit if you reached level 29 Paladin. You have to kill Diablo.
That’s the whole point. If you get stuck on 29, you lose. A level 46 Sorcerer can kick the shit out of a level 29 Paladin. Facts of life, people.
Anyway, you can’t fixate on goal-achieving every moment. Sometimes, it’s the weekend. I have a brief respite to celebrate my accomplishments, drink, sleep-in, and have sex. I ordered a shirt on Amazon, unlike any shirt I can find in town. I can’t fucking wait for that shirt to arrive. Hashtag, life goals.
Ultimately, your dream job breaks down into a certain number of hours clicking a mouse and typing crap into your keyboard. Just like any RPG. But that tedious repetition leads to rewards. Go figure.
Your dream life still sucks sometimes. For 9 hours last week, I yelled and screamed in my office at a complicated piece of language analysis software. At one point I shook my monitor and pleaded, “Why won’t you work for me? Do you hate me? Are you a demon?”
But ultimately I calmed down and re-read parts of a 300-page manual until the thing did start to do what I wanted. Win.
The world doesn’t stop because you taught yourself a new skill —like a bunch of other blogs told me to do. Nope, while you’re learning a new skill emails still pile up in your inbox. Your husband texts you three times about scheduling a home repair. And you still have to go home and plan your teaching lesson for the next day. Bummer.
If I were a typical inspirational blogger, I might tell you I did all that with a smile on my face. I didn’t. Maybe I’m just broken inside.
But, hey. Nicolas Cole hints at the long, 15-hour days that lie behind the lives of successful people. I don’t like sticking links into the middle of my posts. So just write down his name and search him later.
Seriously, your dream life can suck. When I sit down to plan a lesson for my class, it sometimes feels like the last thing on earth I should be doing. Thoughts occur like, “What don’t you already have a lesson plan made? For godssake, Jessica. You’ve been teaching for a billion years now.”
The trick is realizing you don’t have a choice. Whether I like it or not, I’ve got to have a plan for me and my students. I’m always learning better ways to teach, so I’m always coming up with new lesson plans.
Continuous self improvement isn’t a marketing gimmick. Marketers have made it sound sexy. It’s not that sexy. Sure, I can spend 3 hours planning a lesson and then take a selfie with a caption, “Done lesson planning!” You see the selfie, not the three hours of me stomping around my house.
That’s how life works. Your dream breaks down into a helluva lot of things you’d rather not do on a daily basis.
Hello, your dream life still sucks. So you gave a kick-ass presentation to your colleagues today. You won a major award. Great! Guess what? You still have to share a gym with the guy who talks on his blue-tooth headset on the elliptical machine right next to you.
You have to resist the urge to pull that headset off his stupid face and throw it in the trash.
Sure, you could buy your own elliptical machine. But you don’t really have room in our house. Besides, you know you’d never use it.
In my late 20s, I had a little flash of extra cash from my first book. I bought a home gym. I didn’t use it.
Everyone thinks they want a home gym. Probably, you don’t. No matter how much money you have, you want a gym membership. Just the idea of exercising in my own home makes me depressed. I at least want to see other people lifting weights and rocking an elliptical machine.
Basically, I just want to see other people suffer like me. It reminds me that I’m not alone in my vain quest for eternal youth. I also like the little validation that comes with a 21-year-old girl chirping, “Hi, how are you?” when I swipe my card. I like the music that plays on the speakers.
A gym membership is how I discovered Katy Perry.
That sounds pretty dreamy, right? But sometimes you come across a loud jerk talking on his blue-tooth headset. That’s so mid 2000S, but here he is. You slip in the earbuds from your pricey iPod. You forget how amazing it is that you own one of these things. Seriously, an iPod. You made enough disposable income to afford the latest generation, and you filled it up with your favorite music. That should calm any inner anxiety.
But no, my new iPod might’ve meant something 7 months ago. Now? All I care about is the guy on the blue-tooth headset. He’s so loud. I can still faintly hear him over BlackPink turned up at full volume.
The fucking indignity.
Suck it, suck it good. I’m still stuck on blue-tooth guy. Here you are, trying to live your dream life. And he’s fucking it up. Curve ball: he’s also trying to live his dream. His dream involves a blue-tooth headset at the gym. Yours involves a quiet life where you exercise with an iPod blasting K-Pop.
You briefly think about going for a jog in the park. So quiet. So serene. So Instagramable. Except reality bites. The park closest to you is scattered with trash and screaming children. You tried jogging there for six months. It stressed you out. You even drove there on your spare time to pick up litter with a litter grabber. It didn’t help. So you opted for the gym.
In the entire city, you have one park. Your favorite one, the quiet scenic getaway, requires a 15-minute drive each way.
That’s 30 whole minutes. Does your dream life allot time for that?
If you made a million dollars a year, you could afford a home that overlooks your favorite jogging trail in that scenic park.
But you don’t make that much money. And the drive to said scenic park causes enough stress to equalize the benefits of going there in the first place. You tried jogging around your neighborhood, but the cat-calls were relentless. Footnote: you don’t have to be a “supermodel.” Any moderately attractive girl trying to run downtown’s going to get cat-called.
In other words: If a girl doesn’t look like Jabba the Hut, she’s going to get cat-called.
Clarification: Curvy girls don’t look like Jabba The Hut.
They still get cat-called on their runs.
In fact, a curvy girl running in a sports bra will probably get an extreme number of cat-calls.
So that’s why you might refer yourself to the gym.
And besides, a home overlooking your favorite jogging trail would mean a 30-minute commute to work. So screw that.
Elliptical machine it is. At least for weekdays. And weekends, when you’re not grading papers.
No day goes perfectly. You briefly judge yourself. “Dammit, if I hadn’t wasted an entire day figuring out an important software application, then I could’ve gone for a nice, wholesome run along the river.”
Here’s the secret to human nature. You can’t satisfy every part of yourself every day. No matter what you do, someone inside you is left wanting. You have to manage the little personalities within.
It doesn’t matter which thing I’ve done. If I’d gone for a run and snapped a selfie of myself stretching on a bridge, I’d still feel guilty. I would’ve judged myself. I would’ve thought, “Dammit, if I hadn’t wasted an afternoon jogging, I could’ve figured out the meaning of life.”
Yeah, life still feels like a chore.
Adults still act like children. We just know how to keep those moments to ourselves. Except when blogging.
So my key question was how you function in spite of negativity. Let’s face it. You have to go through the motions some days. The shocker is that usually the things you dread aren’t half as bad as you think. Sometimes, your brain plays games with you. Example: Yesterday, the prospect of sitting through a 2-hour meeting after my classes made me want to puke.
But what did I do? The night before, I planned my lessons. I drank a little, watched iZombie, and turned in. Next day: I did the stuff. After, I went to the gym. I bought my fucking groceries. And now I can chill.
This kind of advice never gets old. Because it doesn’t matter if we’re 2018, or 1998. Nobody wants to do this shit. Someone’s always out there peddling some formula for the perfect life. Sure, money matters up to a certain point. But you can’t attain financial security by watching YouTube videos and signing up for whoever claims to have the hidden secret to success. You need to pick a vocation, train for it, and then do it. Manage the everyday frustrations. Repeat. Go through the motions. You’ll love it.
