The world
was looking pretty odd there for a while. It turns out that going to grad
school is pretty awesome fun, but it comes with some uncertainty and costs
afterward. The 11 months following grad school were irritating, uncertain, and
anxiety-inducing. I was only able to find jobs that paid almost half of what I
made before grad school. Considering the prior two years were some of the most
fun, fulfilling, and engaging of my life, it is difficult to be critical of my
decision to attend grad school. But right now, everything is finally looking
great.
Even though
I would rather be on the road with enough money in the bank to travel for a
year or two, the job I ended up landing and the security I am now inline for feels
like a worthy substitute. The unpopularity of my backup plan to finding a good
job stalled and destroyed my potential to go see the world and find the intellectual
space to develop my own path.
The chance
of eventual failure of said plan was higher than I would like to admit, but the
chances for success were also quite high. I needed to either find a job or find
the space to carve my own path entirely.
Since I was
robbed of carving my own path and creating that space for myself, I am now
stuck with what I have been given: An amazing job with great pay, smack-dab in
my field, with incredible potential for growth. Not bad a bad place to be,
considering this is exactly where I hoped not to be.
My desire
for something else came from my realization that the working world is a shit
show. It’s a donkey punch to the gut. It’s a system of raping and pillaging the
mind, body, and soul. I had a unique window to experience something else for a
while, to see new things, and to live life a little differently. And while I
blew it, there is still a chance that I will still make that opportunity for
myself.
The place I
am now looks safe, intentional, and successful. And it is. For a while there, I
was worried that grad school actually decreased my market value. And by certain
viewpoints, it has. But my per hour value, after 11 months of fighting
vigorously to not lose ground, has gone up. I finally found a job that actually
pays more than before grad school, and the job is great.
The thing
that those around me who bit, scratched, fought, and drug me down to prevent me
from doing as an alternative don’t realize is that they paved the way for an
absolutely wicked midlife crisis. I can feel and predict it. As odd as it
sounds, I never really had a teenaged and 20-something youth, like many of my
fellow Millennial’s have been privileged to. I have little snippets and
moments, but never prolonged periods of safe, unadulterated youth. I have
always been worried about bills, responsibilities, and following that straight
and narrow pathway to conventional success.
So, while I
am in a safe place and have found that success that I had before, I have
instead endangered my future and my desire to domesticate. While I am satisfied
for the moment, successful, and have found that winning job again, I can
already feel the steel of the shackles wearing into my skin, once again. And
for a still-kind-of-young male, in a world where men are more shamed, more
directionless, and more anxious than in any prior generation, that is a very
dangerous seed to plant.
I predict
that the stunting of my path to finding new and different spaces will backfire
in the future. I was already unsure if kids were going to be in my future, if
the domestic life was at all for me, but now that I am trapped behind a desk
and the crushing weight of domestic debts and conventions, I am afraid I may
perpetually long for freedom from the prison I have been put in. Or at least
seek evidence that there is something else out there. Since I am not
here voluntarily, no matter how good it is, I may never be able to buy in. On
the surface I will be satisfied and successful, but in the depths of my psyche,
I will be constantly planning and plotting my exit from the prison of
domesticity, stationarity, and conventionality that I have been stuffed and
chained into.
The world is
my oyster, once again.
