obligation schmobligation
i like to behave as if i want total control over my own life in order to be happy. and yet i’ve historically given myself many obligations, which is a great way to ensure that other people and things will make life choices for you by default. but i think obligation isn’t the real problem here, it’s choosing obligations well.
when I was in high school, I packed my schedule with classes and clubs merely because it seemed like the sensible thing to do. I couldn’t wait for university, where I’d no longer be obligated to learn useless things, to participate in activities that plausibly looked good on paper, or to be home by nightfall.
while I ended up committing to classes and clubs willy-nilly in uni just as before, the extra freedom I got in regards to showing up or sleeping longer probably made my life worse. in high school, friends would call if I missed an occasional morning class, and the school would call home. in uni, nobody noticed.
so I’d often fall asleep between 4 - 6 am, and I stopped going to class altogether. my life was mostly dictated by the cadence of our grueling assignments, pushing me into a cycle of grinding before deadlines or ignoring them for friends and clubs. in a rare moment of lucidity and resolve, I tried to quit my program, but it turned out to be too late that term and I never tried again.
near the end of my degree, I worked for four months at a job that required me to be in person five days a week. it embarrasses me to admit that this was more than my body could handle, because it sounds pretty standard, but the commute both ways and preparing dinner and the next day’s lunch every night left me constantly exhausted. (I think part of the problem here was that I wanted to have it all, so I was doing high effort and high variety home-cooked meals. I heard that some guy just ate two potatoes for lunch every day.)
after i graduated, i wanted to reconsider my relationship to work and life and commitments. many of my peers were headed straight into high-powered roles at high-status companies, but I wasn’t sure that that was what I wanted. I’d seen a few people floating around on the internet doing really cool independent research, or becoming a nomadic artist, or earning money through completely illegible hobbies-turned-careers like “niche linguistics communicator” or “live wedding illustrator”. i thought that, without the constraints of a degree or a traditional career, i could unfold a life that I didn’t want to escape from.
ultimately, it was really helpful for me to have some time to myself where I could live without expectations, decide that everything was basically fake, reinvent nihilism, etc. but this, too, wore on me. I started waking up in the morning with the sense that hardly a soul would care if I lived or died.
in this time, I often thought about the movie The Materialists. I actually hated this movie, because it really doesn’t give you more than what it says on the tin, and in particular I hated a scene where a woman sobs that she just “wants to be valued” in order to justify her cringe standards for height and net worth (or something).
and yet… that’s kind of how I felt, waking up unemployed, zero obligations, beholden to nobody, finally free, and valued by no one. I had no degree to obtain, no teammates or users who counted on me, and therefore no straightforward value I could produce.
this would be a good time to be an entrepreneur, to create value, as they like to say in the bay. and while i had been decent at doing that at companies, it took more courage than I had then to believe that someone out there would value the things that I wanted to make for myself. i didn’t feel like I had time to accumulate an audience, felt I was wasting away, isolated. you can’t build security in a vacuum.
in the end, I decided that the best way to move towards the life I wanted was to be employed anyway. I was lucky enough to find work with people I really liked and a mission that tied into “my life’s work”, though it was no small feat. and even though it is a traditional 9-5—closer to a 10-8 in fact—I think being prevented from coasting or only showing up when absolutely necessary is definitely the right move. I am glad that this obligation reduces my worries instead of just increasing them—via the money, the food at the office, the validation of appreciative coworkers. By showing up every day and doing a good job, I find that I’m beginning to trust myself more, that I can show up and be valuable. and because I’m quite sure that this particular shape of a life was my choice, I feel a lot more lucid and conscious that I am responsible for every part of it.
there are things that I am still wanting, of course. more of a community, more time for art, more sunshine in my day. but I’m committing to things more slowly now, and paying close attention to how they make me feel.