Quit

I want to grab every one of my coworkers by the shoulders and shake them and scream, "We weren't supposed to live like this !!"

"Can money pay for all the days I've lived awake but half-asleep?" --Primitive Radio Gods

I read this line in a forum signature earlier on today and was so moved by it that all I could do was to immediately stand up from my desk and walk off. Unfortunately I only found my way as far as the cafeteria, yet again fulfilling my daily routine.

Before I start, I -don't- have all the answers. I don't have some magical way to snap myself out of this. Yesterday I changed my Windows theme from the Standard Operating Environment to a background called Crystal with Silver XP theming. That was my short-term solution, and it's not fucking good enough.

"The infinite possibilities each day holds should stagger the mind. The sheer number of experiences I could have is uncountable, breathtaking, and I'm sitting here refreshing my inbox. We live trapped in loops, reliving a few days over and over, and we envision only a handful of paths laid out before us. We see the same things every day, we respond the same way, we think the same thoughts, each day a slight variation on the last, every moment smoothly following the gentle curves of societal norms. We act like if we just get through today, tomorrow our dreams will come back to us."

I have dreams. I have goals and things I want to do, probably more than most people. I have a ridiculous number of things I'd love to do with my life, and the more I think about it the more I realise that at this rate, very few of those things will ever happen. We wile away our hours in cubicles making other people money, working on other people's machines, achieving other people's goals. We delay our gratification, telling ourselves that when we have more money, we will take the time to do things that are important to ourselves, but the next promotion, the next pay-rise, the next bonus is always just around the corner. Just out of reach. So you work for it. You work harder and longer to get more money. Then your expenditure expands to match your new income and the cycle repeats.

"Death: It's the new circle of life."

The circle of life isn't circular anymore. It's more of a rectangle with sloping, rounded corners. You're heading somewhere and slowly, the route starts to change. Things get in the way, the road starts to divert and you work with the diversion because it's there. But it presents a whole new host of things to deal with which in turn, divert you further. And before you know it, you've turned a 90 degree corner, and you're heading off in a different direction. But it's a direction, and one you put yourself in, so you keep going. And again, slowly, the road begins to curve. You don't notice it at first, but with every angle you turn off, you're tracking in hard, stuck in the problems the curve presents and before too long, you've turned 180 degrees. You're going back in the direction you came from, the opposite of the way you were travelling. You may even go further back than whence you started. But the curve was only small..

"Drop a frog in a pot of boiling water and he'll jump out immediately, however, turn up the heat slowly and he'll happily cook to death."

If you took a 17 year old and dropped them into a cubicle farm, they would go fucking nuts. Every part of their being would scream that there is something extremely wrong with, they would go out of their minds, they wouldn't take it. The reason teenagers don't work in real environments isn't that their not qualified - I know people who knew more about software and coding than most professionals do while they were still in high school. It's that they listen to their emotions. Some might call this immaturity, but I'd prefer to call it "being in tune with one's self". They haven't forgotten who they are, they haven't had to slowly grind away the desire to jump in a hedge or see what happens when you shake up a can for an hour and throw it down a flight of stairs. They get jobs at fast food restaurants and supermarkets because they spend that time interacting with people, talking and having fun while they work. McDonalds isn't the perfect example of many people's ideal jobs, but it's closer than you think. What you call maturity is really just the dulling of the senses that scream at you that deserve better.

"It's not smoking or speeding that kills young people today; it's growing old and giving up on everything they used to say."

I work with a guy whose holiday time is maxed out. Every day he arrives before anyone else and leaves last. His overtime and time in lieu are maxed out. Another guy, when I asked about his interests, said that he doesn't have any. He has a house, a wife and kids. Did they start off like this? Did they wake up one day and decide to forget everything they ever wanted? Granted many people only do want a family out of life, this is a perfectly valid goal and I'd like to have one myself one day, but I'll bet you $50,000 that I don't wake up on the day that I realise that goal and forget who I am.

"It's the last hour, of the last day of work."

..don't fall so far behind now, you'll be another nameless face.. I'm not suggesting everyone should just quit their jobs and go live in a tree. I'm also not suggesting we all quit and go start our own businesses. The workforce needs workers and without people to do other people's bidding, no idea goes anywhere. Startups fail. Businesses go under. Trying to go out on your own has an entire other host of associated problems. Some people find that in trying to start their own business doing what they love, they spend far more time running the business than actually doing it. And that's part of what causes those failures, being sentenced to business instead of action.

"We live in a world so complex, young people are sentenced to 12-15 years of training just to survive."

The word "teenager" didn't exist until the 20th century. Previous to that, you were either a man, or a boy. No in between. This is evident in the Jewish Bar Mitzvah which literally means "Son of the Commandment", whereby at the age of 13 he is deemed a man, and thus obligated to fulfil the Jewish commandments. Knights in the middle ages took on a squire at 13 as he was old enough to be put to good use, but instead we sentence our children to mediocrity, we tell them that they have not achieved adulthood, we force them into a servile state of punishment because we deem them to not be capable human beings, and then we wonder why they do graffiti, make bombs, get in fights and drive dangerously. We force them to spend their most amazing entry into the world a subjugated race, devoid of responsibility, told they will understand when they get older.

"Half the reason I rebel is because I'm not supposed to. The other half is 'cause it's fun."

What's the first thing you do if you've been held underwater? You come up for breath. At it's basic root, rebellion is cause and effect. Don't get me wrong, I highly recommend standing up for yourself when something is wrong, fighting back when you're unfairly treated, but I don't think any of our youth problems would be as severe as they are if we were treating them more fairly. When you hold people back, they fight for freedom. If you educate them and help them towards better and more awesome things, they do better and more awesome things.

"Youth is wasted on the young? Rubbish. Adulthood is wasted on adults."

You don't know what you've got until it's gone - old saying. I don't agree with it in this instance. The problem isn't that you don't know what you've got, the problem is that you don't realise it's leaving. Some people don't notice until it's packed it's bags and is outside on the street hailing a taxi. Most people don't notice until they get a postcard from it living the good life in Tijuana.

"Consider this a postcard."

Wake the fuck up. You have more brains, more resources, and more skills at your disposal than you EVER have in your life. You have more money, more freedom, and more power to achieve anything than you ever did when you were younger. Make a list of things you've always wanted to do then start actively pursuing doing them. I don't have all the answers. I don't have the magical solution to make you see the abundance of every experience the world has to offer. But I'm goddamn sure that the solution does NOT involve rotting away your days, hours, weeks, months, years in a cubicle working harder and harder to get that next promotion, that next raise, that fancy car. I'm not decrying work. You need to work in some capacity to survive, whether it be growing all your own food on a farm somewhere being completely self-sufficient, or distributing the latest small business server patches to clients in the Swindon branch, but what and how you work to get the resources to survive is up to you. Figure out the best way for YOU to live and make NO assumptions.

Make your list of things you want to do, and start fucking doing them. Because if you don't, you're going to fucking die inside, and that's worse than being dead for real.