'I don’t want a good career'

             

(c) - www.careeranna.com

   When I was younger and less wise, I always thought that a good life is a well-planned life. It’s when everything falls into place and all you have to do is live what is thought. And coupled with this visceral boring plan is the uncompromised idea of a good career. After all, having a good career is what gets you the money, the fame, and the glory. So basically, having a good career gets you much nearer to a good life, than not having one. For many years I have lived my life believing in this absolute uninspiring motive. I took a good (or rather, honorable) job, decided to take a further study and worry many times a week about what good ideas might be wonderful to write a paper about, and so on. There were times when the scenery of this bland pursuit was not awesome to watch, but mostly, especially when I get too serious, the beauty of the race had gotten so addictive. So run, I did.

                Until I got tired. I began to question the things that I religiously believed before. I began to be aware of my weakness and limitation. I was shockingly exposed to the brutishness of life. Nothing made sense, and I got tired of dreaming big. In other words, I have become disinterested. Like someone who is forced to watch a movie a third time around, almost memorizing its every scene and conversation, effortlessly knowing what event follows from the previous one and what leads to another one, life for me has become so boring that it made me want to sleep always – literally. I stopped running. Instead, I spent most of my time lying lazy, eating, internet, wondering why people still do what they do. Armed with my philosophical eyesight, I began to realize that somehow, everything that we have always wanted for ourselves are not really heavenly eternal goals set for us by destiny or time. All of it, we have made it up.

                Some of us wanted to get promoted to the highest possible position, many want to earn more and more, many others want to get famous for things they are best at, and there are few who naively dream to become like the personas they see in the television. But all of these are essence-less, they do not have a nature, they are a social-construct. We construct them so that we can feed our ego, hide our insecurity, and decorate our pride. We look at our worth in comparison to the achievements of other people. Somehow, whether consciously or not, we have created a giant weighing scale, and all of us are in it. Like Solomon of the Old Testament, I declare life’s vanity!

                This, perhaps, is the reason why I no longer have the same enthusiasm like I did before concerning my career. Well, it may be that I am just insecure and that I only say this because I have already been outrun by others. But I know insecurity; I used to live it. I know for certain that I am not insecure. In fact, so far by now I am most secured. Disinterested, yet contented, practical and realistic, but overwhelmed by ideas, placed in a dim spot but enlightened inside. I know for sure that I cannot continue to live my life the way I did. I don’t want to run to outrun. I am tired of all these nonsense. I don’t want the center stage, the spot light, the presidential table, the microphone. In short, I don’t want a good career.

                Somehow, I realize that to pursue a good career is to install an unending chain of competition, greed, and insecurity. If I join the race, and I am fast, people become insecure of me, and if I am slow, I get envious of other people. My worth and others’ worth would be determined by who among us gets first, and this is just terrible. I am tired-to-the-point-of-hating the kind of life people endorse in the television, successes people post on Facebook, achievements made up by the education system to make students fear the numbers called grade. This economy of bragging and envy is sick. So I’ll slow down and lay low. Get lazy. Get fat. Then soon, in the margins where I won’t necessarily have to catch any attention, I’ll explore my passion and follow it. I’ll imagine more. I’ll be a self that nobody cares, neither the center of attention nor a magnet of jealousy. And I won’t have to worry about this goddamn career.