a doctorate in SYKEology: May 2010

[originally written for The Vista]

“Cash rules everything around me. C.R.E.AM. – get the money. Dolla dolla bill, ya’ll.”
- Wu-Tang Clan

The rain has finally died down from a throaty roar to a lethargic, haphazard drizzle. The wind has picked up a little but not enough sweep away the wet, week-old grass clippings still sprawled in clumps across my yard. It’s hard to remain mad or even cynical on a beautifully overcast day like this. But somehow I manage to press on in the face of such adversity to find another gripe I’d like to bring to your attention.

This week’s ramble concerns a subject that has nagged at me for a while now. “Nagged” is really too subtle a word. Poked, pricked, hen-pecked and incessantly rat-a-tat-tatted at the soft spot in the back of my head – where the skull curves down to meet the spine – is more like it.

We college students are born and bred to focus on one thing more than any other in this entire universe – our future. At the beginning of the Fall 2009 semester I was convinced I had an early leg up on mine. A friend and I had started a company in an up-and-coming field and we knew we were destined for success. Despite my best intentions, at almost exactly 12 a.m. April 6, 2010 – my 23rd birthday – I found myself telling my friend-and-business-partner that he could take the company name, equipment, debt and every last bit of the its future and do with it what he pleased.

There are many reasons why I left but they pale more than an albino with a hangover in comparison to the causa de facto. I had become so tautly wrapped up in this company so that I could achieve my dictionary definition of success that I had completely lost sight of the world around me. The whole idea behind this company was that my friend and I were creative people and we would combine our collective creativities to make one heaping helping of success.

Yet, the more I focused on the business and making it profitable, the less I found myself able to create anything worthwhile. Trying to conjure up even the smallest amount of inspiration was like trying to pull a tooth from Great White Shark with my bare hands. The harder I pulled, the more bloody and painful it became till I had severed every last muscle and tendon and no longer had the strength to even grip the damned thing.

From an outsider’s perspective, I am now where so many college students end up after graduation – waiting tables and selling bone marrow on the black market to pay bills, with no definite job prospects and no guaranteed track to success. Then again, if the past few years and this hellride of an economy taught us anything, it’s that there’s no such thing as guaranteed success.
Why then do we wrap achievement like a chain around our necks and anchor it to this Everest-sized mountain we call our future? The more you struggle to pull that massive mount along, the tighter your chain will squeeze till it suffocates the very life out of you.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t strive to attain our goals. I mean, that’s why we’re in college, right? Study hard and work hard but for chrissakes, don’t enslave yourself to some terrible standard of accomplishment that keeps you from everything else in your life.

As for me, I have ambitious, perhaps even lofty plans for the future. For now, I’m as content as a restless mind can be waiting tables and writing verbose ramblings for your student newspaper. Most importantly, I’ve taken that chain of achievement from around my neck and hold it firmly in my hands. I haven’t breathed this easy in months.