Regarding how I want to live my life, I keep changing my mind, but am no longer ashamed of this. I encourage myself not to avert my eyes when people shake their heads as if I’m telling them a joke of which they’ve already guessed the punchline. Everyone’s motivations will be different, but my last blog entry may give you an indication of mine. Having spent more than ten years working to pay off a student loan, and with no end in sight to money making, I am burnt out and want to escape a life in which I continue to feel trapped by the seemingly obligatory nature of “earning a living”…can’t just live the life you were born into, you must earn the right to do so.
Melanie Poole’s Ted Talk entitled, There’s No Such Thing As A Good Job put best into words much of what I have come to know about “living to work” but still, like everything else I have found, only addresses why I am in the muck, offering no practical solutions for exiting immediately (without then wandering homeless or resorting to identity theft). She says there needs to be a movement, cooperative ownership of the means of production by workers, and mentions Universal Basic Income and a fundamentally important change in values. Until emancipation, how do I face willingly participating as a slave? What is the cost of buying my freedom? Or do I flee?
Mental illness won’t break me out (although I suspect I get closer everyday) and suicide stopped being a consideration after determining I was my own God and life is all I have to work with. My every impulse is to run off to the places where time slows to a series of ‘nows’…to the ‘Forever Nows’! Places in which I more easily live my present without worrying about future commitments because my day to day life is no longer about striving to pay someone to stay under their roof and eat their food.
The Fantasy
As a student, I’d pass these places when I traveled by bus from one city to the next, through rural Brazil. A one-room crooked house, grey from weathering, a horse half-way hidden in lush grass behind a live tree-fence, and, upon a hill, an open-umbrella-shaped tree, broad and low to the ground, for shade. There I could read, write, breathe without feeling my heart like a fist against an unopening door; there I could sleep without guilt from the twisting together of a definition of productivity and self-worth, overworked guilt that comes from never earning the right to rest.
I am Ready, Take Me
Of course, the fantasy, as imagined above, excludes the reality of labour intensive farming and mosquitoes, but, on vacation, which feels like how life should always be, I’ve had experiences staying in similarly remote places. In my recent state of mind, I gladly accept freedom with inconvenience over another useless staff meeting I feel obligated to attend. Absences will only indicate dissatisfaction, better hidden to maintain the illusion of the ‘happy slave’ and, with it, a source of income.
Left alone to grow my own vegetables; rearing livestock and dogs to keep me company (neither for food); with friends on rotation, visiting to bring wine, spend time skinny-dipping in the lake and sleeping under the stars—in this way, my satisfaction would be complete. I say “satisfaction” because ‘happiness’ is said to be something you decide upon, despite external circumstances. My base happiness is more like a cultivated state of distrust regarding what life is about to send my way. I will indulge joy when I’ve calculated that it is safe to do so…usually, in mental states altered by alcohol.
Where the risk of feeling obligated to work for others has been reduced, there too, I have gotten a glimpse of joy. Where I am free to choose; it is in these quiet and remote places I wish to reside.
Fantasy Homes
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