I do most of my hardest thinking lying in bed at night. So, I drank too much Irish coffee on the fifth anniversary of 9/11 and I ended up on an uncomfortable mattress, unable to sleep, thinking about what I wanted to do with my life. The following is an edited transcript of what sprung forth from my mind. Perhaps it has some of the more questionable characteristics of my many other late night epiphanies, but most of this stuff has been getting firmed up in my mind over the past few years. Anyway, it has a much more profound effect on my actual behavior when I write these kinds of things down and make them public.
To get started, if you don't know me at all, here's the scoop. I'm 25 and at times feel about as lost as is to be expected at this age. I hate living up to common expectations. I took a year off from teaching/taking Sociology courses at the University of Florida in the Summer of 2006 and spent a year traveling while working on different projects with different people along the way. I'm writing my dissertation on resource sharing initiatives made possible by online social networking systems. My strongest family/personal relationships are all still in Florida, so I came back to take care of them. Anyhow, if you want to know more about me, read more stuff on this site.
One more thing that will help you understand me better is understanding that there are three core concepts that explain my behavior and outlook: Narcissism – Efficiency – Guilt. I'll demonstrate this trinity in context... I want gain status in unconventional ways. I am obsessed with achieving my full potential and helping others achieve theirs... and with the likelihood that I will come up far short on both counts. I want to do things with my life that return the favor for the massive amounts of unnecessary and mostly useless hardship I was lucky enough to avoid. To me, this goes beyond good works. It means shunning money (specifically its accumulation) and power (institutional or political).
I've stopped feeling guilty about being unemployed or underemployed. It's too common a measure of prestige and self-worth. As long as I'm not idle, I'm OK. I don't need to be paid to do work that I value because I would do it anyway. I don't need to have a job in order to demonstrate my importance to society. Moreover, given my extreme social privilege, financial security, and satisfaction with a low consumption lifestyle, others seem to need the jobs I am qualified for much more than myself. I'm pretty happy that I don't need to work to "make a living"; it makes the process of directing my life more interesting and challenging.
I want to do good works through social entrepreneurship - meaning directing my efforts and capital towards interesting projects that I can help produce valuable social outcomes. I've always liked the idea of paying it forward as much as possible. When the money runs out, I will still have strong knowledge, skills, and relationships to call upon. Besides, I think it might be more fun (not to mention romantic) to put myself in a position where I am forced to scrape by on my wits, luck, and the generosity of others. It would be both extremely challenging and unrewarding in the conventional monetary sense, thus giving me the alternative prestige avenue I always wanted.
After many years of experimentation, I have found that I have limited interest and aptitude for learning the kinds of very specific technical skills that most conventional jobs require. I don't much care for rote work of any kind and I consider it both my predilection and my sole justified return on investment to keep myself out of full time tedious production processes. I enjoy doing a bit of both hard manual labor and bureaucratic tasks to balance my existence, but they are not where I am happiest.
I want to work on developing cutting edge ideas with intelligent and interesting people. My gifts lie in idea work. I excel at the process of gathering diverse information, seeing a pattern or future trend emerging out of it, and then working out a rough sketch of what the idea needs to look like in pragmatic terms in order to be realized. I enjoy most the process of manipulating and creating knowledge that helps lift peoples' horizons, all the while informing/debating them about its potential benefits/dangers. I want to speak, write, teach, and consult for those who will benefit most from what I have to say.
How will I accomplish these things? I need to establish a reputation for having an original mind and become more visible. The wider my social network and work/giving experience, the more likely I will find the things I want in life. I need to actualize some good initial ideas that can get my name out there. I think that I can bring myself to work hard/smart enough to bring at least one of my conceptions to fruition. I need to finish my PhD and build an non profit organizational backdrop, because those credentials will give me that extra bit of status I'll need to land higher level projects. I need to move in many circles: media, academic, business, policy, philanthropy, etc. I need to travel to actively look for interesting people and ideas all over the world. I need to stay out of ruts and give up on dead ends faster. I need to take in and put out more high quality information. Most importantly, I need to believe even more firmly in my ability to accomplish all of this.
I want to live a constantly changing and exciting life. I want strangers to visit this site and be able to find out enough about me to feel comfortable with asking me to work with them. I want to develop a deep network of people that I respect, so that when I am amongst those whom I do not, I do not feel I am there because I have to be, but because I want to be. I want to find my tribe (people thinking about the world in similar ways), grow within it, and expand its number and vision. I want to have a lifestyle that resonates with others and challenges them to rethink their own. I want to learn how to create the most fulfilling life experiences possible for myself. This means good friends, good food, good exercise, good challenges, good conversations, good views, good coincidences, good information, good entertainment, and good clarity of mind. I want to be constantly learning more about more. Finally, I want to be happy with what I have and make others feel similarly.
As for my personal life, I want to find good friends, compatriots, and partners – I will keep searching for them all my life. I would like to have many children because I think I have a lot to offer both genetically and as a parent. It is a sad irony that population patterns are such that those who have less than average to offer on both counts generally have higher reproduction rates. I would like to have children with dual citizenship and diverse genetic/cultural backgrounds. I wouldn't mind creating the big extended family I never had. I want to give my children the most useful (not the most expensive) educational experiences possible. I would love them to grow up and eventually work on projects with me and with each other. Hopefully, they could carry my values and visions forward when I am gone. I want to live forever, but if that turns out not to be possible, I'd choose to die either righteously or in a drug induced bliss when I am no longer able to contribute any more to the world and those around me.
