the existential crisis of existential crises
I do not dream of labor
The question no child between the ages of 4 and 18 can escape:
what do you want to be when you grow up?
For me, the answer to this question was constantly in flux. Truthfully, it still is.
A paleontologist, a fashion designer, a broadcast journalist, a sports marketing executive, a pastry chef, a teacher, a personal trainer…
Everything I’ve ever declared as my desired profession has been tainted to some degree by what I thought other people expected of me. What I should want to do. What would put everyone else at ease.
My career trajectory has had more eras than a Taylor Swift concert. It started in college as I changed schools and majors nearly every semester, and that pattern continued well into adulthood, never staying anywhere too long. I can’t help but feel pangs of jealousy for those people who wanted to be veterinarians when they were six… and then became veterinarians. The consistency, self-assuredness, and stability of that path is enviable, to say the least.
For every stranger who asks me what I do for work, I get a twinge of embarrassment—what do I say? How do I explain what I do? Which job do I pick? I find myself stammering to over-explain myself, needing to assure them that, yes, I have three jobs but…no, you have to understand, it all makes sense, I’m not a loser, things are happening, I swear.
I’ve always wondered what’s wrong with me. Everyone around me seems to be content with picking a career path and sticking to it, or at least staying at the same job for any meaningful amount of time.
But lately, those feelings of jealousy and embarrassment have dissipated as I’ve gotten to know myself better. There’s something in me that yearns for something more. Something deeper.
I do not dream of labor.
And I don’t know that anyone being 100% honest with themselves does.
At least not in the modern sense.
Truthfully, I hate that we live in a culture where asking people how they make money is the primary way we try to get to know a person. The least interesting thing about me, and I would venture to guess, anyone, is how we make money.
If you’ve read pretty much anything I’ve ever written, then you know I have a slight obsession with the human condition. How, as a whole, humanity isn’t doing so hot. We’re as sick as we’ve ever been, both mentally and physically, and every attempted intervention seems to just make things worse.
It’s clear to me that our problems aren’t due to a lack of pharmaceuticals or gyms or fitness trackers—all of these are just band-aids for the fact that we’re not living the way we’re intended to.
So many things feel like busy work—made-up jobs constructed seemingly out of thin air with the sole goal of making someone (probably not you) a bunch of money. Most jobs consist of arbitrary idle tasks that are completely void of meaning or purpose. So many of us spend our time plopped behind a computer screen under fluorescent lights tip-tapping away on keyboards with the immense pressure on our shoulders doing… what? Something that the world would be totally fine (maybe even better off) without.
So much of my journal lately has been me lamenting the fact that I have to spend my days parked in front of a computer while there’s so much beautiful life to live and rich experiences to have outside my front door. I squirm as I sit down in front of my laptop to spend my days doing what is ultimately busy work in the grand scheme of things—work that fulfills someone else’s dreams and lines someone else’s pockets, but not my own. My daily routine has come to make me deeply, viscerally uncomfortable.
I guess the good thing is there are more options than ever as far as how we can make money. We can examine our values, strengths, gifts, talents, interests, human design, enneagram, and rising signs and figure out what it is we’d like to do and how to do it.
But most of the options at our disposal are utterly meaningless.
So, it’s also a bad thing.
On the flip side, jobs that are important and meaningful—makers, builders, healers, teachers, providers, protectors—are undervalued, being choked out by bureaucracy and the allure of all the other, more sexy options at our fingertips.
I feel this in my own life. My head is dizzy with all of the possible lives I could live. It’s a daily whiplash of potentialities. A million different scenarios are constantly swirling around me like the Gravitron at a county fair, and I’m stuck in the middle, paralyzed, unable to commit to one for fear of losing another. So instead, I do nothing, drowning in options, craving constraints.
Sometimes I think it would be easier to live in a simpler time, one without money, where my job was just to survive. But you’d be dead by 30 I can hear some insufferable troll say, refusing to get my point. In my fictional world we have modern medicine, ok?? But instead of trading our time for a fictional thing (even more so now that money is digital) that we all arbitrarily agree has some value so we can buy things that we think will make us happy but ultimately will just leave us even more empty, we spend our time contributing to the wellbeing of the group. We hunt and farm and prepare meals and keep each other safe and care for others when they’re sick or injured and care for children.
And before you dismiss me as a loon and accuse me of idealizing the past, some cultures still exist today that live a version of this life. And they aren’t suffering in the same way we are in the Western world: Hunter-gather cultures like the Hadza, San, and Awá still exist, and they have a much (much) lower prevalence of mental illness.
It begs the question: If modern, Western society is so great and advanced, why are its people so utterly miserable? There’s so much advancement and abundance, how could we possibly be so sick and sad?
Turns out, abundance just for abundance's sake doesn’t really matter. Sure, we have a lot of things, but none of the things that would actually make us content human beings.
If you look at modern hunter-gatherers, they have strong community bonds, built-in social support systems, and a strong cultural identity. They live active lifestyles, not from gyms, pilates classes, or hot girl walks, but from purposeful, physical labor. They are deeply connected to nature and eat a diet rich in diverse natural, local, and seasonal foods. There’s also a lack of modern societal pressures—no bullshit jobs or corporate ladders to climb—everyone plays an important part in making the community run. All of these things are severely lacking in Western cultures, EVEN THOUGH they are the most basic, fundamental ingredients for a thriving human being. In fact, by most accounts, the main sources of distress for modern hunter-gatherer communities is the LITERAL ENCROACHMENT OF WESTERN VALUES that are leading to displacement, loss of traditional lands, deforestation, forced assimilation, and exposure to modern diseases.
Go figure.
Our innate human drive to innovate is destroying our very existence. We are our own undoing.
I feel like I’m on an unrelenting hamster wheel that I couldn’t get off of even if I wanted to. I just want to go around shaking people, yelling what are we doing?!
But no amount of wishful thinking will make it so. So, for now, there’s nothing left to do but to make a decision. To grab an option from the ether and do my best to spin it into a reality that allows me to push the boundaries of the culture I was born into and try as hard as I can to shift it—the slow the hamster wheel just enough so that we can get back to being humans again.
We are human beings, not human doings 🫶 really enjoyed reading this as a fellow multi-hyphenate who is equally exhausted by anyone asking me “what I do” when they first meet me. I don’t want to “do”, dammit, I want to “be”! Thanks for sharing x
Yep. For me, my aspirations were rockstar, astronaut, artist, accountant (a bit rogue, I know…), psychologist, Electronic music producer, chef, baker, copywriter, novelist and philosopher.
One of the big issues I’ve noticed surrounding the existential crisis is the less discussed consequences of social media. We’re able to watch vlogs of people in our dream jobs—who are still unhappy! We’re dwarfed by the insane talent of others, gazing at child prodigies of every kind. And, to top it off, we get a slight dopamine kick by watching others do cool stuff. We trick ourselves into rationalising we don’t have the talent, so we quit and move on.
We also overthink everything.
There’s one beautiful interview I once saw from a member of the Hadza tribe. (My brother and I refer to it all the time.) When asked the meaning of life, the laugh in disbelief. Isn’t it obvious?
“Baboons and honey, of course.”