Home-Free Living

All this talk of jobs and lifestyle has had happiness on my mind lately. What is it that makes one person happy as opposed to another and why? Is there any universality in this?

I think about this often in relation to my “job.” (I use scare-quotes to denote that my job is probably only loosely a job; because it’s through Americorps, it is bureaucratically “service,” and I get paid a “stipend,” not a salary by the government’s definition. Also I don’t like thinking of it as a job because I don’t like it). I am perpetually unhappy at my job. I feel like it is taking away from my real life goals–-not only taking away, but detracting in fact, not building towards anything at all. I would be okay with a job that took up all my time if it allowed me to save money, because that would equate to eventual freedom from work. I would be okay with a job I didn’t like if I worked part-time and had more freedom with my time. I would be okay with a job I liked. This job fulfills none of those requirements.

Anyway, I wonder at how unhappy I am because so many of my co-workers seem pretty contented. I’m kind of the anomaly. Even though we’re working for a nonprofit, I don’t find the bureaucratic busywork in the least bit stimulating. But most people here seem pretty happy, pretty fulfilled. I’ve kept very secret my own feelings towards the state of pure work into which my life’s been funneled.

Admittedly I feel frustrated that others are happy when I am not. Why is this? Why can’t I be happy in something that so many others seem to not only find contenting but downright enjoyable?

On the other side, I also don’t understand why everyone else isn’t miserable like I am. How could anyone enjoy spending their days doing mindless tasks? Don’t they like creating? Don’t they enjoy being creative, drawing, writing, playing music, thinking, reading books, educating themselves, like I do? These are such virtuous things, I think–-why doesn’t everyone feel compelled to devote themselves to them?

These are very earnest and simplistic questions, but they are genuine. I can only see so far into the minds of others. I’ve come to the conclusion that it is just my nature, somehow. I don’t fully understand why I like what I like. But it makes me wonder, too, if I have a lower tolerance for unhappiness than most. I am almost nonfunctional when I’m unhappy. I can’t really control it, even–sometimes it feels like my body is on the verge of collapse after work, like I can’t even remember what makes me happy or why and life starts to feel utterly pointless. Sleep is a temporary remedy.

So what drove me to be like this? Obviously, a lot of it is this drive I feel to be creative, to make things and produce art and show it to the world. Is this a basic human urge? I thought it was. I never considered this to be my future lifestyle, though. I always thought I’d be a scientist when I grew up, and I may have been creative as a youth but not very continuously. Only when I was in high school and I started making music with friends did I discover a kind of untamed, creative person inside. I found that with writing and music I was able to express myself in ways that were more fulfilling than I’d ever imagined.

And then three years ago I started working on this novel, and now it sort of consumes me. I write about it far less than I think about it. It feels like an inevitability in my life now, something that’s been weighing on me. Like I won’t be a full person till I finish it; it’s like an unfinished part of my self. And it’s fucking hard. It’s a lot of work and I want to spend more time on it, but it’s hard to find discipline and with work now it’s near impossible to find the time. But I’m at the point where I simply MUST finish it. It’s consuming me, and I know where it needs to go next; I just need to find the time to do it. And being homeless enables me to expend this time.

But I think I always took it for granted that everyone felt like this. Doesn’t everyone want to express themselves? Doesn’t every human feel happier when they’ve made something good and fun that others appreciate, regardless of the medium? I know that alot of people, in my experience, struggle with validation issues, the “am I good enough” question. I think I stumbled into this weird artist vortex where I was lucky enough to never have that problem–-I just started making music one day, and it was funny and good and people appreciated it immediately despite the shitty recording quality, and I never questioned myself again. Quality of art is completely relative anyway.

But if that isn’t stopping people from making art, what is? Do some people really not enjoy it? Or is this another chocolate-analogy–-a child who has never tasted chocolate does not crave it. Art isn’t really valued in our society. Nor is education, the other activity I like filling my time with. If I wasn’t making art, I would probably be absorbing books as fast as I could and writing about them and critiquing them.

This job has been hard because I feel both undervalued and stifled. No one has ever paid me more than a dollar or two over minimum wage to do anything. I thought this would end after I got my BA, but evidently not. I feel worthless at my job as well; I feel like my incredibly low pay has confirmed my fears that I am of no value to our society. I have to remind myself sometimes that I have a BA in astrophysics and English. I must be valuable to somebody, somewhere. That must mean something.

Living in the Silicon Valley has been hard for the reason that so many people my age are extravagantly wealthy (by my standards–meaning there are lots of people [my age] making $40K or more, or 3 times my income). There are lots of older people with lots of money, too. In fact, the average household income in Palo Alto is $119,000. The value system of the culture I live in seems to be radically different than the one I grew up in. Status symbols are very important to these people, Mercedes, BMWs, Lexuses, expensive restaurants, designer clothes, all things that I was taught were pretty fucking empty, shallow frivolities that are meaningless in the larger scheme of things. But even though I don’t believe it, what am I to do when I am immersed in this culture? It’s hard not feeling like a failure sometimes because I don’t share this culture’s common values.

It’s also frustrating to see some of the people my age, or near my age, who are making this money. Most of them look like absolute assholes. I’m talking money-obsessed, empty, boring, shallow people whose jobs contribute nothing to the greater good of mankind (many of them Stanford grads). Yet by the dictates of our society these people are above me; I may be more educated, more compassionate, more artistic, more intelligent, more full as a human, but by their standards I am a piece of shit because I don’t make any money and I don’t wear designer clothes and I don’t drive an expensive car. I can feel their disdain for me. It leaks, subtly, from their faces and body language as they walk by me on the sidewalk, pass me in their cars, see me using food stamps, pass me on my bike, see that I have facial hair and no tie and cheap clothing. I am aware of being viewed as subaltern, and that feeling penetrates to the very core.

It’s unbelievable to me to think that I live one mile away from Steve Jobs. I have $28 in my bank account right now; he has $4,000,000,000. That’s 8 orders of magnitude. For some reason, I find this absolutely mind-boggling. For $8,000 a year I could pay for some tiny, shitty flat in San Francisco and write my book and be happy. Am I entitled to that money without working for it? Most would say no, at least Americans would. Does Steve Jobs deserve all $4,000,000,000 of his dollars? Did he earn every one of them? Is it fair for him to hoard such a massive sum while people in his own country suffer? While people fifteen blocks away from him have so little? How many hundreds of thousands could see their life improve incrementally with a tiny sum of that money? It seems contrary to the idea of democracy for there to be such massive wealth disparity. Many (again, particularly Americans)* will disagree with me when I say I don’t really believe anyone should be able to have more than 50 million to their name. I don’t think anyone needs that kind of money like millions of people in the country need shelter.

*(The ironic thing is that anyone who disagrees with this almost certainly has less than 50 million to their name. We’re one of the few countries with this weird peasant mentality wherein Americans defend the very rich who spurn and profit off them.)

I guess this is part of the core of my unhappiness–-this frustration at feeling like an outcast, an embarrassment, a freak for not adhering and not achieving their success. I don’t feel particularly like I’m part of any community and I don’t feel like my values are shared. In fact, I find myself starting to question if my way of life, my decision not to value the heartless quest for meaningless wealth, is the right one, simply because no one around me seems to agree with that value system.

So maybe it’s unsurprising that I’m so unhappy in other parts of my life as well. I don’t live in a nice place: the suburbs are wretchedly boring and strip malls and freeways are fucking hideous. I don’t live among nice people; boring, greenwashy yuppies and the shallow, material-obsessed ruling class. I don’t live in a culture I share-–this is hypocritical capitalism in extreme. Finally, I loathe my job. Seems like a ripe time for a change.

I would like to end with a rousing quote from Teddy Roosevelt:

“There is not in the world a more ignoble character than the mere money-getting American, insensitive to every duty, regardless of principle, bent only on amassing a fortune.”

If a Republican president agrees with me, my views can’t really be that radical, can they?