What Do You Do?

I hate that question. Lately when people ask me that question I tell them I’m a “professor of awesome” or a “pornography broker”. I do this for 2 reasons:

1. It’s none of their fucking business how I make my Arby’s monies.

2. I don’t like to be pigeon-holed.

Most of my friends are entering their late twenties now. This is the time period where many people really begin to pull out the yardstick and measure themselves against the accomplishments of their peers. I think this is stupid and shortsighted for a number of reasons, but whatever. Most people (including most of your friends and family) would rather see you fail than outshine them. Nobody wants to be Brad Pitt’s brother, do they?

It reminds me of a story I read by an anthropologist several years ago that goes like this:

An ethnologist was out in the field living with an indigenous tribal level society for a few years and he became great friends with the leader of the tribe. The chief was fascinated with life in the industrialized modern world and wanted to know everything he could. He was particularly interested in airplanes. He loved the idea that man had finally learned how to fly and he wanted badly to see one of these big flying contraptions up close. So, on his last day of living with the people, the ethnologist decided to do something special for the chief. He invited the chief to go up for a ride in the little twin engine turbo prop that was going to come pick him up.

The chief was excited and immediately started gathering large, basketball sized rocks from around the village to take up with him. The ethnologist was confused and asked the chief why he was doing this.

“So I can drop them on the neighboring tribe, of course.”

Scams and Scammers

The biggest swindle of the past 30 years wasn’t sub-prime lending, nor was it carried out by Bernie Madoff or Dennis Yu. The biggest fleecing of the American people has been carried out by administrators of higher education. Why do I say this?

Because college degrees are mostly worthless.

College was expected for most of us. Go to school, get the degree and land a good job–that’s the way it worked in our parents’ day.  Besides, in the past, most companies would only promote those with college degrees to management level positions. Combine this with the fact that blue collar and trade professions are viewed with a degree of disdain by many Americans. You never see reality shows titled, Who Wants To Marry A Plumber? Ironically, this means that more and more of us become dependent on blue collar workers to do things that we are incapable of doing ourselves. Think about this the next time you take your car in to get the oil changed.

I don’t blame our parents because they wanted us to have a better shot than they did.  The ones I’d like to hang are the worthless fucks who took our money knowing full well that we were screwed. The assholes who said you needed to learn a second language, take calculus and pay 60K (or whatever it was) so you could end up scooping ice cream at Marble Slab.

What’s that you say? You just need to be more creative with your resume? Use terms like: Outside of the box thinker. Excellent researcher. Goal-oriented. Excellent communication skills.

Congratulations. If you were hired because you put this on your resume it’s because the hiring manager knew the corporate kool-aid would go down that much easier.

But what about the more quantifiable skills you could have picked up at school? If you studied something quantifiable, then you will probably be able to afford dinner this Christmas, so this blog isn’t aimed at you. In fact, you are probably too busy busting your ass to update your twitter, surf teh Googles or update your Facebook status.

It horrified me when I learned that there was no such thing as escaping the real world through academia any longer. If you know me then you know that I hate the fucking real world. In fact, I can’t go inside Home Depots without taking a Xanax. Academia has always been the perfect place for burnouts, dilettantes and dreamers. Not no mo. I don’t care what the University of Phoenix tries to tell me.

FACT: The higher the barrier to entry is to your profession, the safer you are. For now. The less people out there that are able to do what you do, the better position you are in to leverage your talents for economic gain. However,  just because your market isn’t saturated now, doesn’t mean it won’t be five years from now.

Zeitgeist

We have moved beyond the hyperreal postmodern era of Madonna, Arnold and Diet Coke.

This new zeitgeist is more unforgiving and evolving faster than any other has. Things are changing exponentially now and only those with the most resources and intellectual capital are able to survive. For the rest of us, it seems as though the second you have a foothold, the whole thing begins to crumble beneath your feet. Most of us have processed 10,000x the information of all of the previous generations combined, and yet we are collectively less intelligent and less able to adapt than any of them. Art has always been a good cultural barometer and art is essentially dead in this country, amirite?

“God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables — slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won’t. We’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off”

I think this quote from Fight Club (again with the Brad Pitt) sums things up pretty well. The Dali Llama has been quoted as saying the self-loathing in America is astounding.

What does all of this mean? I don’t know. I’ve always operated under the assumption that humans were never intended to evolve beyond simple hunter-gatherer societies and all of the dissatisfaction that we experience is a symptom of a cultural disease. We are moving as a country and a people towards some kind of shared hyperreality that I believe will collapse on itself eventually. New Media has destroyed our attention spans and distracted us long enough for the snake oil salesmen to set up shop.

The sad truth is that most of the world doesn’t give a ratfuck until you sign on the dotted line. If you don’t believe me, go tell your preacher that you’ve decided you don’t believe in tithing any longer. Come back and tell me what he says.

Sartre’s  put it perfectly in No Exit when he said that “Hell is other people”. The world/our country is made up of unintelligent and incompetent people who need to be handheld and force-fed to survive. This country is not designed to support the kind of population density that we will see in the beginning of this century. Make sure you have your worst-case scenario kit handy.

Conclusio

Things are pretty fucked up these days and people are being forced to ask themselves some very difficult questions. What I’d like to know is this: Where do you derive YOUR meaning from these days? What do you do it all for?

Is it for your kids–so they can go to college and get a degree and have a better shot than you did?

Or are you secretly banking on one day being able to fly over the neighboring tribe dropping rocks?