a year without a job job
i spent... three months making lists.
lists of all artifacts i needed to consider before making the decision, i ranked the artifacts, researched and weighted them, ran a fucking monte carlo model with them because i wanted to come up with the best possible decision. i then made more lists of people i needed to talk to, of more models, more artifacts, more possible outcomes.
then, one breezy october afternoon, i woke up from a nap, and suddenly no amount of rational holistic analysis made sense. why the fuck am i forcing this management consultant bullshit down my own throat? i asked myself.
just like that, i quit my job the next day.
funny how we religiously study science and systematic analyses and obsess over predicting the future, yet at the end of the day our decisive moments in life are often just… intuitive.
decision making is art, not science.
on leveling up
there are 2 ways to find motivation & level up in your career:
#1. gamifying your goal - KPIs, OKRs, weekly / daily goals, checklists → short term execution
#2. romanticizing your goal - mission, vision, narrative, meaning → long term strategy
#1 works well when you’re in your early career and everything seems naturally exciting, or when you have a short-term reachable milestone and you just need a little organization of your tasks to get there
#2 works well for long-term goals like going to the moon or changing, idk, some aspect of humanity.
climbing the career ladder can be comforting and fun when you’ve committed to a certain career track. there’s a sense of safety in structured food chains. as in, ‘i’ll follow the rules of the game and know my hard work will for sure pay off and i’m less likely to get fucked over by unknown events’.
if career advancement was a game, it’s a very well designed game: because the rules are clearly defined and the gaps between each level are tastefully consistent. A hedonic treadmill by design.
but wait.
as i grew my career, and ofc, my salary — from 80k straight out of college, to 100k to 130k to 180k to running side hustles, i also saw the socioeconomic class change around me. from seeing what lower middle class’s lives to seeing what the top 1%’s lives are and then all of the sudden it hits me ——
i thought i was climbing a career ladder, only to realize i was, after all, just climbing a socioeconomic class ladder.
all this romanticizing a company’s mission, my own mission, suddenly made no sense.
没有战争的年代，也没有英雄。
可谁不是年少一腔热血呢，谁不想打怪练级当英雄呢。
in other words, i drank the kool-aid too fast, needed some time to throw up.
existential much?
a year without identity (on entity vs. identity)
common conversation opener in the bay area and US in general would be: ‘what’s your name?’ followed by ‘what do you do?’, then people who go on to talk about work.
2021 for me was a year without a job - and by (lack of) association, without an identity.
2021 was also a year of cheap money and expensive social capital.
i thought i was pretty blunt when i introduced myself to new internet friends. i told most people i’m just spending a year clout-chasing (later they told me they thought i was trying to be funny).
surprisingly, without an official identity, i was able to build way more deep, meaningful friendships in 2021 than ever before. without work talk, a conversation can go as shallow as shooting our shit or as deep as sharing and debating philosophical views.
̶'̶w̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶d̶o̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶d̶o̶?̶'̶
‘what do you enjoy doing?’
‘what are you obsessed with?’
‘how do you spend your time?’
thank you, dear internet friends (who are now IRL friends) who tolerate my ambiguity and decided to stick around. 💛
on market hypes, creator economy, web3, and nothing makes sense
a year without 9-5 obligations gave me a lot of time to observe. observe different communities and subcultures. observe the dynamic of new market hypes. who gets to define the value of a piece of art. who gets to define the value of a piece of code. etc.
feburary 2021 was the start of creator economy hype. april 2021 was the start of nft & crypto hype. all the seemingly twitter economists from 2020 are all of the sudden art experts in 2021 and web3 is just playground for tech people and hustlers who weren’t dealt a good hand at the traditional finance table.
everything seems like ordered chaos. but does it really matter?
life didn’t make sense from the beginning of time and somehow it feels comforting that it also doesn’t make any fucking sense now.
it’s like watching a slow-mo replay of all the bizarre legacy systems implemented in 1880.
participating in chaos is like… finding some level of cathartic release in carefully crafted absurdity.
what now?
a good friend asked me, serena, what do you really want?
and i jokingly said, i don’t want a lot of things, really. all i want is to be able to feed myself and shoot nudes.
but the truth isn’t far from the joke.
i want to be a stardust.
to be no one’s hero. to not save the world.
the world doesn’t even need saving.
here’s to another year of just existing is cool enough.
happy new year.💛
— a girl who drank the kool-aid too fast
12.31.2021 10:17pm