Letter five: I sold my happiness for money and learned to trust myself
By: Michael Kazarnowicz
Tags: Life Lessons, Work, Career Paths, Values, Living Well

Letter five: I sold my happiness for money and learned to trust myself

Lessons from a career without a high-school diploma

Dear Past-Micke,

I know that you’re dying to ask me about career. It’s one of the questions that you’re struggling a lot with. Career is so central to who we are. I’m an author, I’m unemployed, I’m a personal trainer, I’m a shoe salesman — how a person answers “so what do you do for work?” changes our perception of them. We identify so much with our job titles that we rarely answer that question with what we actually do, instead we say who we are. We repeat it so much that we forget who we really are.

Career is central to the trajectories of our lives. To you that trajectory is so unclear that it’s hard for you to dream of what you’ll be doing two years from now, let alone five. Most of your peers are attending this university or that, having made that choice that every twenty-year old is expected to have made at that point: what you want to be when you grow up. Nothing seems interesting enough to warrant spending a lifetime on it. That means you don’t have any concrete reason to get that high school diploma you lack, having dropped out of the last year. You don’t like to talk about it, partly because of the stigma and shame of being a high school dropout, partly because it inevitably leads to the question “why?”. Since you don’t know what career you’re aiming for, that question doesn’t have a clear-cut answer, no clear-cut defense, no silver bullet to justify a choice so irrational. And yet, I know it doesn’t seem irrational to you. There’s no clear-cut answer because there are many reasons, each resting on a complex network of decisions and events, each by itself not nearly good enough to justify the sin of dropping out of high school.

There was the struggle of coming to terms with your sexual identity, to come out to yourself and others. The disillusion brought on by the school system failing to to make sense not only of what you’re learning — you were always fine with that, trusted the teachers to teach you the right things— but why you should learn it. You understood the need for basic math, but not for the need to calculate derivatives. Every subject seemed so disconnected from the others as well as from the practical world. Take chemistry and physics for example, you know that both involve atoms but school built few bridges between them for you. The first time you’ll fully realize how it’s all connected is when you watch “Cosmos” with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, but that will be in nineteen years, almost a lifetime in the future from your perspective. If you only learn stuff to get good grades, what’s the point of it?

But high school did point you in the right direction, even if it still is unclear to you. This is where your first became aware of the internet, the first thing that seemed to be interesting from a career perspective. I don’t think many high schools in Sweden had computers connected to the internet in those early days, but your school did. A computer in the library caught your eye. It had a chat page open in a Mosaic browser window. Seeing real time communication in action like that lessened the gap between reality and movies like “Hackers” and “Johnny Mnemonic” (I’m sad to report that neither has aged very well). Shortly thereafter, you went to the newly opened internet cafe in town. Being the gamer you are, you quickly discovered Multi-User Dungeons, or MUDs. They may have been text-based, but it was an immense world where you could interact with both human and computer controlled characters. In 2004, Blizzard will release a graphic version of MUDs called World of Warcraft, but in 1996 you got hooked on a newly started MUD called “The Shadow Realms”. It became the perfect escape from the problems of your own world. It offered a universe where you could be someone else. In the meat-world you were a confused, gay teenager. In the Shadow Realms you were Ethan (what you lacked in imagination, you made up in crush on Ethan Hawke), the mightiest mortal sorcerer in that universe. I remember you checking your stats after a year: you had spent more than 1800 hours in the game. That would have cost a fortune at the internet cafe, but lucky for you, you spent so much time there that they hired you as an internet guide. In those early days, people came in to the internet cafe having heard about the internet, curious to try it, but most had no idea how it worked or what you could do. Your job was to get them started. It doesn’t seem much to you now, but twenty years later, when the internet is as integrated in our lives as electricity, it’s kind of old-school cool to have been an internet guide. The decision to drop out of high school doesn’t seem irrational to you. Even though you had no idea what the next step would be, what a career involving the internet could be, dropping out to work as an internet guide seemed like a reasonable choice.

There, you learned things that built the next step in your career. When you don’t know which direction you’re heading, taking one step at a time is the only way of moving forward. It will make for an interesting path, with fourteen full-time employments and two periods of self-employment in twenty years. From internet guide to support technician to programmer to team leader to project manager to personal trainer, back to project manager, to social media manager to digital strategist to head of innovation … each step will take you in a slightly different direction. Even if most adjoining steps seem related, together they will paint a motley pattern that will confuse both you and potential employers. When you’re navigating chaos, all you can do is navigate the current moment as best you can, and hope that some sort of pattern, something that makes sense of the chaos, eventually emerges.

The pattern I see, twenty years later, is you intuitively applying design thinking on your life. Your peers are busy pursuing specific career paths, you don’t even have a map of possible paths to take. When you don’t have an inkling about what you want to devote your career to, trying things out is a good way forward. With each job, you’ll learn skills and gain experience that will enable you to move to the next as soon as you realize that “no, this is not what I want to spend my life doing”. Luck and timing will be as important as skills, if not more so. But all the skills you’ll learn and all the experience you’ll gain have nothing on what you’ll learn about the value of time.

In 2007, you’ll start a rather well-paying job, and your first day you’ll find out that the other new recruit, who was supposed to be a project manager, quit before he started. They’ll ask you to fill in, as they’ll have more need of project managers until a new one is recruited, and you’ll reluctantly agree — even though you specifically said during the recruitment process that although you come from a position as project manager, you don’t want to be one anymore. One thing leads to another, and you’ll end up spending months in a position that requires you to be in place 40 hours a week, but you’ll only be busy for 15–20 of those hours. Even though the client will be happy with you, you will not be happy there. You won’t be able to shake off the guilt of not working hard enough for your salary. The job is okay, at best, but you’ll feel like you’re living for the weekends. Combined with rather dull offices, it will slowly wear you down. So slowly that you won’t notice the slip into dullness until Christmas break. On the morning of New Year’s Eve, you’ll be helping your friend Wille to prepare a New Year’s Party and you’ll talk about how happy you feel, as if color had returned to your life. That’s when you’ll realize that it’s the time off work, and having spent that time with family and friends, that had revived you from a slow slide into depression.

You’ll realize that the equation is simple: if you spend your work life living for the weekends, spend five days every week longing for the other two, and one of those two dreading the coming five — then you’ll spend 85.7% of your life waiting to live.

After Christmas break, you’ll ask your manager to be moved to your originally agreed-upon role. He’ll be sympathetic, but he will explain that they can’t move you from the client — a couple incidents over the year had made the client nervous, and they couldn’t rock the boat by removing a well-liked project manager. You’ll see it from his perspective, and it will make perfect sense. That’s exactly what you’d have said in his place. If you agreed, the client would get what they want, your employer would get what they want, and you’d get paid. But you’ll realize that you won’t get what you want, and you’ll give your month’s notice right there and then. You’ll give it knowing perfectly well that you have no job lined up, no savings to speak of, and bills to pay. But you’ll think that you will make do, you always had and this wouldn’t be any different. It’ll be like that first skydive — terrifying and liberating at the same time, but you’d rather live now than wait for the weekend, the vacation, the retirement.

That will be an important lesson about the value of time, and the first time you’ll explicitly trust your capability in your professional life. It’ll happen about six months after the Sitges story I wrote about in a previous letter, which is the first time you’ll trust your capability in your romantic life. When you trust your future self, and your future self delivers, self-worth grows. It’s during that period you’ll realize that only you are responsible for your happiness, and when you’ll lose all your superstitions and become a true atheist.

Trusting your future self will pay off. You’ll soon get a job at Hyper Island, where you will learn so much about yourself, like that you’re an introvert, how to lead yourself and others through change, how to give and take feedback, and how to own your mistakes without feeling completely worthless. You’ll learn that being considerate of other people’s feelings and taking responsibility for them are two different things. That job will be such a defining period in your life with so many insights, more than rewarding the risk of quitting without a plan.

You’ll become bold, trusting yourself and your gut feeling. When you do it’ll pay off, when you don’t you’ll curse yourself. It’s a gut feeling that will make you buy a ticket to Cleveland, which till lead to an amazing relationship and a period living in New York. As you prepare the move to New York, you’ll get rid of almost everything you own. You’ll only have the things in the two suitcases you bring over, and a few boxes you’ll save at mom’s house. At about the same time you’ll read an article in New York Times, titled “Living with less”. That article will plant a seed in your mind, a seed that will grow as you realize you could have gotten by perfectly with just one suitcase. Sure, the second has a lot of things that could be good just in case, but it won’t be worth the cost of lugging it around. After reading an article how experiences make you happier than things, you and Mike will make eachother a promise: not to buy gifts for birthdays and Christmas; to spend the money on experiences instead. (I admit that we both have cheated on occasion, but it’s one of the best decisions we’ve made.)

Life in New York will be hectic. Seeing people stuck in the rat race, competing over who’s busiest and therefore most important, measuring the importance in money while losing sight of true wealth, will make you realize it’s a city you love to visit, but hate to live in. Fortunately, Mike will feel the same, and you’ll decide to move back to Scandinavia. As you come back and pick up those three or four boxes where you’ve saved those few items you deemed important enough to store, you’ll realize that there’s only one item in there with any real value: a box of memories and photographs. The rest? Apart from a kitschy lamp depicting a UFO abducting a cow, I can’t remember a single thing of it. You’ll save that lamp a couple years, confusing the fact that you saved it with importance.