Can't sleep, clowns will eat me

[andrewducker]

Well, actually, can't sleep, slept in until midday and haven't moved more than 50 feet all day.

So, I've been chatting to green_amber about depression and direction and life. And I'd been chatting to Sana earlier about the same thing. And eventually something managed to click, even in my disease-fogged brain:

At some point in our lives we stop drifting onwards in a perpetual daze and ask "Where am I going?" Some people first do that between 30 and 50, at which point it's probably a mid-life crisis. Some people do it at 70, at which point it's a second lease of life, and some people do it at 16, at which point it's a bit bloody annoying because it can derail the nice simple bits you're _supposed_ to drift through.

Sana, for instance, did it during her first year at uni, suddenly realising that the degree she'd been 'going to do' for so long wasn't actually what she wanted at all. I did it just a little later than that, wondering why I'd done a degree. Erin's doing it now, trying to find an answer that'll make it all worthwhile.

When I said to Lilian that Sana wanted to find the _right thing_ before going back to Uni, she laughed at me (or would have done, if we hadn't been on MSN at the time) and said:

Uni is not a straight path to what you do.
It's barely the start.
Is she any more likely to find out what she wants to do in a crap job in Edinburgh?

Which reminded me of something that purelyskindeep once said - you don't need to necessarily be moving in the 'right' direction, so long as you keep moving from time to time. If you keep trying new things eventually you'll find one you want to do. I was lucky, I found mine back in 1982 when my parents bought a BBC model B Microcomputer. but it wasn't a plan, it was just plain dumb luck that I found something I loved, it brought me into an industry that happened to be something that pays fairly well and that I happened to be good at it.

Somewhere out there is something you want to do. You can sit there for ever, trying to work it out and never be sure what that thing is. Or you can get out there and try things until you find it.

In the meantime - when did you first ask the question "Where am I going?"

Comments

[sarcaustik.livejournal.com]

you don't need to necessarily be moving in the 'right' direction, so long as you keep moving from time to time.

I think I'll adopt this as my personal motto for this, the year I turn thirty.

As for when I first asked "Where am I going?" however pretentious this sounds I don't think I've ever not felt inclined to wonder. I was one of those annoying people at school who managed to be academically successful at everything with minimal effort, so I never really had a clear path and often did things (like A-levels and going to university) more because they were expected of me than out of a sense of self-motivation.

[andrewducker]

often did things (like A-levels and going to university) more because they were expected of me than out of a sense of self-motivation

Well me too. That was kinda the point - at some point I stopped doing things because they were 'what I was always going to do' (like university) and wondered why the hell I was doing them.

[sarcaustik.livejournal.com]

Depressingly I don't think I've ever done anything with a real sense of purpose, except trying to give my daughter a good life, and getting pregnant wasn't exactly on my agenda.

[green-amber.livejournal.com]

I never had anything I wanted to "be." I remeber looking up history in the careers library and discovering I could be a historian, or a history teacher.

I junked history.

It is the merest good chance I have ended up in a job I seem to be good at and on a good day find pretty fulfilling.

Take a chance on me..

[rainstorm.livejournal.com]

...which is why I've pretty much decided I am going to apply to dumfries college to do an hnc in art and design.

if i get in (hopefully i will) and get funding (not so sure about this) i will be starting sometime this autumn.

[green-amber.livejournal.com]

Well, my conclusion was that if anything was the meaning of the life it was children so you got a head start :-)

[sarcaustik.livejournal.com]

I accidentally ended up in a fulfilling job that paid well and I was good at once - I got made redundant.

Perhaps if my new degree goes well I will aspire to academia. "Some" of the academics I know seem to have got Real-World Avoidance down to a fine art. ;-)

[sarcaustik.livejournal.com]

*Nods* I would never have said so three years ago but I would be forced to admit now that I agree.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

Is she any more likely to find out what she wants to do in a crap job in Edinburgh?

Maybe. I did.

It's one of Life's Little Ironies that if I had done just that bit better in my exams just after my 18th birthday, I'd have gone to Southampton Uni straight from school and done a B.Sc. in Psychology.



I am now certain that this would have been absolutely the wrong thing for me to do. Wrong subject, wrong uni, wrong reason for wanting to go to Southampton, and I don't think it works out well for students to go directly from school to university anyway: the difference between me (the very youngest of the "mature students" at Napier) and the kids who had come directly from school and clearly in their heads were still there, was - vast.


In the meantime - when did you first ask the question "Where am I going?"

Fourteen? Twelve? Somewhen about that sort of age. Certainly well before I was sixteen. Of course, it's not the sort of question you can stop asking for very long once it's occurred to you to ask it of yourself.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

I don't remember. Probably when I came to uni and had no idea how to talk to people, make friends, hold a conversation or do anything really. Longest I'd been away from home before was a week, on a school trip. Now I was 350 miles away, ish.

Luckily in 2001, I was able to go "Oh wait, here I am."

And then go on changing from there.

[nickys.livejournal.com]

> In the meantime - when did you first ask the question "Where am I going?"

I remember having intense philosophical discussions about the meaning of life in year one at primary school, and by age seven I'd figured out that everybody including me was going to die, and I suffered huge existential dread over it.
I recall lots of sleepless nights trying to negotiate some sort of a fairer system with God, but he never responded to suggestions such as that only bad people should die, or that only really old people should die, so I gave up on religion.

I suppose my family did give me a fairly clear idea of what their opinion on the meaning of life was - to be quietly decent and kind and to try to make the world just a little bit better in the process. Classic wooly liberals, I guess.
My Dad had more ambitious ideas than the rest - he wanted to start a revolution and change the world, but the strain of that ambition was too much, and he crashed and burned.

[rainstorm.livejournal.com]

Oh, and...

My course was pretty much a spur of the moment decision. I chose it because it sounded alright, and I didn't know what I wanted at all. It was always a gamble. Yes, I'm that dumb.

My job is a filler, a time for me to think while away from home. Both jobs I've had have given me the confidence to say "this is not my life!" I usually need a spur into doing stuff. Hating my job gives me the kick up the backside I need.

Guy talks nonsense sometimes*, but he is right this time: going is better than not going, even if you don't know _where_ you're going.

I don't know what the right thing is, but suddenly I feel better. Just the action of filling in an application form and having the intention of actually posting it has made me stop feeling so bloody miserable.

I think shit jobs have a place in the world: to inspire intelligent people to do something better and more worthwhile.


* i have to say this, it's in my contract.

Laf

[green-amber.livejournal.com]

I'm sitting here typing away at this mind-rotting family law thing I have to do by Friday cos I couldn't face starting it any earlier when i *wouldn't * have had to kill myself to get it done in time..

TBH tho it's been pretty good to me, I don't think I'd recommend academe to anyone coming in now - lots of stress, long hours, crap pay, crap management, crap prospects, no jobs, no thanks from anyone, least of all students, govt, parnets etc etc... Nearly all of us seem to have arrived here by acident or because we were too dysfunctional to be good at anything else :-)

[green-amber.livejournal.com]

I think shit jobs have a place in the world: to inspire intelligent people to do something better and more worthwhile

True. My first job, long searched for and sweated over, was in legal /tax publishing in London. It was spectacularly, unbelievably boring. I used to count the minutes till I could fake my next toilet break.

Evenually I ran home with my tail between my legs and realised I had to do something less boring or kill myself. It was a useful experiement really.

I got to the job I'm in now from there by: going back to Strathclyde to do my Diploma in Legal Practice to be a lawyer (which I didn't want to do, but it killed a year and I got fees paid by Brent); getting offered a lectureship while there (which i didn;t want but it gave me something to do next to make beer money); running away from THAT to do a computing MSc because I was bored shitless and guess what, I could get a grant for it (they were encouraging arts students to convert to It in those far off days :-) ; and then getting my lecturship at Edinburgh because again no one in those days had the combo of law and computers I now had and they had just installed a local area network and had No Idea what to do with it...

And I still had no idea what I wanted to do, but about two years later the Internet had just and no more arrived and I was king in the land of the one eyed lawyers.

I now have this really groovy job that everyone thinks is so cool and it's just a long series of weird accidents. You might as well step off the ledge and wish hard..

[kpollock.livejournal.com]

In the meantime - when did you first ask the question "Where am I going?"

I'll spare you my usual desire to take it literally and tell you about the first time I got lost (probably at age 4 or something).

I have never believed (as far as I can recall) that life has any purpose, less still that my particular life has any purpose, and, by implication, direction.

I have had things that I want to do and made plans, short and long range, to get me to whatever the aim for that plan was, but I've never been afraid to chop and change as life inevitably changes around me. I've never thought that any plan, either currently in operation or queued up, is 'the final solution'.

For instance, I am doign this sailing course because we are gettign the boat and I have to bring it back from the Netherlands, and sometime around 2007 we will set out into the great blue (grey, green) yonder, but I have no firm itenerary as of now. When we go, I will know the general outline (i.e. probably round the world eventually) but the detials may change as things happen. Maybe we will find the perfect deserted island and never come back. Maybe we'll be back and settle back down after 2,3,10,20 years. Maybe we'll end up settling down, but in a totally other part of the world. Maybe the metorite/comet/H-bomb will wipe us all out. Who knows?

In the short term, I have no idea whether after the course I will be working in sailing or back to software for a few years. It entirely depends on what comes up at the time.

No plan is perfect, every kind of life has stresses and disasters. Most kinds of life can have joy and happiness too. It's just finding an acceptable balance.

As long as I am not bored, I can deal with most things.

[diffrentcolours]

In the meantime - when did you first ask the question "Where am I going?"

At about the age of 15. I was all fucked up with nowhere to go (© deathboy), and wondering if this was as good as it got. I didn't know what I wanted to do after my A-levels, and was pondering jacking it all in and going to travel the world, maybe settle down with a bar job on a beach in Goa.

Far more interesting is when I first answered the question "Where am I going?". After graduation, I went through one job after another, with no real aim other than to continue improving my skillset and hence my employability and salary. It wasn't until about 18 months to two years ago that I realised that I wanted to do something to make a difference, that I wanted to use my skills for something bigger than mere personal gain. I'm not sure I'm doing that well at achieving my aim (other than working for a charidee), but at least I have an aim.

I might say that it's also not necessary to be moving in the "right" direction, so long as you know what the "right" direction is...

[diffrentcolours]

Good lord no. You're implying that people who exist to spawn fucked-up brats to replace themselves have some sense of meaningful purpose and existence, which is Just Plain Wrong.

[sylphigirl.livejournal.com]

i remember the exact moment i realised that people died and that logically this meant my father would die, when i was seven. it was like a black hoel of terror opening up in my stomach. it took about another year before i realised this meant i was going to die and that started a more existential set of worries about what i was going to do with this suddenly tiny finite and yet boundless amount of time and experience i had in front of me. which has continued more or less ever since.

[sylphigirl.livejournal.com]

see mainly my reply to nickys comment...but generally from about seven. i ran through a number of ambitions from seven to eleven, including astronaut, gymnast, writer, pilot, animator, settling for the longest on barrister. have never really got an answer, which i think is a good thing.

[nickys.livejournal.com]

> a black hole of terror opening up in my stomach

Yes, that's how it was.

The feeling comes back once in a while, usually at the dead of night, although I haven't had it for years now, probably not since I was 21 or so.

[green-amber.livejournal.com]

Nope it's right. You may not like it, but that's a different issue. Sense of meaningful purpose is subjective; the single mother in Westerhailes with a baby may have it, you with all your brains etc may not. It's not an objective assessment.

[diffrentcolours]

That's not quite what you implied earlier when you said "if anything was the meaning of the life it was children".

Not everybody who is a parent has a sense of meaningful purpose, and not everybody who has a sense of meaningful purpose is a parent.

[stormie.livejournal.com]

just had to add...to what you and guy said..yes you should keep moving and trying new things until you find something suitable. sadly, however, unless you are super rich this can be a bit difficult. i've changed course three times, i've changed job many times and i've moved flat more times than i can remember. all these things..especially the course changes cost a lot of money. if i had all the money i wanted then finding out what i want to do could possibly be a bit easier. already only in my first year of the course i'm in i'm experiencing financial difficulty due to the lovely SAAS only paying the last year of my degree cause they assume my parents give me money and they know i've already been to edinburgh uni.

[taromazzy.livejournal.com]

Don't most people reflect on and re-assess their lives regularly?

What I do now won't be what I'll do in a decade - I dont expect it to. Thats part of the fun.

[trav28.livejournal.com]

I get the "fear" everyday - at some point in the future I hope to have a "career" instead of a "job".