Catch - 25: feeling stuck in an uncertain world

For those of us in our mid-to-late 20s and 30s, the world is vastly different from the one we became adults in. We chose majors and planned our lives around a status quo that simply doesn’t exist anymore. The information revolution, if you can even call it a revolution, has upended everything. Jobs are disappearing at a rapid rate, while the requirements for the ones left are shifting by the day. Even those who thought they were safe with computer science degrees are facing threats from AI. What used to take decades now can happen within months. Companies are constantly reorganizing to keep up with technology and the pressure of shareholders’ expectations. If you’re not part of the capital class, you’re at the mercy of viral market trends and the whims of algorithms. At any moment one of the president’s coke-addled sons could whisper something in his ear and your industry could disappear overnight. (Just look at the foreign aid sector right now.) You might get laid off but rehired because it looks better on a spreadsheet. All of this and the uncertainty it brings can be suffocating, especially when so many of us are at a crossroads trying to figure out what to do with our lives. 

There’s always been some underlying sense of dissatisfaction and restlessness with the state of things, I mean how many movies or books have there been about quarterlife and midlife crises? Something has radically shifted though, nearly everyone I talk to is close to some sort of breaking point. There’s this collective urge to follow curiosity and explore things that matter because our careers and lives don’t feel real anymore. Living and working all day in artificial systems is driving people crazy. The world we’ve built is increasingly abstract, hypothetical, and superficial. We also wake up to new and existing global crises that are growing exponentially. When you add it all up, it’s the perfect recipe for an existential crisis. It’s like we’re all having this slow-motion near-death experience that’s causing us to wake up to the fact that we want to do something real with our lives. 

Unfortunately, any steps we may want to take to make our lives better or more fulfilling run up against the neverending Catch-22s of living in America. There’s no shortage of careers, degrees, side hustles, and gigs, but nothing feels like a stable enough move to commit to. We want to go back to school but our dream job won’t pay off the debt it takes to get there. Small businesses have no protection against monopolies. Non-profits are competing for a shrinking pool of public funds. Even some hobbies take an unsustainable amount of resources to keep going. There’s also this pervasive numbing caused by the constant flood of information and opinions we see online. We see the infinite routes we could take and what others say we should do, but nothing feels right. We’re scared that if we make the wrong move, we’ll end up permanently behind in an accelerating world. That fear is palpable in a time where we see thousands of families lose their homes to fires caused by climate change, all while billionaires prevent any positive change that would help those families, or any of us for that matter. 

With all this uncertainty, the logical move for many is to stay put. We’re careful not to rock the boat, as we try to make the best out of an increasingly shitty situation. It’s an almost zen approach that borders on nihilistic resignation, where the most you can hope for is a sense that “the world is burning but at least I’m happy.” Not only is it the safest route, but it also feels like the only one left. It’s been a hard year, so many of us kept hoping for the arc of justice to bend a certain way, but instead we got yassified billionaires carving up the country like it’s the 11th century. No matter how much we hate capitalism, there appear to be fewer and fewer options to do anything about it. We all have dreams of what we want our lives to look like, but for far too many reasons those dreams seem incompatible with actually being able to enjoy life. It’s hard to say you’re truly happy if you’re treading water all the time, so why not just go along with the current? 

I’ve been struggling with these ideas lately as I come to terms with how it is I want my life to look. Like everyone else, I’m searching for ways to eke out fulfillment in this live-streamed hellscape. Over the past year, I’ve doubled down on that search and I finally have an opportunity to move my life in a direction aligned with who I want to be. The issue is that with everything going on in the world there’s a lot of risk involved. I’ve been clamoring for change for years, but all of these external pressures make it feel like the only move is to play it safe and stay on my current route. Staring down the barrel of the countless Catch-22s is what makes “the world is burning but at least I’m happy” such an appealing idea. There’s a lot to be said about building this “small” life filled with personal meaning where we just do what we can. I’m not even someone who wants to have the quality of my life determined by how much I “achieved”, so why wouldn’t I just keep focusing on the small stuff? Yet, the more I sat with that idea, something didn’t quite feel right about it. 

When I first heard about the opportunity, I slipped into a form of self-gaslighting about how stable my current life is, trying to come up with every reason not to move forward, including all those I outlined before. Life though kept showing me how nearsighted that was. Time after time, something new would happen that would rock the boat. No matter how hard we try, nothing is truly stable. Life is change. You can either initiate that change or life can. I reference music a lot in my writing because I think lyrics can have a profound impact on our lives. I always go back to this verse from Mac Miller, “You’ve got to jump in to swim”. Happiness and personal meaning aren’t built on avoiding consequences. How you create a meaningful life is seeking out what fills you up or moves you closer to who you want to be. That is the “small life”, making choices and interacting with the world based on who you are. For some people, it’s about what they do forty hours a week, and for others, it’s what they can do with the resources they get from those forty hours. What’s important though is that we keep making steps forward for us and the people we care about. Things may not always work out, but trying is an expression of you. No matter how frightening it is to fall down in this world, not taking the chance to step forward is a worse fate. 

I know a lot is going on right now. It sucks that any choice we make has an untold number of variables because insecure and power-hungry men keep grasping for more. Some of us don’t have the luxury of chasing dreams or making big steps. Shelter would be enough for far too many people. For those of us who do have opportunities though, I think we have to take them. Not just for ourselves but for those who can’t. Making a choice despite everything going on is a form of resistance. We’re choosing humanity over a system that was never concerned about any of us in the first place. People like Elon Musk will never know what fulfillment feels like, that’s why his “choice” is to loot government infrastructure with an army of incels, instead of using his literal billions of dollars to make the world a better place or spend time with his family. A life based on authentic fulfillment and connection is how you find happiness in a burning world. Sometimes that means taking risks, sometimes it doesn’t. There’s going to be uncertainty. There’s going to be consequences. That’s life. It’s up to us to choose how we want to live. Even if that decision is to stay put and focus on all the small things, it’s still a decision. If we let the broligarchs take that from us, then we let them take life from us. So whatever you decide, just make it your own.