Late to the Party

What you can buy with the best two decades of your life

You need to figure out who you are. You need to know how you’re going to fit into society. Let me give you some options: you can flip burgers for three years until you get the store manager position from your fat pignosed franchise operator of a boss, at which point you can shovel his shit for another decade before quitting to go into fashion design and completely failing because why would anyone partner with or buy from you, you’re unknown and old. Then you can collect unemployment for a couple years until you give up all hope and settle for another fast food management job. Your retirement plan will be a smoking habit — you’ll want to die at around age 68, before simply being alive becomes a constant physical pain to you but after you’ve wrung every last drop of boredom, misery and despair out of your empty existence.

Not appealing? Okay, here you go: you can join a construction contracting company at 16, drop out of high school and start sweating in a yellow safety vest. It’s good pay for a kid your age, and you’ll have plenty of room to climb the ladder. You can specialize in whatever you want: wiring, plumbing, roofing, drywall, you name it. Eventually you’ll get a senior position, but seniority here is a lot more appealing than in a Subway. By the time you’re middle aged not only will you be able to afford your own house but you can start your own contracting company. You’ll manage the company finances, send your kids to a decent public school, and end up making not quite as much money as you expected you would. Then you’ll get Parkinson’s at the same time as the housing bubble crashes, your company will fold and your medical expenses will go through the roof. Your wife will pick up a job as a yoga instructor, and you’ll burn every last penny of her income and your savings fighting the deterioration you racked up through decades of heavy labor and toxic vapors. You’ll have discs removed from your neck, you’ll go on massive medications, you’ll try an experimental surgery where they drill into your brain to electrically stimulate the affected parts, and you’ll cling to life for fifteen more years, a slow, inevitable slide down a gravel pit that strips you of everything you have. By the end you’ll be unable to eat without a straw, unable to breathe without swallowing several times first, unable to walk without a person under your arm. You won’t be able to afford hired help, only your aging wife will be there to take care of you as your body fails piece by piece.

Okay, I can see why you’re not eager to take that up, so let’s try again: you can learn to code. Get online, sign up for a coding bootcamp, learn HTML and CSS and get a shiny certification at the end of it, and something to put in your portfolio to boot. Take all this and apply to a web dev job only to find that you need either 8 years of experience or a Malaysian street address to make it in web. Sign up for a Python bootcamp next, and start looking at community colleges. Spend the next three years spinning your wheels through various coding courses and part of a Software Development degree and getting rejected from entry level job after entry level job. Hear over and over how the job market is booming from guys at the top — CEOs and VCs writing LinkedIn thinkpieces about how their hiring rates have doubled YoY. Realize far too late that you should be networking, and start trying to connect with people on LinkedIn. Get your four year degree only to find out you learned everything in it within the first three bootcamps. Finally find a job for Adobe or Accenture or Amazon hunting down bugs in tracking code for 90k a year. Spend the next 20 years losing your eyesight and your sense of self, only finding enjoyment in subreddits about people hating their jobs. Become a middle manager. Drive a 2014 Acura. Get locked out of further promotions because you accidentally pissed off the wrong VP. Fill your life with lateral shifts and self-reinventions, learn meditation to escape from the feeling that nothing you’ve done has meaning, that you’ve never helped a single person, that the only purpose of your current job and indeed your entire career has been to give other corporations something to spend their money on. Move to a different company and experience the same lethargy and doubt, except now you have no friends at work. Realize that your only friends were at work. Make a middling salary and grow estranged from your kids and your wife, who is probably cheating on you with your neighbor because he has a 2015 Acura. Retire one day and do nothing with your life. You are your work, and you hate your work. Exist passively for a decade with nothing to do except irritate your wife into pulling her hair out. When she dies your kids put you in a home, and one of them will come to visit you once every other month.

No? That one really isn’t too bad. But alright, not the most exciting career trajectory, I get it. How about this: you could be a writer. Sounds pretty good, right? You can express yourself through the written word. Hone your voice, forge yourself into an interesting person. Not only will you be invested in your work, other people will want to talk to you, to hear your thoughts, to be near you. You can have a direct impact on the world, you can shape conversations, introduce new ideas, sharpen old ones, and there’s a good chance that one day some bright young person full of potential and genius will come to you and say “you inspired me, thank you.” You’ll be able to take that person under your wing, nurture them and invest in them, and launch them to do even greater things than you yourself. You will become eloquent with your friends, honest and passionate with your wife, admirable to your children. Do it right and you might even become a better person — the kind of man whose family loves him and wants him over, the kind of writer whose colleagues appreciate and whose editors are proud to work with, the kind of person who lifts the spirits of millions of people.

You’ll start out humbly enough, with nothing but your keyboard and library late fees. You’ll write a couple adventure novels in high school, thrilled by your ability to complete a 65k word draft, and use your essay writing proficiency to get into a college with a good liberal arts degree. You’ll sign up for a creative writing course, get in, and immediately realize you’ve made a huge mistake. You’ll hate most of the writing your fellow students do and nearly all of the writing they admire, they for their part won’t like anything you put to the page, and your outsider status will make you feel the Sword of Damocles hanging over you, threatening social ostracization from your peers and professors if you allow yourself to be open or vulnerable. Unwilling to contort your mind to match the field’s values, but also too cowardly to write your true thoughts without subterfuge, anonymity or both, you’ll make substanceless genre fiction for the semester, leave absolutely no impact, and drop the program. You’ll try to get published on your own for a couple years, before giving up on that too, discouraged by the fierce competition for slots and the pervasive monoculture that reacts to your voice like a T cell to an infection. You’ll end up in a career that looks much more like option three while making occasional attempts to self publish, often under pseudonyms just in case the monoculture finds you and can somehow ruin your new career as well. You’ll never fully trust your voice or your thoughts, you’ll constantly wonder how much of someone’s critique is tainted by their subconscious desire to make you fit the monoculture and as a result you’ll become terrible at taking criticism. You’ll sporadically update a blog with tepid cultural analysis, and you’ll write sophomoric short fiction that you never show to anyone except strangers online.

Until you reach that middle management, and build up a nest egg, when suddenly you’ll decide you want to fulfill your lifelong dream and write a book. You didn’t initially want to write a book — you wanted to be a writer — but there’s no sense in splitting hairs now. For the first time in your life you have the opportunity to pursue your dream. You’ll take a hiatus, setting aside a year and a half to work on your perfect novel. You’ll pull out old curricula and your collegehood copy of Strunk & White, you’ll dig out that Stephen King book, read it, decide it’s bunk, and start plotting. You’ll get the unsettling feeling that somehow your plot is too cliche, that it’s not the groundbreaking profound work of literary fiction you always hoped to write, so you’ll scrap it and start again. You’ll get the same feeling with your second idea, and your third, and your fourth, so you’ll decide to just go with the fourth. Your characters will all be based on people you know in real life, but mixed up and reimagined and in different situations. Your dialogue will start out clunky, but will be functionally competent by the second rewrite. Your characters will be believable, if somewhat uninteresting as a result. Your plot will be interesting, but you’ll get the feeling that you haven’t done it justice, that your authorial voice has somehow failed the work of brilliance you had in mind when you started out. You’ll shop it out to friends and relatives, and incorporate all their advice, and self-publish a run of 20 copies from a micro publisher. Excitedly, you’ll give everyone you know a copy, and keep one for your own bookshelf, to display proudly in your office.

Then you’ll go back to work. No one will email you to tell you how inspiring your words were. No one will come over for dinner and mention offhand how much they enjoyed your book. No one will ever mention it at all, in fact, except that when you meet a new couple at church your wife will sometimes say “and he’s written a book, too,” in the same tone of voice that your mother did when you finished your first adventure novel draft at 13.