There is no motivation quite like intense disgust.
Which is why I stopped dallying about emailing the admissions people at a college offering a graduate program I'm interested in, responded to the book repairer with whom I had hoped I could get some practical experience, and have the phone number for Penn's center for research and fellowships with intention of scheduling an appointment.
Obviously, that time could have been spent looking for jobs, but if I've realized anything this past week, it's that I just straight up find most office work repugnant. Mostly because it's not real. I know, I know, I live in a world of things that aren't real. I am a millennial, and while I can recall things like rotary phones, floppy disks, dial-up, and Windows 95, I also casually post cat pictures, skim my Instagram feed for furniture deals and calligraphy, read my news on the internet and my books on a Kindle. I participate in that world, have participated in it since I was a middle schooler looking for an escape from everything.
And hell, it hasn't always been this obvious to me--how much I object to the abstract world, I mean. I am, after all, someone who loves ideas. I studied philosophy, which is probably the poster child for abstract anything. But among the several reasons why I stopped studying philosophy after I got my Bachelor's is that I didn't feel psychologically competent to handle the implications of so much of metaphysics and epistemology. A friend was bemused when I blamed my semester's depression on taking my major too seriously, but I wasn't exactly kidding. Take ethics and political philosophy seriously, please do. But laugh in the face of ontology, or it will kill you.
Anyway. I was faced with my aversion this morning when I got a callback from one of my more dubious applications to a marketing company. I find the language of professional office work to be all kinds of vague, so I asked for a little more clarification on the role, which was met with a silent raised eyebrow and a still vague answer that began with "well, you saw our website." Yes. Yes, I did. Your website tells me that you do branding and offer solutions. This is fluffy. What I want to know is, literally, what does an account executive's day look like, task-wise? And what is this "weekly bonus"? Do you have some kind of up-selling or cold-calling incentive?
I should not be so skeptical, I know. I did apply, after all. And I accepted the interview. And I'm always a huge pessimist up front, and then settle in and everything is okay afterwards. It's probably something I could do and then run out on it in a year and a half. I just didn't want this. Of course, I didn't know what I wanted. Which is why I'm here.
Adulthood: ready and waiting to grind would-be astronauts into real-life paper pushers.
Today's Reading:
- The FBI vs. FIFA by Shaun Assael and Brett Forrest
- The decisions we make about climate change today will reverberate for millennia. No pressure. by David Roberts
- Thomas Piketty on the rise of Bernie Sanders: the US enters a new political era by Thomas Piketty
- How to Make Sense of All the Post-Scalia B.S. by Brian Beutler
- Mythos Erfolgsmann: Die Wahrheit hinter Trumps Milliarden von Marc Pitzke
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