Follow your bliss can kiss my caucasian butt.
SFgate, which appears to be a typically lefty big-city newspaper, is fairly well regarded on the lefty side of the online universe. But every now and then someone will link to an article that will make my blood boil gently in the afternoon son. A while back (a year ago? Two years?) one of SFgate's chirpy columnists penned a little ditty bemoaning how sensible lottery winners were with their lucky millions, and saying that he (I don't remember the name, but I feel fairly confident that it was a he) wished he could hear about someone blowing all of their winnings on an epic orgy of drugs, sex, and depravity, because it would be cool.
Given that almost any month of the year will find some member of the new hyperrich upper class tossing a few 10s of millions of dollars down some gilded trashheap in search for some new thrill, I find it somewhat offensive that a journalist would chirpily recommend that a lottery winner (most of which are not the new hyperrich, even if an occasional multimillionaire walks off with a couple of hundred million in walking around money) blow their life-changing event on whisky and condoms.
Today, I was spending some time during a system build following weblog links, and came upon an article by Mark Morford recommending that people dump their careers and go off and follow their bliss, because what have they got to lose except their stodginess? Well, perhaps, maybe, their families? If I dumped my job (a thing that I think about almost daily as the python that is the failing American economy wraps itself more tightly around my neck while the cries of "oh, it's not going to get any worse" try, and fail, to drown out the screams of the tortured and dying in the American Gulag and Maximum Leader Genius's lovely little war in the Near East) I'd end up, doing, um, what? I've been unemployed for long periods of time, and when you have a family that depends on an income (and the last long stretch of unemployment coincided with the Portland economy cratering, so there were no jobs for either of us to find), not having that income makes it very very difficult to follow any fucking bliss when you're worried that something terrible will happen and drive you out on the street.
"Giving up certain luxuries." Like food, and shelter, and medical care, and healthy children.
I figure I've got enough life left for one life-changing event, and I don't want to waste it by trying to "follow my bliss" in the gringo banana republic that the United States is aspiring to be. If someone wants to gamble that they can survive off their bliss, wonderful. There are quite a few .com millionaires out there who rolled the dice and made a bundle off naive venture capitalists, and quite a few showman-artists who are making a comfortable living off gullible rich people. There are also quite a few .com paupers who rolled the dice and ended up with snake-eyes and 50,000 shares of Enron stock, and countless artists who scrape from farmers market to farmers market, praying that they'll never get sick, or old, or have their car break down.
I work in computers. All it would take is an upper management reshuffle with promises of saving millions by hiring Indian programmers and my job would be gone. And then I could follow my bliss just like I did during the 2.5 years where I didn't have the tyranny of a regular paycheck, or the rich parents who could underwrite a vacation in SE Asia and the subsequent import/export business (which would take countless 14 hour workdays, but then you could hire copywriters to make it sound like you're the next incarnation of J. Peterman while you reaccumulate the piles of junk that you discarded when you went off to "find yourself')
"Working hard and succeeding" may be a lie (it's not for my brother, who's now in extremely upper management at a hugely successful investment company), but "work is evil; you should follow your bliss" is simply insulting, even in the cases where it works out.
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But the thing is that the people who want to "follow their bliss" will do it all by themselves, without benefit of this awful patronising cheerleading that Mr. Morford is doing. What pisses me off about the SFgate editorial is that it seems to be aimed more at the people who are perfectly happy with their so-called conventional lives, and didn't have the foresight to get rich enough parents so they could spend their lives being attractively flitting insects.
I know people who've spent their adult lives "following their bliss". Well, they've gotten old, and now they have nothing except a cozy little cardboard box under a bridge (which they're losing because the state DOT is doing a project of blocking off all the bridge underpasses.) Are they happier than I am now? Were they happier than I was when we were both working 10 years ago? Were the long hours they worked more "real" than the long hours I worked?
(The answers are: it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Don't be ridiculous.)
Of course you can do it -- if you've resisted the pressure (not impulse, not temptation, but pressure) to acquire all kinds of crap. One gathers from your rant that you have not.
It's easy to have options, but it takes time, and fortitude while people look at you like your an idiot.
If by crap, you mean children, why, yes, I have.
Is that all that's required to follow your bliss? Not have children?
I'm even less convinced than I was before.
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Morford is a columnist, not a journalist. As such, he has a certain liberty to make outrageous suggestions.
Aside from that, I wonder how many "how-to" books have been published, advising people to give up their despair, refuse to become cogs in a corporate wheel, and "do what you love, the money will follow"? Or to, "follow your bliss"?
Not everyone has the entrepeneurial bug, not all of us want to be business owners or have the kind of dream that leads to opening our own business, but for those who do, it takes courage and vision to step out of the safety of the mainstream and reach for the golden ring. I admire those who try it.
I'm no more interested than you seem to be in unemployment, poverty, and the uncertainty of self-employment, but I don't scorn those with the courage to risk them following their own dreams.