The Realities of Adulthood
Growing up, I never felt that I could be myself around my peers. Everyone seemed so different from me, even though we shared the same culture and spoke the same language. It was quite obvious to me that my mindset differed from theirs. I viewed the world as a mysterious puzzle that I had to slowly chip away at to understand, even if it meant frustrating others with my feeble attempts to make sense of everything through trial and error. By contrast, my peers seemed more interested in ephemeral things: pop culture that I hardly cared about, the latest trends and fashion, playing videogames that everyone else was playing but me.
When I was still in school, I didn’t get straight A’s. To me, grades only meant how well you could memorise lesson materials to regurgitate random and disparate facts at will. Comprehension was secondary to writing things down verbatim. I didn’t play well with the education system, and ultimately I paid for it with merely decent grades, which is to say not quite excellent enough for me to be considered the best student, nor quite bad enough for me to be considered a mediocre student. Nevertheless, I was happy and content with my academic performance.
But of course, some people expected more of me. They saw my untapped potential and wanted me to fulfill whatever unspoken expectations of me that they had made up in their heads. And so they asked more of me, demanded more of me, all in the hopes of nudging me towards their illusory version of me that ticked every box and adhered to their wants and desires. In other words, I was just another blunt tool in the toolbox to be sharpened.
When I entered the workforce, I remember having a naïve idealism that I could enact change. At my first job, I saw firsthand the inefficiencies in the systems and workflows that governed my day-to-day tasks. In response, I proposed various solutions to improve how things were done. Despite my best efforts, my ideas were shut down again and again. Any tool that had tangible benefits but some upfront cost was quickly dismissed. Management wanted results at little to no cost. If it meant that employees had to work overtime due to these inefficiencies, so be it.
In my short 8-month stint at my first job, I had become totally jaded. At one point, I asked myself, Is this what adulthood is really like? When I was around 10 years old, I began to question the system as I came to realise the rampant inequality and injustice in society. By the time I graduated high school, I had become aware of politics and capitalism. But that knowledge was all on paper, a theoretical framework in my mind. All my education would never have prepared me to face the harsh realities of how socioeconomics dictated the adult world. In this world, wealth and appearance mattered more than morals and virtue. Making people “feel good” mattered more than doing good deeds when no one was looking. Creating shareholder value mattered more than creating art that enriched the soul.
In a previous essay, I alluded to going through a transition phase of sorts. The truth is, I got laid off from my job at the time. It was my second job and I quite liked working at the company, so much so that I stayed there for 4 years until my entire department was made redundant. After my last day of work, I remember feeling so lost, wondering to myself how it all went wrong. Of course, looking back at it now, there were factors beyond my control that resulted in some company exec deciding to get rid of my department.
I was unemployed for 2 months before I landed my current job. During those 2 months, I saw how morally bankrupt the jobseeking market was. Companies were willing to lead you on with countless interviews, bad deals and sometimes outright mistreatment before you even got a job offer. Oftentimes, it felt like a performative humiliation ritual where I had to boast about my skills to some hiring manager who was only mildly interested in hiring me. I’m glad that is all behind me now.
As much as I like my current job, it has its own challenges and work culture to navigate. I have come to terms with the fact that all jobs, no matter how cushy or mind-numbingly easy, are built on exploitation. We have been funnelled into a system that extracts resources and creates products for consumption. Our precious time is traded for money. As a child, I fantasised about all the cool things I could afford if I had money. As an adult, I fantasise about all the cool things I could do if I had time.
Life is too short to be working for half a lifetime. Which is why I am planning to retire by 50, earlier if possible. In order to achieve that, I will have to plan my finances and make investments to earn a passive income of sorts. Even though personal finance often bores me to tears, I have to game the system somehow. At the end of the day, all I want is to be happy. Money is just a means to an end, figures on a bank account that have no inherent meaning. I realise that I will never be truly free of the system, but at least I have the freedom to choose a better future for myself.