The Art of Spontaneity

To be honest, I still haven't figured the whole work/life balance thing out. Sometimes, I think having a work/life balance might be an idea China astroturfed into our lexicon to make our population feel defeated because the only people I've seen perfectly achieve it are TikTokers who spend half of their day frothing green smoothies and nepo babies who make bad indie movies. 

If you're reading this, odds are you aren't rich or lucky enough to find the perfect work/life balance, but there are many things you can do to get close. If you were for any big company (500 employees or more and at least $10 Million in annual revenue), and you actually do what's required of you during the eight hours you're paid for your labor at a lower rate than you'd like, after you get off the clock your life should be yours and yours only. But but but but…. that's a pessimistic attitude towards building a professional career! Shut the fuck up. The only way to secure your job at any given company beyond joining a union or having some pull within the C-suite is by being irreplaceable. You have a long leash if you make your company sufficiently more money than they pay you with your work. They don't want to replace you because they'd be less profitable without you! 

Working at a small wealth management firm, a startup, or other environments where you are presented with an opportunity for horizontal and vertical professional growth means you have a chance to vastly better your professional experience at a young age. If you're in that position, work each day until your eyes burn as badly as they used to after playing Nazi zombies on a snow day in middle school, and then wake up and do it again the next day. The same goes for blue-collar workers working an apprenticeship before trying to open up their own shop. Those two groups (who make up a fair amount of people) should work as hard as possible because they'll see it pay off in time. But that isn't the case in many of these bloated, gigantic corporations. The powers that be in almost any recognizable company won't even give young employees a chance to be irreplaceable within their first few years on the job…. it's too big of a risk, so prioritize your life if you're in that spot because the stress and extra hours worked won't matter anyway. When those publicly traded companies cut an entire sector of their business to make their shareholders happy, they won't pluck you out because you were active for an extra fifteen minutes on Slack daily. They couldn't even if they wanted to because when something to that effect happens, the person impressed by your work is often fired right after you. 

We are in a very awkward time in American history. To put it in sports terms, we're kind of like Georgetown basketball in the late ​​'90s- we're coming off a monster run, and we still have some star power, but you get the feeling that our best days are behind us. As great of players as Otto Porter Jr. and Greg Monroe were, you'd be fucking crazy to compare them to Allen Iverson, Alonzo Mourning, Dikembe Mutombo, and Patrick Ewing. There is ample opportunity to make something of yourself in this country; if there wasn't, so many people wouldn't want to fucking move here, but, at the same time, there is a growing sentiment that we're in big trouble. At the moment of my writing this, we're in $34 trillion in National debt due to reckless spending, our life expectancy rate has declined in recent years, our healthcare costs are double that of our allies, we have lost respect around the world as a result of stupid military interventions constructed by Neo-Conservatives, and we have irresponsibility let everyone and their Mother cross our borders thanks to short-sighted thinking by Liberals. Our education system and infrastructure are failing at impressive rates, our population is the unhappiest it has been since we bombed the masculinity out of Japan, the ocean temperatures keep crawling up, our foreign enemies have infected the minds of our youth with nonsense, and everyone in the entrepreneurial space getting sucked off is quite literally innovating a product with the hopes of replacing as many human operated jobs as possible.  

We still have a few NCAA tournament appearances in us, but boy, oh boy, does it look like our program is about to fail, or what? The most optimistic thing we have happening in this country is a booming weight-loss drug market because the food stocked on our shelves is so poisonous that we're excited to try drugs we don't really know the long-term effects of, so our hearts don't detonate. What does all of this have to do with work/life balance? It should be a reminder to think rationally. 

Bronnie Ware is an author famous for her book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, a memoir from her time as a palliative caretaker. The second most common regret she saw while watching people draw their last breaths? I wish I hadn't worked so hard. As I've said, if you're out of school working at a publicly traded company where you exist in a department defined by mediocrity, it's okay not to do more than what's expected of you; the key word there is expected. Our society is worse off when people half-ass or don't live up to their end of the bargain in the workforce. You shouldn't give up your entire life for a company that doesn't value you; a company should also not employ anyone doing below or under what they promised to do in exchange for monetary compensation. The whole idea behind capitalism is that both sides of a labor or service transaction come away happy, but America is in a fragile position because of greed, crazy workforce norms, societal pressures, a failing education system, ego, and, most importantly, short-term thinking, overcomplicate this concept and in the long term, ruin companies.

Is it a coincidence that many companies begin to falter after making diversity or nepotism hires in their C-suite? Is it fair that executives who lost billions of dollars for their respective companies (Marissa Mayer, Bob Chapek, and Dave Calhoun, among others) paid themselves largesse salaries before jumping ship with an even bigger severance package in hand? Are creative marketing campaigns better when someone uses the creative side of their brain or what they learned about what a campaign should look like in college? Should people off the pulse of their industry's customer base still be working in said industry just because they put their time in? Does a CEO who kept his company's equity holders happy by going on a mass-firing spree deserve a raise for his efforts if nothing tangibly improved beyond their balance sheet? Should a startup founder pay himself significantly more than all of his employees before the business has reached mainstream success? You know the right answer to all of these questions, but they illustrate why our workforce is silly.

To find the best work/life balance possible, you have to have the courage to genuinely look at yourself in the mirror and assess your position while also at least doing what's required of you to get paid at your job. I'm for workers' rights as much as the next guy, but when I'm sitting in front of the Walgreens counter eagerly anticipating the fat lady to get off her phone so I can get my Zyns and go home, me, the eight people behind me, and everyone else whose day she's ruined since she started working there wants her to get fired because her fuck you attitude towards upper management is negatively impacting our lives. 

If your job provides the potential for upward mobility by way of raise incentives, fluid hierarchical structure, and limited red tape, seize the opportunity to make something of yourself while it's in front of you. You'd much rather put sixty to eighty-hour weeks on your plate now than when you're in your forties with kids, and the knowledge you'll obtain through these years will only suit you for the better! As depressing as my insights on America from earlier in this chapter were, being that we are the future of this country, we're the people who can at least try to fix them! Everyone reading this book has the potential to achieve great things AND lead a life full of electrifying experiences and meaningful personal connections. That won't happen for most because of a mix of bad luck, the pursuit of cheap thrills, and other factors both in and out of our control; however, let's be blind with optimism for a minute and say it will. America used to be a country where people were rewarded for their work ethic and ideas as opposed to their ability to maneuver their way up the corporate ladder. Let's get back to that as a generation! We've seen that the Boomers laid their bedrock for a workforce that was run by inefficient white men who sold their souls for houses in the Hamptons. We've seen that the Millennials are overcorrecting that by building their corporate caste system on really gay effective altruism- let's build our companies on actual merit and tell everyone who has a problem with that to suck our dicks and clits! The only way our country's problems will be solved is through a cognizant population of hard-working free-thinkers. 

This brings me to what could perhaps be the most important part of this book: the art of spontaneity. My all-time favorite Anthony Bourdain quote goes, eat at a local restaurant tonight. Get the cream sauce. Have a cold pint at 4 o'clock in a mostly empty bar. Go somewhere you've never been. Listen to someone you think may have nothing in common with you. Order the steak rare. Eat an oyster. Have a negroni. Have two. Be open to a world where you may not understand or agree with the person next to you, but have a drink with them anyways. Eat slowly. Tip your server. Check in on your friends. Check in on yourself. Enjoy the ride. This quote has inspired me to have (probably too many) drunk Thursday nights I don't regret and buy quite a few plane tickets I couldn't afford, and I'm better for it. 

Even if you are one of the lucky bastards who can work hard now in the name of long-term gains, never surrender to life. Always make sure that you use all of your PTO days, travel the world as best you can, eat as much good food, and drink as much cold beer as your stomach is able to handle during your short time on this planet. I'm not encouraging anyone to be a degenerate like I've been in the past and like some of you were during college; all I'm saying is that living the best life you can comes with having some fun, and as long as you aren't hurting anybody else, I encourage fun. 

When I was living in Jersey City by myself, I had plenty of $200 weekends in New York, and they fucking ruled (regardless of how many times I struck out at Fiddlesticks). While living in Hoboken, I took every chance I could to play trivia and drink $20 Bud Light towers along the waterfront with friends on Thursday nights. In Nashville, I rarely regret walking to Broadway after work on a sunny day and spending money I don't have watching future deadbeat Dads try to make a living singing live music. And I have no doubt in my mind that by the time this book comes out and I'm living in Tampa Bay, there will be weeknights where I splurge on conch fritters and $36 bottles of white wine. 

Since entering the workforce full-time three years ago, I've been to two European countries and at least ten of America's greatest cities, and I've seen several concerts in which I still couldn't name one song by the artist. I've convinced myself that a stripper in DC liked me for my personality, fallen in love with eating snails, and had many (probably too many) interesting cigarette-fueled conversations outside of bars. I've taken a shot of tequila with a scorpion in it, hiked Sintra, stormed a basketball court, and eaten enough raw fish to probably die. I've gotten drunk with a few famous people, had money stolen from me multiple times, been serenaded by an accordion on a date, and gotten the privilege to see the best standup comedians the world has to offer in small rooms. I've played pool in Pennsyltucky dive bars and drank out of bottles on Miami club tables. I've twirled pasta in Little Italy, lost a quarter of next month's rent in casinos, fished in all kinds of places with no success, eaten cheeses that smelled inedible, sat in a private cabana on a foreign beach, and farted in a handful of unorthodox museums. I've done all of this and more while never making more than $70,000 in a year. At the risk of telling anyone who may be bipolar to rack up ten figures of credit card debt in a weekend, I recommend you do the same. A trip abroad or a weekend in New Orleans may take you months to economically recover from, but it will grow you as a person as it has grown me in a way that staying inside, playing video games, or watching YouTube videos has never. None of the fun things I do are routine, and very few are planned months in advance; they are almost completely spontaneous and usually come at times when I feel burned out.