From Here to Autonomy (Part V): Your Money or Your Life?

If someone put a gun to your head and asked you to give them your wallet, what would you do?

The answer seems obvious, but the truth is that this has happened to many of us—we’ve been forced to choose between our money and our lives—and we’ve chosen to keep the money.

I loved Shoshanna Zuboff’s column this month in Fast Company; she did an informal survey of the other soccer parents living, like her, in rural Maine. Some of the parents were locals and worked in local industry, others were transplants—professionals who had decided to slow down and chose lifestyle over career status. This led Zuboff to explore why people who had “succeeded” in their careers chose not to live in a more urban, status-oriented world that rewarded their success.

By the same token one could ask why a handful of executives, once they hit a zenith in their careers, decide to resign; or why a novelist, with a mass market bestseller under his belt, decides to pen a “quiet” book under a pen name; or why Michael Jordan decided to play Minor League baseball. 

Do people wither in the limelight?

I would argue that many who reach a pinnacle never actually experience it; rather they arrive at a vantage point where they see that they have been following an optical illusion leading them along an endless path to an unknowable horizon. Some acknowledge the illusion and jump off the path before they waste more time on it. Some see the challenge as more worthy than the prize. Some forge their own paths to simpler, knowable places.

This is an easy thing for me to say, having never achieved a corner office, an Oscar, a mention on Oprah. But the dynamic serves at all levels. And people’s versions of success could be defined by anything, really. Whatever resonates for us is our “McGuffin,” as Alfred Hitchcock called random objects in his films that somehow dramatically affected the plot’s outcome. I’m certain that the closer people get to achieving their McGuffins the more ridiculous they become.

My McGuffin was a bylined piece in The New Yorker. When I started to write professionally for magazines, moving closer to my dream, I experienced a six-month-long blue funk. I figured I was experiencing garden variety achievement anxiety and, like many young professionals in New York City who considered therapy on par with eyebrow waxing—a form of personal maintenance—I started to “see someone” (the jargon for those who see shrinks but swear it’s not for anything serious).

Our first meeting was slow-going. My therapist asked me a few basic questions: What did I do for a living? She asked.

“I write for magazines,” I said.

“Oh, you’re a writer!” she exclaimed.

“No,” I said. “I write for magazines.” In my mind my published pieces didn’t matter. They weren’t published where I thought they “counted.”

“Why are you unhappy with your career?” she asked. I felt profoundly confronted; at the time the words “career” and “life” were interchangeable.

“I don’t know,” I said, lying.

“Well what would make you happy with it?” she asked.

“Getting a piece in The New Yorker.” I said. You’d think she’d asked me, “How long have you endured the pain and torture”; inexplicably I began to cry.

This therapist was relentless, “Why are you crying?” she asked.

“I don’t know!” I said. “Because that’s not what I want!”

“Well what is it? Writing for some other magazine?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

I understood in that moment why I had been so depressed. The thought of hanging my future onto something as tenuous as a clip in a specific magazine was ludicrous. Imagine how stressful that could be. What if my query letter got lost in the mail? What if the editor had read my query and said, pass? What if I was never considered by the editors to be New Yorker material? I might as well not exist.

“I don’t want to write for the New Yorker!” I said to the therapist. “I don’t want to write for anyone!”

The therapist gave me something to chew on:

“Why don’t you shoot for something more in your control?” she said. “Something that’s not so externally based.”

I appreciated the advice, but I didn’t know how to do that. I had always wanted things that others had told me were worth having. Not in any explicit way, mind you, but in those insidious ways that make you believe it was all your idea. Living in New York and working in publishing, you are practically illiterate if you can’t at least comment on a Talk of the Town piece at the water cooler. Of course I'd want to write for The New Yorker, or I wasn't really a writer.

Not long after that appointment I stopped writing—I chalked up my decision to needing to put an adolescent fantasy to rest. With years behind me, I understand that I threw out the baby with the bathwater. I didn’t want to stop writing, I wanted to drop the control the literary world had on me, making me gauge myself in relation to others and by its symbols of success. I needed to take a metaphorical trip to Siberia—to a place that would make me miss my home so much that I would return to it in a state of gratitude.

Zuboff  describes how the same desire to not be controlled by the external trappings of success led her fellow Mainers to escape the Rat Race, a phenomenon called deconcentration, “a historically unprecedented trend in recent decades in which people leave the regimentation of city and suburb, seeking more personal control and meaningful voice in a rural community.”

Ironically, for me, escaping to a “rural community” meant switching to a career in business. Still, I understand the literal notion as well. When I wasn’t dreaming of receiving international accolades for my epic writing in the form of the usual literary decorations—Pulitzers, Nobel Prizes, New Yorker articles, I was fantasizing of sitting in my little cottage in some unknown rural enclave with a view of my wild English garden, sipping coffee. Even while dreaming of my arrival I was planning my escape.

Perhaps it’s the voice in me that knows—that voice that knows in everyone—that wanting something that we can only obtain by the whim of others is a slippery game. In the end it falls short because it was won by adhering to others’ notions of brilliance, not our own.

Zuboff illustrates this from a corporate perspective:

The last few decades have created millions of educated people who naturally have opinions and feel the need to control their own lives. But with organizations increasing in size and top-down pressures, there’s no way most workplaces can fulfill so many people’s desire for control. There just isn’t enough space at the top of these pyramids…

…(according to epidemiologist Michael Marmot’s study) more than cigarettes, sugar, and too many hours spent bench-pressing the TV remote, it’s the lack of control in our jobs that’s killing us.

It sometimes really is a question of your money or your life.

For some people it’s not a trade-off. Choosing the money is equal to choosing their bliss. Think A-list movie stars who can pick their projects and earns tens of millions; think Richard Branson.

For some people, earning what others deem our work to be worth is insulting enough to make us throw in the corporate towel. A recent New York Times piece described the journey of a 45-year-old Hispanic woman who left a restaurant management position with paltry pay to start her own construction business. She was hardly on easy street at the onset; banks did not want to offer small business loans to a woman tackling a traditionally male-dominated industry, let alone a Hispanic woman. But, as Hispanic women make, on average, 53 cents for every white man’s dollar, she opted for the more difficult, less predictable career path, temporarily putting herself into debt and bringing herself close to financial ruin before earning a profit.

Running her business is still difficult, she says. But at least she’s not subjecting her future to others’ outcomes.

She, and others are simply making ENOUGH doing what they love, or doing what they do their way. They belong in the same category as the Richard Bransons. They have exceeded money, fame and other parameters of narrowly defined success. They have achieved a much higher standard—their own.

Comments

Fabulous series!

[Mindwalker]

It's crazy, I know, but I have been coming in every morning to work and pulling up your site before doing anything else. In that millisecond before I know whether or not you wrote more for this series, I feel a sweet sense of childlike anticipation. I am enjoying it that much -- and maybe living a tad vicariously through your experience.

[Yvonne DiVita]

Your insight astounds me. As a writer, I connect with your words on varying levels... it's so comforting to read someone with a dedication to the written word, someone who is not slave to words but a true craftsman. One can only cry, More, more!

[SynapticMayhem]

I was thinking along a similar vector last year when I left an M.F.A. program in creative writing.

It's always nice to see someone slow down and enter into a thought consciously rather than reflexively.

Thanks.