You are not the lizard man
A long time ago I became friendly with the lizard man. He was this guy who would walk around the city with a big iguana and hassle folks for a few bucks to take a picture with it. He never had a plan– he would just show up wherever he thought he was supposed to. Sometimes I would go years without seeing him, but when I did, he was always doing fine. He had an apartment and a car. I think he even had a wife and kids, all supported by his job as the lizard man. The lizard man is always going to be just fine. Some people are just like that.
I am not like the lizard man. If you’re anything like me at all– or rather, if you’re like me in this extremely specific way, you didn’t spend a lot of time mulling over outcomes when you were a kid. Maybe you had life or career aspirations, like wanting to be a doctor or a lawyer or something, and the broad strokes of what it takes to get there were always pretty clear: do well in school, go to a good college, whatever. But you had no idea what it would be like to actually be a doctor or a lawyer– and those are the jobs that they show on TV. What could a 10-year-old possibly know about what a marine biologist actually does, or what it’s like to be a management consultant living in a full-amenities yuppie prison complex in Stamford, Connecticut? But you were sure, probably in no small part due to where and who you came from, that you would become at least one of those things or some other thing that would be just as good.
Because you were so sure you kind of just ambled through life and did whatever you wanted– and for a long time it was cool and fine because you had a little bit of sauce. But there came a time when that sauce started to run out to reveal the dry, crumbling meatball beneath. And maybe for a while that was fine for you. But it was only fine for a while, because it was only a matter of time before your brain figured out second-order thinking and you finally started to worry about what was going to happen to you. So if you’re anything like me you do whatever you can to keep the ship afloat, to keep the party going. And you do make it happen– getting maybe not where you wanted to go, but somewhere you’re okay with being.
It shows up everywhere– in people and things you didn’t realize you cared about until the window shrank to the eye of a needle, and suddenly you want to try and stuff a camel through it. And then the cycle repeats itself. It doesn’t really matter if it’s your education, your career or even your relationships. It’s comfortable in its own way because most of the time you can just kick back and munch lotus, something you feel especially vindicated in doing after a brief fight for your life.
You’re an ouroboros of letting it pass you by and scrambling to seize it back.
We all understand why the ambling is bad: it causes you to unravel slowly without noticing until something gives. But the solution isn’t to become a big-time scrambler– that’s just the same guy except this one has a map drawn by a crazy person. Being so proactive and forward thinking that you start to reverse-engineer future versions of yourself with future jobs and future girlfriends might be even worse because once you start gaming it out, you introduce the possibility of losing. Turning every encounter into a referendum on your ability to make a coherent decision in this life is a fast pass to misery and dissatisfaction. This is not to say plans are bad: I have plans; you should make plans. But any plan that involves a series of specific interactions going a specific way is probably not going to pan out. Such plans probably shouldn’t pan out because they spit in the face of entropy. Who are you, anyway, to decide how things are going to go?
When I take a really hard look at when things have gone best for me, it’s been when I go with the flow, but in a cool and informed way. That is to say, acting in such a way where I know what I want to do and why I want to do it, and then I do it. And this isn’t a novel concept; it’s not even a novel concept to me:
Did 18-year-old Mikey have any notion of his future travails when he channeled the ~40-year-old ramblings of a then ancient, now deceased libertarian satirist for his senior quote? No way, I just thought it was a funny quote.
Set aside for a moment that the late and questionably great Mr. O’Rourke was probably joking when he proposed you literally cause accidents on the highway: When you strip the sentiment down to its most bare essentials, he, and by proxy, young me are talking here about the same basic idea current me is espousing right now! The only real difference is motive: he endorses control, I rebuke it