Voluntary unemployment_ 02
At last — the first day of being jobless with no plan.
From all sides I'm being told that "Gildabang" won't work.
What should I do? For starters, I'll begin with morning pages.
Things I've put off, and things I could do — they spill over: English, graphic tools, coding, updating my résumé, researching business ideas, redoing my personal homepage, and so on.
I went to bed at 1:30 PM and barely managed to get up at 7:30 AM.
If this is my condition, then to wake up at 4:30 I'd have to be asleep by around 9, wouldn't I?
But come to think of it, isn't it good to get seven hours of sleep a day?
If we're ranking pity, I wouldn't be first. I'm still young.
Maybe, right now, this is a one-in-a-lifetime chance. Where else is a planner like this? A blank page.
I even have some living expenses set aside. I can find and do the work I want.
Literally a free life.
So what is it that's making me so uncomfortable?
// What do you think — it's because I'm not working while everyone else is working. People call this "loafing around," "drifting."
// Of course, body and mind are tired as ever — it's the densest, hardest, most purely self-directed time of questioning I've had.
(In the middle of morning pages, I think I drifted off briefly; my handwriting is unreadable.)
I wonder if I'm a fusser. Whining one way and the other.
I was trying to get up, but the dream wouldn't let go.
(Again — drifted off mid-writing; unreadable.)
Before, coding, English, grad school, patents — there were so many things I had to hurry and do, so many things to learn, and whether at work or not, I was always rushed. But now it's strangely, uncomfortably empty.
Because of long-term doubts about a salaried career, I can't even update my résumé; I'd like to start a business, but don't have enough money (though honestly, it's less about money and more about not having a direction — why, what, how).
Even the business idea I thought was decent got thoroughly poked by friends. Too many holes.
Yesterday I hauled my LPs over from my parents' house. Barely got them here. But now that they're here and I've listened, I can't really tell the difference.
In the end it repeats:
"limits of salaried life -> look into starting something -> weak ideas, no money -> back to salary work, or re-concretize the business."
"English, math" are things I should do; "psychology, philosophy, brain science" are things I want to learn; "fashion, drawing, programming" are things I want to do.
What I've done longest is... clothing and mobile-web planning. Maybe three years?
DCamp, startups — it's all items rooted in a mega-economy built on market capitalism. Items based on investment money, or based on prestigious knowledge rather than field experience, and on an elitist temperament and attitude.
I want to work while I can keep studying, and draw too.
Maybe that's why I keep thinking of a shop.
But since I can't afford that, maybe that's why I'm thinking of a bike or motorbike?
// What happened to the modular "get-fed" BM?
Somewhere in the corner lingers a not-quite-regret: "maybe I should've gone for a civil-service job after all." Even trying to reason it away, it won't leave, which tells me I, too, am a weak human. Maybe it's a bad thought — but that doesn't mean it isn't dead-on factual.
I want to make my own product, one carrying true craftsmanship.
//Was I naïve to think I'd meet such a person or such a company? Back when I closed the café out of that same vagueness — was I too weak, too irresponsible? Or maybe that wasn't the real reason; maybe I'm inventing one now, for the narrative, as I write.
I want to have a brand. One I could pour my soul into. Unembarrassing, cool..
So should I learn cooking? Wood carving? Ceramics?
// But when I was actually running a café, tailoring clothes, or drawing — didn't I say I was better at finding "such people" and lifting up their value than at making things myself? Wasn't that me cleverly dodging the difficulty of creating?
I want to be an artist, a craftsman. Poems, drawings, patents — but at the time, didn't I think I had no talent?
Or was that not it? Wasn't it that, chasing a living, I quietly kept pushing it off? Wasn't it that, to avoid looking more desperate or more wretched than others, I chose a "not-too-bad" direction and walked in it?
Isn't this what the repetition of those small compromises has wrought?
Intellectual vanity? VS intellectual play.
I criticized Hwajun's subway book-club donation program and his planning of the website event page.
But I wonder if I could be wrong. Or is it just a difference in values? No — I don't think so.
I think I was saying "you're wrong." Even if it didn't look that way, I think that was the intent.
It has to be made perfectly.
I can't accept the idea of "make it now and fix it later," or "it's not enough, but go."
For what and for whom is a "bad" process in the name of a good cause?
This, I think, is where my values, my attitude toward life, my approach differ most sharply from others'.
The very foundation for accepting "common sense" is different.
No matter how good the goal, if the method is bad, it's meaningless.
The first "good" here is good for me and everyone else together,
the latter is "good" only relative to one's own situation — and if so,
then the sandwich of two "goods" at either end is merely my own private "goods" at the beginning and the end.
Am I really carrying a life of too much thinking? Does no one else think this far?
But this, I think, is less a useless thing than the "" I had spotted earlier.
What if I set the direction based on this thought?
"For what and for whom is a 'bad' process in the name of a good cause?" — "no matter how good the goal, if the method is bad, it's meaningless."
I think I want to look cool.
I wondered if it's some unconscious lack of affection. Or is it just something every human has?
