Been getting sick a lot lately

[TheRumGone]

3 hours ago, Bronn said:

I would watch Fight Club. Watch it a lot.

I'm sure he has. That was essentially a chuck palahniuk post. Just matched my feelings about everything. The workforce are basically just drones.

I've posted here about when I was 25 and quit my job up north, worked outside with my hands for a living for awhile, lived in a cabin in the woods and genuinely enjoyed my life for over a year and what I was doing. I fell in love and things changed. Now I just dream of that time throughout the monotony. It can get super depressing. Makes you wonder why humans set up society this way with the unlimited possibilities we have the capacity for

 

 

[pstall]

It's within us to dream and the ability to change our own personal paradigm is there.

Directv has a funny ad with The Settlers.  Don't alot of us fall into that category? I mean we all come here and talk a big game with an expansive view of things but we don't take any risks or chances. We play it safe for steady money and benefits. Having kids makes you play it even safer.

We sometimes wait for the pefect scenario or for someone else to open a door but it's really up to each one of us to figure out our dream and go after it. Im focused on destroying my debt so i can go after more if what i want out of life. Not just google it or thru someone elses instagram feed etc.

Life isn't a spectator sport. 

[The NFL Shield At Midfield]

since we're on the topic, i wish i had the balls to do what my brother just did.

he butted heads with management at his job for the last time and wound up fired.  the worst part was that the guy who dropped the axe was supposedly a family friend of ours.  anyway he was friends with this guy from our hometown and had done some IT work for his dad in the past.  the kid's dad it turns out is investing in, uh, well it's an emerging industry in some of the western states.  he needs a ton of help with IT operations and tapped my brother.  he thought about it for probably two days and then just jammed everything he needed into his civic and drove to oregon.

this was probably two months ago and it's clearly already been a substantially life changing thing for him.  just the trip sounded like it was crazy - he did a straight shot from kansas city to portland.  he talked about running on no sleep deliriously driving through the rockies.  then once he  landed at the guy's house he basically got pulled out of his car and right into work.

i'm very much a white bread 9-to-5 blockhead who can easily live within that framework.  on the other hand, that kind of thing drives him insane and he functions at his absolute best (and his absolute best is extremely good) if he's able to sleep for 14 hours, then get up and work 20 straight hours, then go back to sleep again.

there's this little voice in the back of my head telling me that, if there's an in for me there, i'm going to take it.  but i don't know.

 

[PhillyB]

On April 14, 2016 at 8:48 PM, frash.exe said:

*sigh*

I'm probably gonna agree with you and say you're half right here. It's not the job, though. It's jobs. It's the state of working in this country.   The workforce culture in America is horrible and should be reformed dramatically. I think about this from time to time. Sometimes I feel like I'm in a rat race. That we're going back to the industrial revolution working environment where increased productivity is demanded forevermore until it stretches out the limits of tolerance on the human body and the collective physical and mental well-being of this country goes down the toilet.

 The traffic is the worst it's ever been every day. I drive past the same accident in the same spot once or twice a week. Last week I'm in the left lane on a highway and some guy in a white Mercedes almost legit drives into me from the middle lane. He probably would've if I didn't notice him out of the corner of my eye and made a quick maneuver onto the shoulder. This isn't a driving error made out of lack of skill. This is just poor judgment. There was an exit coming up on the left but he wasn't even trying to make it; he just wanted to be in the left lane. I know this because I saw him behind me for like another 4 miles. 

We're a bunch of strung-out, caffeine-addled bastions of exhaustion by the time we walk into the office. Everybody is short on a Monday. Everybody over 36 has a back support or a donut fit onto their chair. Everybody over 50 can't wait until retirement. At some point you meet someone in your office whose cube is adorned with Dilbert comics. I can't think of a more appropriate expression of giving up your goals in life than finding Dilbert relatable. Some managers look at smartphones like giant dildos with gold sparkles on them and can't see someone flip it out to text their S/O or pregnant sister or whatever for five seconds lest they turn into R Lee Ermey. Dunkin donuts in the break room is like fuging Christmas Day for these people. If you surveyed a bunch of random office spaces, I bet you'd find an alarming portion of the employees have never even heard of OSHA. 

The work isn't mentally stimulating for me. I could quit but what is out there? I'm just going to be working for someone else or some other faceless board of directors that can't be negotiated with for a raise and enforce their employee directives and policies through HR, which isn't really a department it's just a less fortunate extension of the executive department. My last job was especially like this and that's a main reason why I left. They don't think of you as anything more than a gear performing a function so the business works like a clock. This is what I went to college for? This is what I went through all the loops to be educated is for?

I thought about getting a nice DSLR and once I got good enough to know it around, I could do some freelance photography for real estate, because, my god, you look at some of the listings on Zillow and the photos look like they were shot with a Nokia from 2003. And we're not even getting into things like staging, just resolution. Maybe start on the side and see where it took me. Because right now I can't think of something I want to do that confines me to a desk or singular location for 40+ hours a week for the next 40 years of my life.

Sometimes I tell my parents I want to move to Australia, like Melbourne and set myself up and start a new life away from this overcrowded shitfest of materialistic people who take themselves way too seriously called North Jersey, where I have to sit in line for 20 minutes to buy a candy bar. They laugh at me. Little do they know if I had the money I'd fuging do it. 

brother get the fug out now. everyone dreams about leaving the rat race and nobody does it - they end up with donuts on their chairs at 50 tut-tuting and telling all the young kids to get out while they can.

i've mentioned my story a few times on here - massive existential crisis, depression, stuck in the rat race working in a cubicle for a corporation. incidentally i did what you just mentioned. i quit that job and bought a one-way ticket to australia. i didn't stay, but i ended up backpacking around the asia-pacific rim for half a year and i can honestly say it changed my life.

staying where you are right now will kill you just as surely as any bullet. leaving that situation will be the most counter-culture thing you can possibly do, and you'll face immense blowback from your friends and family, but rest assured they're all just bitter they didn't do the same thing when they were young.

so i say formulate a plot (doesn't have to be australia specifically) and set an immovable target date of your departure. hell, buy an airline ticket so there's no going back. buy it six months from now. give yourself six months to get your poo ready. you'll be psyched and motivated. maybe you'll cut down expenses to bare bones to save extra cash for your bank account. you'll spend your days researching fruit picking season in australia where you can make $200 a day under the table tossing apples out of trees with hot german backpackers, homestay opportunities, whatever strikes your fancy. then you'll go and have the most formative, enlightening, self-actualizing wanderjahr of anyone in history and come home months later with something gleaming in your eye that's not abject boredom and tepid malaise. you'll have meaning and purpose and you'll find something you give a poo about here - something that might not be a ton of money, but something that will fulfill you. and after a year living out of a backpack you won't give a poo about money anyway. you'll be broken of that.

go do it - your life depends on it

[PhillyB]

oh yeah and leave yourself significant doubt. there's life in the terror of not knowing. don't buy a roundtrip ticket, buy it one way. don't plan on coming back until you're out of cash or otherwise find the need.

there is no vitality like midair suspension as you've taken your irreversible leap from the cliff behind you

[pstall]

I would say if you are single or married without kids. Quitting a job can work.

I pulled a Jerry Maguire in Aug 05. I was doing wealth mgmt and investment stuff and was 37 and 2 kids. I predicted the housing crash but was 2 yrs early. I thought 06 and it was 08/09. When i left i was ready to go in with whoever for flipping homes knowing how bad foreclosures would be. The problem was other investors had all their money tied up and got caught flat footed and didn't believe me early enough. 

Now my email i sent that went viral at least at that giant bank made me a legend and to this day people talk to me about it. They saved the email and it inspired so many people. Im serious. 

On one hand it was liberating and cool story bro and it reached a few thousand people but it seemed people benefited more from me leaving than i did. It put us in a very tough spot and my plan just didn't work. 

I bounced back and worked my way back up but it's taken 10 yrs.

I want to do something bold again but not sure where and how. My kids are now teens and college is staring us in the face. One can probably get academic scholarship and the other knows what she wants to do post high school.

Frash just be prepared to have nothing go according to plan. If you are single then you have a lot more flexibility.  

I don't regret my decision.  Upper management heard what i wanted to say and i highlighted some people that i thought were either overlooked for larger roles or mistreated. The most rewarding part was a little old Armenian lady who specialized in an odd yet specfic retirement plan that is complicated.  I made mention of hear and how she deserved as much as anyone in the building.  A few months later she got a promotion and a couple of big raises. I ran into her a few years later and she was in tears thanking me and how her and her husband have beem able to travel more and help others. I lost it right there because that was the payoff. In the end it was worth it. 

But really really think it through. 

[frash.exe]

So an update

I got myself a PCP, which I haven't had one in like 6 years but whatever. I told her about a few things that were getting me stressed out so she put me on lexapro, and my mood has been a little better since then. Also not dwelling on things has let me take a new approach to some things in my life and I'm seeing some improvement in a bunch of different aspects. 

 

A few weeks ago I got a physical done because she said I should have one since it's been a while and also some blood/urine work. She says my cholesterol is a little high for a 26 year old. It's 120 and she said it should be like 70 for someone my age. Besides that my vitamin D was low, which she says may cause fatigue. Then she said they found a microscopic amount of blood in my urine but that can be caused by a lot of things, including strenuous exercise. And the night before I went to the gym and did some heavy lifting. Anyway she says it's fairly common and that she's not worried about it and I shouldn't be either. 

[pstall]

I'm a big fan of a good walk in the sun for some vitamin d. 15 mins and your body stores that junk for a long time.

Good to hear frash. I was actualy going to pm you and get an update.