Stepping Off the Treadmill: Redefining My Life

The mind is an interesting machine; we don’t fully understand it. Sometimes, I feel like an NPC in the game SIMS. Today, I’m fighting with myself again about what to do next. I passed a first-round interview last week and have another one this week. I’m looking forward to getting back to work if this turns out to be my next stop on the journey.

The current break makes me think about the eternal need for having an income to pay the bills and live my life to the fullest. At the same time, I realize how the feeling of unemployment incapacitates my day-to-day on an emotional level. Today, I was so depressed that the only thing I was able to do was go through my professional knowledge and work history. That reminded me of particularly depressing topics along the way.

It’s confusing that I’m not able to work on any creative projects. I always used sound to paint a picture of my inner demons, even to cheer myself up. But as soon as I turn on my synth, I have to close it, as if I’m afraid of seeing my image in a mirror. Probably it’s just another wave of procrastination?

The fight with myself today was about the fact that I work so hard on getting back into the grind that I forget to live a little and see the current time-off period as a gift, not as a punishment for things I’m already trying to change.

Derek, a friend, asked me today, “Is it possible that YOU are the problem?” I replied, “I can’t agree more; I truly hold myself back.”

And I’m sure, once I’m back in the job, I will say, “I’m so tired because I worked all day,” so I won’t have enough energy to do anything else aside from family life. The step forward is to say it out loud: “There is and will always be something if I allow it to be there!”

The real issue here is not that I want to work again. It’s because I feel like I let my family down, and because of that, I can’t sit here and have fun while my partner is at work and my child is at school.

I wrote last time that there is nothing I am afraid of, but I realized I am afraid of something: that this situation, or whatever you may call it, becomes permanent. That’s the fear. I also fear that the longer I stay away from my career, the higher the chance that I start forgetting things or get out of touch, and in the end, I have to restart what I worked so hard to build.

This whole spiral of thoughts makes me think there is more to life than work and money, this constant fear of not being able to pay my bills anymore. Like in The Matrix, I was born a slave into this system. I’m kind of a battery; my electricity is the number of years I can provide work in return for my years of service. I receive a few dollars a month, and once I’ve given the system all I can, the system rewards me with an ever-shrinking pension that barely pays for the food on my table.

The recruiter asks, “How much is your life worth to you?”

I’ve seen it with my parents, and I’ve seen it with my grandparents, the struggle and the final years in sickness, the end. I want to enjoy whatever time I have left, and I’m sure there is a way to stop it. I believe the way is to break the loop at the right time, find my true purpose, and build my life around that.

NEO

The first step to being free is to find the NEO in ourselves, and that’s what this text is about. The logical part of my brain is the matrix; it just wants me to return back into my cozy loop of waking up in the morning, going to work all day, coming back home, making dinner for the family, playing with my child, going to bed... Next Day! I need to pay the bills, provide food and shelter for my family. I will do that until I die, and that’s it.

My resistance comes into place, telling me, “Stop the grind; you’re part of the universe, and as such, you have options!” An uprising is starting in my head. I don’t want to go back it’s a death sentence within a death sentence.

Since the invention of currency, our minds strive to get hold of it. We want to earn and possess as much as possible, and the illusion is born that we can only be happy if we’re rich. We look around us and see these super-successful entrepreneurs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, or even smaller ones. Like lemmings, we start walking towards the cliff, reading books about Steve Jobs and other success stories. We try to think of ways to become rich. All we have to do is what they did, and in no time, we will be there. A week later, and a lot of hard-earned dollars poorer, we realize it’s not as fast and easy as we thought it would be.

I was there once, and I always wanted to be like Steve Jobs. I studied the guy, read every book I could find, watched every speech of his on YouTube, and tried to understand what I had to do to be as successful as him. I even came up with a few products.

One morning, I woke up and realized what the problem really was. It was so simple that I felt like the stupidest 20-year-old on earth: “I am not Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, or one of those successful guys, and I never will be.”

I’m not that way. I don’t want to invent a new computer or a social media platform or a giant online shopping platform. That already exists. My way is something else. I know for sure that I can only be successful and win this if I keep searching for it.

What could be the one thing I excel at? I might’ve already found it, it’s probably right in front of my nose. I just don’t see it, like when you search for a pencil on your desk, and you search the entire room for it, but you can’t find it anywhere. You give up, sit down, grab a glass of water, and right next to it, the pencil.

Sometimes all it takes to be successful is to sit down, rest, and grab a glass of water to find the idea that’s right in front of you.

My Life, My Soul, My Variables

When I look at life as a whole, I can look at these names as their own realities, with their unique challenges and obstacles, each from their own particular starting point. Steve Jobs walked a particular path based on his intuition. He went through the doors he thought were the right ones. Steve was adopted by a family, was born with a unique set of biological variables, and the universe connected him with specific friendships and bonds, which later led to career choices, explorations, and ideas.

That makes me wonder if I had been born with one of these names in another life, the results might not be the same, and maybe there would be no Apple today.

The point I’m making is that I am myself born into a particular family, with my biology, my challenges, and obstacles. The universe is connecting me with a unique set of people.

The sum of it defines the paths I can choose from and the doors available to me. I sometimes think that whatever makes me tick, call it a soul or quantum states, is changing the natural path of this person. Maybe without my soul, this person would’ve become a famous movie star, a successful entrepreneur, or even a drug addict lying in a ditch waiting for the next shot of whatever.

I’m always surprised when I experience a situation where I have this natural intuition, but my gut feeling tells me not to do this or that. When I follow the gut feeling, something pushes me back as if life itself says, “That’s not your path.” You end up being with other humans you can’t connect with, and you start questioning yourself, “What am I doing here?”

This makes me think that my personal set of variables is up against the natural course of things, like in Stephen King’s 11/22/63, when the protagonist, Jake, tries to change the past, but the past pushes back.

Echoes from My Past

This makes me think about some of the challenges I’ve experienced in my professional life. I ended up in places that gave me a boost of experience, a lot of positive things, but also many negative ones.

The challenge for me is not allowing the negativity to blind me from learning from it.

I’ve worked in many companies, and in some of the jobs, I was super successful, while in others, I had no success at all. I saw new hires with the identical job getting promoted before me, and all I could feel at the beginning was sadness and disappointment in helping them on their way and not being acknowledged for doing so. I would always ask myself, “Why them and not me?” instead of realizing that I was there for a reason, not for myself, but to become that one variable in their lives that helped them grow.

“Why them and not me?” This question stems from my own anxiety, self-worth, and impatience but also from not understanding that I was in the wrong place.

That didn’t stop my brain from overthinking, so I went on and on in a loop, telling myself:

• "I’m going the extra mile."
• "I’m the first in the office and the last to leave."
• "I’m thinking of ways to excel and improve my work."
• "I help people no matter below, beside, or above me."
• "I always have a good word and bring a good spirit into the team."

Anyway, it didn’t matter how much work I got done, how many eyes I opened, or minds I inspired; it wasn’t enough. Aside from constantly side-tracking myself by “improving my work” without being told to do so, I was seen as insubordinate rather than an innovator, even if the ideas I implemented improved everyone’s performance. It made the manager look bad, who was responsible for these things, and in the end, I made sure everyone knew it was MY IDEA.

I’ve always been an outspoken person, so I asked for promotions and was asked, “Why do you believe you are ready for a promotion?” Even though I had a long list of things to reply to, the managers of the manager didn’t want that insubordinate anywhere near their work because it might make the whole department look bad.

The Universe is a Network

I could now use the easy excuse and say the universe didn’t want me to get promoted, but that’s only half of the story. The truth is the universe doesn’t care about my promotion; the universe connects. I can’t blame the internet because I get bad comments on my articles or if I end up in a random toxic MMORPG group.

Aside from being seen as a disruptive element, the problem was that I couldn’t connect with most people that had a say in my career, no matter how hard I tried. If I can’t connect with my game, I can’t break the high score. No matter how good I am in offline play, since the results don’t get submitted, I stay a zero among heroes.

But I didn’t see that. What I saw was, I’m in a company for many years, someone new joins and gets promoted within less than a year, and the more that happened, the more depressed and desperate I became, and that, however, got noticed. That side was totally connected.

Like the situation when I played solitaire once a day for a 10-minute coffee break at various times, but exactly when I get started, almost every time, a manager passes by my PC, and for them, it looks like I play games all day and drink coffee at my desk.

I fought and fought, tried, and did whatever I could to get a promotion. Nothing else mattered anymore, only the promotion, even if I became increasingly miserable. I connected with many people during my years, and many became dear friends.

In technical universe terms, these connections represented a LAN or local area network. The problem was if you’re not connected to the WAN or Wide Area Network, the score doesn’t count.

It’s a bit like a hamster in a wheel, only I was a hamster running against a solid concrete wall. No matter how hard I ran against it, the only logical outcome was headaches.

Once I realized that, I stopped playing that game and exited this loop. But now I needed a new income, and what did I do?

Instead of finding grounds to flourish, I ended up in a war zone. I didn’t look the new company up or check what employees had to say about it. Had I done that, I would’ve realized that the swimming pool I was about to jump into was full of hydrofluoric acid.

I got an offer too good to be true, with a fancy title and salary directly from a visionary. What do we get told by those wise grandparents? “If an offer is too good to be true, IT ISN’T.”

I will never forget the first day in the office when the curtain of the unknown was finally lifted, and I found myself in a space full of burned-out people, trapped in a loop worse than the one I had just resigned from.

With the speed of light, an image appeared in front of my inner eye. I saw myself parachuting from a jet plane into a regional train, sliding derailed onto a frozen lake with a bus driver at the helm, thinking he was steering a bicycle.

In other words, the blindfolded visionary at the helm didn’t have any basic understanding of complex technical coherences but persuaded themselves otherwise. If you told them differently, you would be terminated.

Long story short, in the time I was trying to work in this difficult situation, I witnessed people getting hired and fired on an almost bi-weekly basis.

That’s what experience is good for, I quickly showed myself out, and again, I was standing in the middle of career nowhere, thoroughly looking for my next connection.

My Next Adventure is Already in the Making

I’ve experienced many ups and downs in the past two decades, always going somewhere, never standing still. But through learning and understanding that patience goes a long way and that working with people I can connect with is important.

I need a job right now to pay my bills, and it is possible that I end up in a place where I can’t connect with everyone. The important thing is to keep moving, because no matter how far the next journey takes me, it’s a little closer to my destination, finding the one thing that I excel at.

I even move while I search for new opportunities, while I write. As I said in the beginning, I might be closer than I believe. It might be directly in front of me, and I just don’t see it.

Why Can’t I Work on Creative Projects While Searching?

The answer is right in front of me, I just didn’t see it. I’m writing these lines, and that’s a creative project. The same goes for all the other creative things. I just have to start, be persistent, and not allow myself to give up. There is no solid concrete wall anymore. My natural intuition projected it in front of me to get back into the loop, and my gut tells me the truth: “There is no wall. Break down this silly illusion.”

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Tomorrow is the place where we arrive and start the life we’re supposed to live. I’m starting to think that working in places is like grabbing that glass of water, it might show me that pencil.

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Picture Source - AI Generated