Wow, I am just plain lost tonight. No idea what to write about. Tabula rasa. Blank slate. Nothing.

So welcome to my totally winging it, even more so than usual. My brain tank is totally empty. Honestly, I don’t feel like writing at all. I feel like just fucking around playing video games and being silly online.

But well, being a grownup starts with realizing that doing things you do not feel like doing is not the worst thing in the world and that it doesn’t mean you have lost some imaginary battle with authority or that you should be angry at the very idea of something besides mindless self-indulgence.

It just means that you have decided that the rewards of doing what you do not feel like doing justify doing it anyhow. And you are an adult pretty much in direct proportion to the degree to which you can internalize this lesson, this truth, this possibility.

I feel like I am just starting on that journey in many ways. I have squandered a decade and more of my life letting depression call the shots and thus avoid having to deal with the adult truths of the world.

Depression is a powerful tool for never really growing up.

Nobody truly makes it all the way, though. There will always be that inner child within us who wants everything now and doesn’t want to do anything but eat ice cream and play video games and who will never really accept the need to do things which are boring or scary or hard.

You can see this in people’s dreams. I am of a generation that was universally taught that we are very special unique snowflakes who can grow up to do whatever it is we really like doing for a living, thus neatly negating the very idea of working for a living.

Love science? Be a scientist! Love singing? Be a rock star! Love sports? Be a pro athlete! You can be whatever you want to be if you just try hard enough! And then you will be able to have fun all day and get paid for it, too!

And the people telling us this meant well. They really did. They wanted to give us permission to dream and to believe that adulthood was going to be great and gave us a reason to work hard in school and keep looking forward to the future.

But it was a bad long term plan. In the short term, it works great. Kids love the message and it makes them happy. Adults feel like they are preparing the kids to go out there and take on that world. They could be forgiven, in fact, for feeling like they are giving their kids the kind of hope and motivation that they wish they had gotten themselves.

Certainly, from the point of view of a baby boomer raised by Depression-era Greatest Generation parents who taught them to keep their head down, get a practical education, and become a corporate drone or a civil service cog,someone who might just feel like their own dreams were taken away from them and who wonder what might have been had they just been giving room to fly, it sound fantastic.

But here’s the thing : life is work. No matter what your dreams are, once you leave the comforting arms of academia where everything is graded and tested and taught, you are going to have to do a lot of things you do not feel like in order to get anywhere.

And that means doing a lot of things that will make your inner child throw a shit fit. Stuff that is boring, gross, scary, hard, and not even necessarily guaranteed to be worth it. And that is going to just keep going till the day you die. Even retirement will only relieve you of some of it.

Even if you happen to be lucky enough to have the right combination of drive, personality, and talent to get your dream job, there will still be bills that need paying, houses that need cleaning, errands to run, clothes to wash, and so on.

And even if you are rich enough to pay others to do these things for you, it will still be your responsibility to see that they get done. And even if you are a rock star supermodel, there will still be times when you just plain do not feel like doing that concert or photo shoot, but you will have to do it anyhow. That is life.

Life is work.

There is just no way around it.

So instead of selling our kids the notion that some day they can get a job doing whatever it is they like doing best and it will be almost like not working at all, I think we would be far better off teaching our kids how to work and get things done. And most importantly, how to do it themselves, because they want the results, not just because someone in authority is forcing them to do it.

Because one thing is guaranteed : if authority forces you to do something, the moment that authority is gone you will not only never do that thing again, you will enjoy not doing it.

And people can get stuck like that for their entire lives. They can die old still stubbornly refusing to do whatever it was they were forced to do as children, and loving every minute that they get away with not doing it, no matter how silly that might seem to an adult observer.

And we definitely need to teach our kids that it is perfectly fine not to grow up to be what you wanted to be when you were a kid. That it is perfectly fine to have a boring, unglamorous, mundane job and that it does not mean you are a loser or that you just did not try hard enough.

The world has only so many job openings for astronauts, rock stars, supermodels, and firemen.

The rest of us are going to have to settle.

And there is nothing wrong with that.

Hmmm. Guess I had something to say after all.