Profit

Kinda trippy that I've biologically persisted nearly to the age of 25 without any idea whatsoever of how to make enough money to buy a car, isn't it? It's not even not the cash right on hand to stroll down to the dealership and pick one up that bothers me, but that I have no functional concept of how to generate the wealth needed to do so. At the end of high school I figured I'd be back in a sweet ride in no time, but now, over six years on, a Craigslist 1993 Celica might as well be Xanadu. I react to the mechanics of moneymaking with the same befuddlement that many of these well-heeled vehicle owners do when they stare at the dark, occult forms under their hoods.

How did it come to this? Not by design, certainly; I've long held no small degree of contempt for the voluntarily unmoneyed twentysomething. ("I'm a free spirit, man.") And I wouldn't say I've reached this sorry point out of sheer ignorance or delusion, either. I've seen money made, I've read about how money is made, I've talked to people who make money. I understand, on many levels, how money-making works. But I still perceive it as a mystical substance that only comes to me in unpredictable quantities on the eve of its choosing, when the stars have aligned just so, the four humors have fallen into balance and the Great Magnet points due north. We laugh at South Park's underpants gnomes, but my life plan is, in form, identical to their business plan:

• Collect skills
• ?
• Profit

I'm no fool, though. I've dutifully read my Paul Graham. I know that, to make money, you have to Make Something People Want. This, in itself, is perfectly acceptable: I'm a person, and I know what I want, so I should theoretically be able to make what I want and offer it to the wider public. The problem is that what "people want" seems, in practice, to be a dog's breakfast of "packet authentication," "advanced micropayments" and "e-commerce," none of which I could sustain enough enthusiasm for to spend a 120 hours a week grinding away on. Even if I could — and I don't find those things totally uninteresting — I'd be robbed of the time I need to work on stuff I actually care about, and thus stand a snowball's chance in hell of doing a decent job on.

What do I actually care about doing well? The answers come surprisingly easily: writing essays, making radio, working with sound and music, making film and video. All fun stuff, though I can't help but imagine that if "grubbing my way to the nearest professional degree and leveraging it" or "starting a business intensely focused on improving the procedures of some minute sub-sub-subregion of an industry" or "painstakingly designing a slightly improved paper clip," I'd have been in my ideal 300ZX — or any 300ZX — years ago.¹ But at what price?

Though I generally look back on my teenage self admiringly, surprised at how much he actually got right, my greatest youthful delusion turns out to be far from small potatoes. Back then, I thought I wouldn't mind doing work I didn't give a rat's @$$ about as long as it paid enough — after all, I couldn't have cared less about school or The Gap, my dual icons of work in those days. (I did do an unpaid radio internship for a while, and there I cared about performing well. It didn't offer any financial compensation, but it was at least tangentially linked to a form that mattered to me.) But this turns out not to be the case.

I've seen more than a few people fall into this basic scenario: get some McJob or cultivate an unengaging "fallback" career to support whatever it is they "really" do; grow dependent on the entity providing said McJob/fallback; build up a lifestyle whose monthly expenditure requires said employment; gradually, imperceptibly forget about real endeavors in the name of shorter-term concerns; become some hideous institutional creature, like a blind fish that feeds whatever nutrients happen to float across the ocean floor.

I could do that. Easily. I'm subject to the same human psychological pressures and bizarro incentives as everyone else, eternal vigilance their only counterweight. However, my own life's "not worth living" threshold seems easy crossable. There are those who argue that sometimes you just have to do lousy work, and they've got a fair point, but the notion that one must perform unrelated gruntwork for the paycheck to support the real work cuts both ways. It's easy to let the real projects slip or get smothered, and without it you can't justify your existence — or at least I can't justify mine.

And hey, I'm only barely justifying my own use of Earth's resources as it is. Perhaps my breathing of air and eating of food is just slightly less instinctual than other peoples', but I'm perpetually asking myself if I'm working on something important enough to keep willing myself forward. "I'm alive, therefore I live" has never quite played. If I simply started working full-time at whatever job happens to be the most lucrative available to me, life would quickly pass both the "not worth living" and "not justifiable" checkpoints. I've come to value immensely the counterintuitive revelation that it does not, in fact, all come down to "you gotta eat." It actually comes down not to a statement but to a question: "Why eat?"

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¹ Once, when I was 17, a coworker 20 years my senior told me confidently that she was sure I'd be "in a Bimmer" by the age of 25. Sorry to disappoint, Cheryl.