innocent bystander //a weblog

Thursday, May 23, 2002

11:59 PM:

how to decide what to do in life? i am at a point right now where i could conceivably shift paths onto any of many different careers:

marketing
writing
professor (history, chinese, or sociology?)
urban planner
architect

but you know what i have learned? it's that the best purpose to pick for your life is the one about which you have the neurosis. there's no point in attempting to be healthy about it, or attempting to solve the neurosis in any other way-- psychotherapy, for example. there is something in all our lives that bothers us, and the only way to work it off, the only way to settle things, to make ourselves happy, is to sweat it off, to grind it down, to worry and strive and whittle (as opposed to, say, maintaining a zen-like calm) because worrying and striving and whittling is hard-wired into our brains. there was something on npr just today about this, only they called it tending, as in the tending instinct.

so, what i think i have a fire under my ass currently to do is marketing. marketing, i choose you. i'm neurotic about you because the job i got laid off from, and have still not replaced, was a marketing job and i feel i need to prove that i can succeed in a marketing job. i can't avoid it. so i will do it.