Candy for breakfast

As many video games as you want, all day long! (Image by digitalskennedy)

On my to-do list today is a particularly dreaded item that I’ve been putting off for eighteen months.

It actually only recently made it onto my to-do list in the first place, having previously been banished to the netherworld of stuff I need to do but can’t even deal with acknowledging.

All it is, is a form I need to fill out and mail to the company that monitored the security system at a house I sold back in 2019, canceling the service.

I tried calling to cancel — nope. And I can’t scan and email. I have to put a stamp on it. Why did I have security monitoring with a company that apparently only has document transfer technology from the nineteenth century? I don’t know. Won’t go back.

As children, we glamorize adult life. We imagine that we will buy all the candy we want and eat it at any meal we want. We will stay up as late as we want to and drive a muscle car, a monster truck, a two-seater convertible, or something else equally impractical. And we’ll have a cool job and a cool house.

We don’t know that, by the time we get to adulthood, we won’t be willing to make the trade-offs necessary to sustain a party-all-night, candy-all-day lifestyle or drive, say, a pink car that doesn’t have room for key members of our family. We become boring old grownups.

Of course, we can still have the cool job and the cool house, or at least aspire to them. Our tendency to glamorize other lifestyles doesn’t die with childhood. In fact, the current culture makes entrepreneurship sound like the highest level of self-actualization and the pinnacle of achievement. The idea of being your own boss is as seductive to the frustrated employee as candy for breakfast is for a child. But it’s not a better approach to life, and it carries its own trade-offs.

When you work for yourself, you can theoretically sleep in whenever you want. Theoretically, you don’t need to answer to anyone. But if you want your lifestyle to be sustainable, you have to commit to work on behalf of your clients and do the work to maintain your business in addition to that. Sure, you can get other people to do some of the work for you, but you have to treat them well and, you know, pay them. You haven’t actually escaped from anything. You’re just choosing a different set of constraints and responsibilities.

Yes, I get to make my own schedule and show up whenever I want. And for me, often, that means a lot of ten-hour days, working on the weekend, and dealing with crises when I had something else planned. And I still must drain my precious life force in filling out and mailing BS paperwork. No escaping that.

No one needs to feel sorry for me or any other business owner, but neither should we be held up as aspirational. The whole point of adulthood in a free society is that we get to make choices. If we don’t like the choices we have made, we can try choosing something else. And that’s true whether we are employed by another person’s company or our own.

My dad has often said that he was never so busy as he is in retirement. I’m not sure if that’s strictly true, but it points to the fact that free time rarely remains free. We fill it with an array of obligations and pastimes that make up a life. We can question many of them, but we still need to feed ourselves and keep our homes clean and be there for the people we care about. Completely free days show up more often during the pandemic than they used to, but those free days probably have a bit of dog-walking and dish-washing and email-checking, no matter who you are.

We grownups can fantasize about running our own business or being fantastically wealthy or selling all of our possessions to travel the world. We can even make these fantasies become reality. But our problems won’t magically be solved, any more than freeing ourselves from the shackles of parental restriction once did. Still, it’s good every now and then to remind ourselves that we could have chocolate cake for breakfast or play hooky for a day, even if we generally choose not to. In doing so, we might realize that we’re already living exactly the life we want. And if not, we can change it.