This is a cross-post by Marc Goldberg
Everyone around me complains about the long hours that they work but not me, no siree bob! That’s because I don’t work long hours, I actually work very short hours, I mean I’m not supposed to but I tend to come in late and leave early, and if I do leave late it’s because I came into work REALLY late and have to at least pretend to do something to justify my existence here.
My office is a nice building with lots of nice people in it who like complaining about their jobs. We get a nice credit card type thing that the company puts money on every month to contribute to our lunches and we have a cafeteria downstairs if we don’t want to leave. My existence is really incredibly comfortable.
It’s not very fulfilling though.
It makes me think of a hashtag that’s been doing the rounds on Twitter lately #firstworldproblems. It’s where people parody the problems in their nice, comfortable lives; here’s a great example:
I really wanna get batman origins but in 3 more weeks my ps4 comes in the mail #ugh #firstworldproblems
I feel like a parody when I complain about my job. I don’t do much and even if I did it would still involve sitting in a chair all day moving nothing but my fingers over a keyboard and I’m sure I’d be complaining just as much as I am now anyway. probably more. There are people starving in Africa at this very moment, at least I think there are, I’ve never actually checked it out.
The 12 year old me would be seriously pissed with the 34 year old me. I’m not a millionaire billionaire, I’m not a gangster ala Meyer Lansky, I’m not a general, I’m not the head of Mossad and I didn’t really try to be any of them. Well that sucks, man the 12 year old me wanted to do stuff, the 34 year old me keeps wanting not to do stuff. When did that happen?
Even now the 12 year old me is like “you’re not actually gonna hit the publish button on a piece that’s so blatantly a copy of Jason’s style are you?”
Damn the 12 year old me is an asshole!
He keeps whispering in my ear that I’m failing, keeps asking me what happened to all of the stuff I always planned on doing and the man I planned on becoming. The 12 year old me promised my Dad that I’d get him a Ferrari for his 60th birthday. Well that came and went, I didn’t even get him the toy version as a joke.
But it gets even worse. The 34 year old me keeps saying that the 54 year old me will be Prime minister of Israel, or at worst a Nobel Prize winning author. Man is the 54 year old me going to have some explaining to do!
Maybe he’ll be telling himself that the 74 year old me will become the king of the world. In the meantime the 34 year old me is still here contemplating his own first world problems wondering what am I doing to make it to becoming a great writer? What am I doing to get myself to a place that the 12 year old me can actually nod his head and say “this older version of me really did it!”
Well I don’t know, but I do think it’s time I got up off of this chair and did something towards being the man the 12 year old me can be proud of.
Don’t worry. As soon as I’ve figured out what that is, I’ll let you know.
