- Supposed to.
- Not suppose to.
- The d is important.
- …
- Yesterday, driving back from my uncle’s 70th birthday party, I thought about the term “supposed to” a lot.
- Specifically, I thought about it through the lens of how we’re “supposed to” operate in society.
- You’re supposed to want things.
- To want the same things.
- Big houses.
- New cars.
- Fancy clothes.
- You’re supposed to want to get ahead in a career.
- To aspire to wealth.
- And power, I guess.
- You’re supposed to agree with everyone.
- To follow the flock.
- Giggle with the gaggle.
- Goddamn, I have never been good at it.
- I have tried.
- I have tried so hard.
- All my life.
- Most of my interactions with everything professional has been me pretending, trying to fit in, trying to be liked and seen.
- Because I don’t fit in naturally.
- And some part of me knows that, and is desperate to not be alone because he can’t understand what’s wrong with him.
- But trying to be what you’re supposed to be is hard.
- …
- Hell, I wonder if burnout is this.
- We’re “supposed to” be more and more productive, and all the fucking media I see in my threads tries to make me feel awful if I’m not striving to be more productive.
- (insert Peter’s rant from Office Space)
- I wonder if this is why I react the way I do about AI.
- I can see AI as a tool to help me refine some of my thinking and creative ideas.
- Kinda.
- But the flip side of that is it’s refining ideas toward the Great Average.
- Which won’t be making me more productive, it’ll be making me more intellectually and creatively lazy in the long-term.
- (The science on creativity says it’s a muscle, btw, and one everyone has.)
- If you’re using AI as a tool to augment your productivity, to have it replace some of your more rote work output, why the hell are you doing that “work” in the first place?
- Which lands us back in Supposed To-land.
- All this shit we’re supposed to be doing is leeching our humanity and our lives.
- Sucking all the joy and meaning away.
- When I think about this stuff driving the car, it’s because I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong with me.
- Why can I not just do what is expected?
- Why do I not get satisfaction from the expected?
- (I’m aware this isn’t just me and I’m not trying to be a precious little flower, but I can’t speak for anyone else, so here we are.)
- For three weeks after college graduation, I got to hang out with my cousins, Brandi and Josh, in the outskirts of Chicago (and also Las Vegas).
- I bought two CDs on that trip.
- 1) Evil Empire by Rage Against the Machine
- 2) When I Woke by Rusted Root
- While Rusted Root played, Brandi and I talked about something, though I can’t remember exactly what, but she paused mid-sentence while flipping through the CD-book, and said, “I’d like to hang out with these guys.”
- At the time, I thought, Brandi, you crazy.
- Now?
- She was right this whole fucking time.
- We were at Mumford & Sons last night and while I listened to the lyrics, I kept imagining them sitting around a studio strumming their guitars and chatting about life and music and how they must feel so goddamn fulfilled by what they’re doing.
- Yes, yes, I can do those things in my “spare” time.
- No time is spare.
- Creation is not less than, and it sure as hell has immense value.
- I’m not opposed to working, mind you.
- Creating anything is work.
- But doing something someone else has determined the organization needs is not what I’m … supposed to … be doing.
- It isn’t.
- I’m not wired for that.
- I do it anyway.
- Because I’m scared of being destitute.
- Full stop.
- That’s the whole reason I have worked for something else my entire life.
- Something.
- Because businesses are not fucking people.
- The same as AI aren’t.
- Think about this.
- You have a job, your career.
- How often do you determine what you do on any given day?
- Are you far enough up the food chain you get to decide how to spend your day?
- Do YOU set your tasks?
- Sure, there are days where you’re given a task and allowed to complete it how you see fit.
- But how much agency do you have in choosing that thing?
- Food for thought.
- Food for myself and my family, a roof over their heads.
- When I look around, there’s not a lot of things I want anymore.
- Stuff.
- There are some. I am a consumerist, after all, but things.
- Physical things.
- Not a lot of those.
- There are plenty of things I want to DO though.
- I want to see Ghent in Belgium, and to go to European holiday markets, not to buy stuff, but to live moments.
- Yes, many of those moments have people in them.
- Most.
- I’d rather trade something I wanted to make for those moments.
- I want to make art, to sell stories built from my imagination and words.
- I want to talk to other people in my craft about what we’re creating, and then I want to talk to the people who hopefully have enjoyed what I’ve created about how it affected them.
- I want to learn to make and play music.
- I want to paint.
- And build shit.
- I want to live doing the things that bring me solace.
- But … living the here and now is surviving by doing assignments other people give me until I’m used up and reach that government mandated retirement age, a number chosen by those who already have enough funds to buy their freedom and agency.
- Life’s being suppressed by “supposed to,” squashed by the consumer economy and all the tasks we’ve been assigned to survive in it.
- I’m not making a political statement.
- I’m talking about our entire modern way of life.
- This is not how it is supposed to be.
- There is plenty.
- Your value and worth are not your assigned hourly-wage.
- Which brings us back to that other album I bought in Chicago, Evil Empire.
- (And I’m sitting here wondering if an examination of Zack’s lyrics is a detour from today’s theme. Maybe yes, maybe no.)
- So … I won’t.
- I highly recommend going to read his words on that album, or hell, stick your headphones on and listen to it audio book-style.
- Zack’s a goddamn prophet.
- And he’s rebelling against “supposed to” in every way.
- I have struggled with it my whole life, wrestled with the fear of being poor, of being a failure.
- More internally than externally.
- I’ll go do what I need to do, but inside, it’s a maelstrom.
- That scene of Agent Smith talking to Morpheus while the latter is chained to the chair.
- That. That moment.
- And before you go, “Well, why don’t you just do what you want?”
- Goddamn what a dismissal that kind of thing is.
- What an uninformed, unempathetic take to have on someone else’s situation.
- We have to stop trying to make other people fit in the boxes we build in our heads.
- We alike, but we are not the same.
- You’re supposed to have empathy.
- You’re supposed to have the opportunity to be fulfilled.
- To life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
- Not to provide value for stakeholders.
- TL;DR: fuck “supposed to.”
- Thanks for stopping by.
TL;DR
skepticlysm 
Leave a comment