On Slavery and Broken Bonds, Perhaps

[Brandon G.]

I am first going to say that this is very difficult to write about. The motivation to compile so much intricate information that is held in a mostly emotional state and convert those feelings into words articulated seems difficult coupled with the feelings of vulnerability of putting yourself “out there.” I apologize, but I am not going to proofread the following. I tend to be perfectionist and having through about this for quite some time I have realized that if I consider the task of writing what I feel I need to write and making it what should be, the task will forever be too overwhelming to consider and will fail to launch. So in order to make this achievable I have allowed myself to simply write this as is and if I so desire, I may go back later and edit and change things. The thought of the work involved in perfectly articulating this difficult and personal experience in the way that would be best is too much for me to take on mentally and so the below is my compromise in an effort to produce something rather than the inevitable nothing if I continue to wait until I have the will power to make it perfect.  

I believe I have come to a better understand of what it is that makes the modern version of earning a living so difficult, and the journey to that potential understanding was very difficult to reach. Around the time of grade school I began to realize that when people spoke about what their job was or when my contemporaries explained what they wanted to be I had a sinking feeling of anxiety in my stomach. Knowing that getting a job was so far away it was easy to ignore. As I got older it began to get stronger and stronger. Having parents that were in the very first years of the boomer generation my examples of what earning money meant was not unique. You were to go to school, get a job and work with very little work/life balance in order to provide and ultimately it didn't matter what it was that you were doing, you just did it. Anything outside of this was lazy or nonsensical. I spent years trying to change my way of thinking to fit into this mold, and when I say I tried, I believed that because of thought of that form of earning a living made me anxious and fearful and at times, physically sick to my stomach, it was simply because I was lazy and spoiled. After all, I could find no one else at all that shared my views on earning a living. Sure, others didn't like their jobs, but what I experienced was different. I didn't like school in the same way others didn't like their job, but the thought of earning a living in the way I just described actually took the desire and motivation to even live, deep down inside of me, to extinguish. As I moved through college the feelings would be harder and harder to push down and in 2005 I attempted to enter the workforce. It was a hard time to find a job and it was even harder to willingly attempt to do something that felt equally as painful as walking to a hard-labor rock-mining camp and asking to be shackled. I ended up finding a minimum wage job and I tried to muster acceptance as much as I possibly could. My heart and soul burned so hard every day that I found it difficult to carry on a conversation. I came home each and every day and went to bed. My chest would often feel hot and tense. I saw those around me spending the vast majority of their day working for things that I found to be useless and I spent much of my time attempting to understand how, even thought they didn't like it, it did not seem to take away their desire to live, love and exist. At this point in my life all I knew is that I wanted freedom. It was not work that I hated, but a lack of freedom, but at this time in my life all I knew of work was that it was a 40 hour or more workweek and if you wanted to own your own business, it would be much more than that, and I had no passion for a business to set my sights on. The irony is, as much as I wanted to get a decent job so I could feel as though I was a valid human being capable of fully supporting myself, I couldn't seem to land anything. It was a rough time in the market I was in and there were a large number of graduates. The vast number of college graduates entering the market meant that the worth of a simple bachelors degree had lost its value. I would spent many years in pain and confusion on attempting to figure out what was wrong with me and why I could not accept the reality that to live meant to spend most of your time working toward something I felt was wasteful. I believe, at least, I now have a better understanding of what this means to me.

Our values seem to me to be a lens through which we view and interpret the world. It would seem to me that the world is what it is, in truth, however we perceive that through the lens of our values. If you wear blue-block sunglasses the entire world will take on a yellow hue, but you may never know it if you've worn them your entire life. Our values are crafted by our culture. For whatever reason, my values were not always in line with those of my peers. In one aspect, what I valued was personal freedom of my thoughts and time. Working a job felt like literal slavery, and I didn't know why and though I tried I could find no one, literally zero individuals, that didn't think that was a vast over-dramatization of reality.

In The Bible it explains that a person should not go into debt. Upon further study of this I do not believe this means we should never borrow money, but rather that we should never make ourselves beholden to others. Many would understand that it would be very, very difficult to operate businesses today without using debt, and often debt can be more freeing that using no debt. There may be examples of someone taking out very large debt, say one million dollars or more, and that debt may not enslave them to anyone, however there may be an example of another individual taking out a loan of five thousand dollars and this loan may all but enslave the borrow to the debtor in many or all aspects of their life. It is in this line that I have reached my current understanding of my feelings. When I work for someone I now have sold not only my time, but myself, to those people. They quite literally own my thoughts because they have purchased them, and I have quite literally sold myself to them. They now have the right to tell me in what order I will now rank the priorities in my life. While I am under their time, they will tell me who is important, in what manner is most important in which to act and worst of all, the acceptable amount of sacrifice I can make to restructure that order. An example of this may be a day where a member of my family or close friends has a very emotionally trying time in their life and may need to talk or may need help in some way. If I control my own life, I may chose to sacrifice my priorities and tend to their needs, however if I have sold my time and mind, I may not have the freedom to make them a priority without sacrificing my standing with my employer. This is a very simple, and by no means exhaustive, example of a much larger concept that I am attempting to get across. Because of the development of my values from an early time in my life, I find this to feel imprisoning. It gives me great anxiety and I am seemingly unable to break away from this line of thinking. I do not expect others to fully understand or accept how these issues effect me, mostly because I have spent many years trying to explain these things to others with almost no understanding. Granted, my sample groups have unfortunately been mostly individuals which are already part of the working class and so would be the types to be comfortable working in that environment. It was only the advent of the internet that allowed me to begin reading the writings of others that had feelings similar to my own. I had literally through that I may be delusion, or have a mental problem, and I am very serious in saying that, because my mode of thought about what living should be has been so divergent from what I have found in anyone I have contact with in the real world that it has caused me to believe I am the problem. After all, that is how we make sense of the world, by comparing our interpretation of the world around us to others' interpretations and then determining the likelihood of whether we're right or wrong by the number of matches we get. Sometimes, it seems however, that something strikes us so strong in the core of who we are, that no matter how many negative results we get from the surrounding group we simply cannot assimilate and overwrite our perceptions. I now work in a coporate setting and on a daily basis I cannot conceive how others can sit behind their computers for 8, 9 or 10 hours and not be utterly stricken in the soul of how this is not how we were meant to live our lives. I feel as though, judging from their actions, I am the only one in the building who feels that what we're doing seems utterly soul wrenching and this makes me think that the problem lies within myself, however again this may be flawed in that I am taking a poor sample of the population. I am only sampling those which have chosen and stay in a corporate setting. Surely all those that felt the same as I would not be staying in the situation.

I worked very low paying, very degrading jobs for for the better part of 12 years. I would go through periods of time where I could handle what I was doing better than others. I once had a delivery job that allowed me to drive through various parts of the state and the sense of exploration allowed me to alleviate some of the pain in my chest, however the feeling of inadequacy of not being able to find a job that could fully support an independent life were always there.

I was working in a factory at the time I met Mr. Stone. He was a very old and eccentric man that lives two doors down from me. I had always tinkered with antique cars because they were a visceral outlet for me to attach myself to a past time that I had a deep connection with. Mr. Stone had bought an old Model A Ford at a yard sale and needed me to transport it across town to a garage for him so his wife wouldn't find out. I rode with him one night to the hidden garage. I had always been able to get along with older generations from the earliest age and in the conversation he, as so many do, asked how things were going. I had never really found a good way to field this question because I was essentially always depressed because of my work lifestyle, but people don't want to hear that, however I also never became fully comfortable without being honest. I would usually say everything is fine and feel some dissonance at the enormous lie I was having to play out. In this instance, I told him I was profoundly unhappy with my work situation and I partially explained why. He explained to me that he had rental property and that I should look into that because he thought I would be good at it but more importantly, it offered him some of the freedom I had mentioned. To say at this point that I was ignorant of real estate would be an understatement. The thought of myself buying and owning investment property seemed so foreign to me that I may as well considered attempting to create a company building rockets to go to space, and again, emotionally those two concepts were not far apart.

I may, at this point, need to take a slight aside to quickly reference something that I'm sure a great many people can relate to. My parents were very supportive in any efforts I may have ever possessed that were outside their own pleasure or understanding. Their lack of interest in my interests was also matched by negative reinforcement for any effort I may have wanted to put forth into something. It was only by deep passion that I ever moved beyond this, for example learning to work on antique cars or blues guitar. As a result, I unfortunately seem to have a default setting of “you will fail” and “just maintain the status quo” which is at great odds with my natural self which seems to analyze the world and seems to see it differently than most individuals. I don't in any way mean this in a self-aggrandizing way. In fact, it's mostly miserable. Finding you are unable to relate to most people on the very foundations of what you believe life is about is nothing to be lauded, but in my experience is a path of difficulty in finding deep and meaningful relationships without compromising deep felt beliefs. At any rate, my reason for mentioning this is to give some context for how why the following events were so difficult.

I remember dwelling on Mr. Stone's words for a solid week or two. The world of real estate was so vast and full of piranha that it seemed like eating an elephant the size of a planet. Where to even begin? I sat down no less than 3 times in that time period in an attempt to search for knowledge about real estate on the internet and it was so overwhelming I would end up typing in the term in the search bar, look at the results and move on to something else. Finally, I began clicking links and though I do not consider myself exceptionally intelligent I feel as though I can smell out relatively well when someone is making you out to be a product rather than a student. I eventually came upon the website Bigger Pockets. The way they laid out the information made it very assailing, even to someone as overwhelmed and insecure as I was. I found the beginners guide to be like a Godsend. I do not intend for this to sound like a commercial for Bigger Pockets, but I explained what I did in the above paragraphs to give context to just how important it was for someone like me to have this information laid out in the format in which it was.

I had taken a job at a warehouse and after spending several months in silence alone decided I needed to find a way to occupy my mind. I purchased a small mp3 player and began downloading the Bigger Pockets podcasts. I would keep a piece of paper in my pocket at all times and each time I had a question I would write it down. Eventually I had several pages of questions that I would compile into a list. Eventually I would sit down with people who managed properties for a living and get their insights into the questions I had compiled. It only took a short while for the book Rich Dad Poor Dad to be mentioned numerous times in the podcasts. I downloaded the audio book and listed to it on the small mp3 player. I understand that because I am highlighting some very intense moments of life and stinging them together this explanation may give an unrealistic sense of my emotional stability, but I suppose that's a side effect I'm willing to accept. Rich Dad Poor Dad has had a huge effect on many, many people, as indicated by how often it is cited as an impetus to action. When I listened to this book it was literally the first time in my life I had heard anyone say anything that aligned remotely close to how I felt about life. This was the first time someone had literally said you're not crazy. I highlight the following because it happens very rarely, the experience literally brought me to tears. A lifetime of dissonance between how I had felt so deeply and yet received no understanding all came to a head. Up until this point I had felt that meaning in my life was hopeless and that my future was to be that of misery while enduring working at meaningless the rest of my days. If my understanding of the world, my affliction, was diabetes, then podcasts and the recommended books of how to escape “the rat race” was insulin. I was torn, because it did not feel real and I had the voice inside me that said that I would never be able to escape, however I was at the same time invigorated by hearing the words of individuals that saw what I saw, too. I found that if I did not listen to at least one podcast or book per week I would begin to slip into a doubt of feeling overwhelmed, hopelessness and depression. In reality, I was listening to at least one podcast a day, sometimes two. If I did that, I would possess this belief that not only was this possible, but that I was, without a doubt, going to make it happen. I felt I had found the answer to the universe. I talked to everyone I could about this, because this was all new to me and I was still very ignorant to the reality that, I don't view the world like everyone else for some reason. I felt that admitting I was different was some sort of ego trickery on my part to make myself feel special, so I continued to insist that surely everyone must somehow be as miserable as myself and they must be waiting, even if subconsciously so, to find the great news which I had found. Let us be honest, the truth about real estate does sound too good to be true considering the alternative of earning a living through a W2, so the continued lack of interest or lackluster response of humoring me shouldn't have been a surprise, however it was to me. I continued to be astounded that we were all stuck in a prison on death row and I just found the master key to every lock, yet as it turns out, all these years of hearing how no one wanted to be in prison was just a way of expression their discontent on how the prison treated them, not a true desire to escape. For me, it was escape or die, for them, it was beg for better slop at chow time. Unfortunately, I cannot say their lackluster response did not weigh heavy on me. I questioned if I had been seduced by snake oil salesmen. I did not feel this to be the case, but my own broken internal voice demanded me to consider this constantly. I went to a school when I was younger that forced us to read an unrealistic amount. As a result, I do not enjoy reading, however podcasts and audio books I find to be wonderful. In fact, in the beginning it almost felt like cheating because I realized I was obtaining information without the negative consequences of hating the method of consumption I had so closely tied with learning. It was at this point that all the wasted years of forced education began to move aside and my real education began. One that would unfortunately further set me apart of those around me, but would ultimately reveal truths which I had felt in my heart for years, but did not understand.

This is all I have time for now. It is my hope I'll find myself able to continue this later.  If not, I write this in part because this is the only way I am able to explain why I am thankful for Bigger Pockets and express that I meant it in sincerity.