Don't stop calling, you're the reason I love losing sleep. (Day 79) [Guest Update]

Today's update comes from Jonathan Yost, a friend of mine, and Editor of Racket Magazine. He also has his own blog, called "The Emperor Decrees".

Make sure to check the blog out, and head on over to his blog and magazine.


Hows everyone enjoying the Guest Updates?

-Aaron Hale

Our world is evolving, but what does that mean? Evolution is the end result of mutations allowing those with the most desirable traits to produce the most offspring, thus strengthening said traits. Is our world is a hyper-evolved, grotesquely mutated version of what is was even twenty years ago? Mutated, absolutely. It’s a sick echo of what our parents grew up in.

I am asked for my advice on a daily basis. Work, school, relationships and everything in between. Somehow, I have gained a reputation for knowing what to do and I have no idea how that happened. I work a job I despise, watching people spend too much money on jeans that they’ll stop wearing “next season” and dealing with dirtbags and doucherags on a daily basis. I spent seven years trying to plow through school while working and attempting to have meaningful relationships, which I haven’t had in over two years.

I wondered why people came to me, and thought of the following:

- At 27, I am older than most of my friends, even though some are very confused to find that I am older than them.

- I have had multi-year relationships, including a cohabiting one.

- Their parents have less idea of what to do in this day and age than they do.

The last bullet point got me. It was a revelation that simultaneously knocked the wind out of my and scared the shit out of me. It’s not that people are looking for my advice per se, it’s that they are looking for anyone who can guide them. My entire generation is lost in a sea of online dating, tech jobs, global warming and terrorism on multiple fronts. Our parents grew up as the first real generation of working women, where it was no longer “find yourself a woman, a solid job, and settle down.”

Now we have people blindly making decisions based on antiquated guidelines and suggestions. My plans were also based on those same anachronistic pathways. After school, I was fully expecting to have both a respectable job and a fiancé within weeks after graduation. I watched as both fell away and me with no manual to check to see what to do next. I dwelled on the coulda-beens and the what-ifs, searching for someone with the knowledge of what I was supposed to do next.

As I found no one that had such a tome of answers, I blindly forged ahead. Went on dates because it was the thing to do, working an unfulfilling job because I couldn’t find anything that paid decent in what I wanted to do and plowing through the inane bullshit that comes at you on a daily basis. After losing absolutely amazing friends, making new ones and patching myself back together, after coke-heads and South African Jews, a brief foray into the sporting goods industry, our home break-in and my sitcom cast of roommates, after trips to a spaceship house in Wisconsin and a concert in the middle of nowhere outside of Seattle, and after everything that I hated for the last two years I realized that no one knows the answers, and no one should.

Life is fucking crazy, and you have to be a little crazy to be a part of it, but that’s half the fun. Go enjoy your fucking life.


-Aaron Hale.