reflections on my obituary
I work in a field which is very sensitive to geopolitics, and as a consequence of the world flipping upside down again, the few days a week I am able to be paid for were further reduced.
In my weary anger, I vowed to pursue a career change. How can a person live like this? The strategy was simple, see what role I would like to do, and chase it down. Afterwards, I can sell my soul to a for-profit, and make big bucks.
As I ground through self-learning courses, it became evident (multiple times) that there is a critical difference between enjoying a subject, and wanting to make a career out of it. Three "roles" later, months were passing and I was still in the same situation.
The word demoralisation does not fully encapsulate my feelings. I felt shame, disappointment, frustration, and anger. Inside me there were two wolves: one, who does not want to be a capitalist's pawn, and two, one that understands that without some bending-over, we cannot achieve financial security. It quickly became evident that a career change is not merely an economic decision, but also one of principles. Already we give too much of ourselves to who ever wishes to make profit off us. Is there really no small niche, no small crawl space, in which one may rest and feel human? Unexploited, unbent, whole in our own identity, being who we are without compromise?
In my desperation to find a solution I felt as though I was losing my sense of self.
I am not sure when or how the idea to write an obituary came to me. Because the question really boils down to this: How do you want to be remembered? How did you affect those closest to you?
The task is deceivingly simple if you are able to be honest with yourself. Nobody is going to see this obituary. If you lie to yourself, you are betraying yourself in a moment of great need. So I wrote... and I wrote... and it turned out a bit longer than I thought it would.
Am I surprised with what I wrote? No, because we always know who we are if we tell the voices to stfu. Of course nothing I am doing now is in there! I do not want to be remembered for my job. I do not want to be remembered for my LinkedIn profile, or for the things we decorate ourselves with on social media. I want to be remembered for how I expressed my passions, the kindness I bestowed upon friends, family and strangers. I want to write, walk, and in the process teach and share.
We live in a time where we are forced to push away our passions, piling them somewhere out of sight, to fix immediate problems. We are not only robbed of our energy and time to create profit, but we are also robbed from our humanity. In our free time our attention is monetised, our thoughts are forced towards figuring out solutions: better wage, better role.
Of course many of us are not in a position to leave it all behind to follow their passions. I for one, would end up living under a bridge. I still need to work, I still need to figure out solutions. I still need a better wage, a better role. What the obituary made me realise, is that I cannot let my life be consumed by this.
In the boring dystopia in which we find ourselves, there can still be pockets of self-actualisation. Nurturing your passions, even if a little bit at a time, is an act of resistance. Because even if I feel like I have not done a lot towards achieving my fictional obituary, the little that I do (such as writing a blog post every once in a while) has given me a renewed will to live.