Some dead bastard, Thoreau, I think, once said that
most men live lives of quiet desperation.
It’s one of my favorite quotes ever. Why? Because it’s the goddamn truth. It’s the quiet, humming, fluorescent-lit soundtrack to the whole beautiful, ugly, and completely fucked-up American experiment.
I’ve been that guy. You’ve probably been that guy. Hell, most of the poor bastards you see shuffling down the street, staring at their own goddamn shoes, they are that guy. Stuck in a world, in a life, that feels like a cheap suit two sizes too small, and you just can’t wait to run away, to rip the whole goddamn thing off and stand naked in the rain.
But you don’t.
So how do you get stuck? How does a man, a beautiful, stupid, and completely free animal, end up in a quiet, respectable, and completely soul-crushing cage?
It’s simple. It’s elegant. It’s a goddamn masterpiece of quiet, slow-motion self-destruction.
The bills.
That’s the first set of bars. The rent on an apartment you hate. The lease on a car that’s just a prettier cage to get you to your real cage. The quiet, steady, and completely relentless hemorrhage of money just to keep the lights on and the wolves from the door.
And then come the commitments. The real chains. The ones you forge yourself, out of love, or loneliness, or just plain fucking stupidity. The wife, who started out as a beautiful, wild, and completely intoxicating mystery, and somehow, slowly, quietly, turned into another goddamn bill collector, another mouth to feed, another quiet, respectable reason not to burn the whole house down. The kid, that beautiful, ugly, and completely honest little miracle that arrives like a screaming, shitting bomb, blowing up your old life and chaining you, with a love so fierce it feels like a goddamn fist around your heart, to a new one. The mortgage, the this, the that… layer after beautiful, ugly, suffocating layer.
You see, when you’re young, when you’re just a dumb, beautiful animal with nothing but a hard-on and a handful of bad ideas, you have options. The whole goddamn world is an open road. You can sleep in your car, you can eat ramen for a month, you can tell the whole world to go fuck itself.
But every time you pick up another responsibility, another beautiful, necessary, and completely soul-crushing chain, the road gets narrower. The options disappear. Until one day, you wake up, and you realize you’re not on an open road anymore. You’re on a goddamn train track, and the train is heading straight for a quiet, respectable, and completely passionless grave.
And you have a choice. You can stay on the tracks, take the safe path. The one they all tell you to take. The quiet, respectable, and completely predictable path of least resistance.
And that path, my friend, that safe path, it leads straight to the heart of quiet desperation almost every single goddamn time. It’s not a path; it’s a slow, quiet, and completely respectable slide into hell.
So how do you get out? How do you jump the goddamn tracks?
It’s not easy. The walls are high, and the guards are sleepy, but they’re still guards.
First, you need a window. A little bit of breathing room. And in this world, breathing room costs money. So you start saving. You squirrel away every spare goddamn dime you can find. You stop buying the bullshit, you stop eating the fancy meals, you become a monk in the church of your own goddamn escape plan. You need enough cash to buy yourself a few months, maybe six, maybe a year, where you can tell the machine to go fuck itself without starving to death in the street.
Then, you need a plan.
Not a dream. Not a wish. A goddamn plan. A map out of the shithole. You spend every waking hour outside of that quiet, soul-crushing job you hate, and you build the raft. You learn the new skill, you write the book, you start the business in the garage. You work like a man whose life depends on it, because it does. This isn’t a hobby; it’s a goddamn prison break.
And here’s the most important part. The part they don’t tell you in the self-help books.
You have to look yourself in the mirror, in the quiet, ugly, and beautiful hours of the morning, and you have to admit the truth.
You fucked up.
You got yourself into this cage. Not the wife, not the kids, not the boss. You. You made the choices. You signed the papers. You built the goddamn walls.
And only you can tear them down.
Whatever you’re doing now, whatever quiet, respectable, and completely soul-crushing routine you’re trapped in, you have to break it. You have to treat your escape plan not like a dream, but like a goddamn emergency. Like the house is on fire, and your own beautiful, ugly, and completely irreplaceable life is the only thing worth saving.
Because it is.
