It’s late. The whole goddamn city of Tucson is quiet, except for the hum of the refrigerator and the quiet, steady beat of my own tired heart, counting down the seconds. My fifty-seventh birthday is next week. Fifty-seven. You get to an age where you stop counting the years you’ve lived and you start counting the ones you have left. And the math, it’s a cruel, beautiful, and completely honest sonofabitch.
And I’m sitting here, in the dark, with this choice. This beautiful, ugly, and completely insane crossroads. It’s not about logistics or finances; it’s a goddamn bar fight for the soul.
On one side of the room, you’ve got The Golden Cage.
That’s the job. The one with the over-management, the quiet, creeping rot of a passionless existence, the slow, daily erosion of a man’s self-worth. It’s a familiar and predictable confinement. But Christ, the bars are made of gold. There’s a new trickle of it coming in November, when the last of the child support payments finally dies its long, slow, and expensive death. Eleven hundred bucks a month, freed from the ghost of a dead marriage. A welcome comfort.
And then there’s the big prize. The dragon’s hoard. The massive, beautiful, and completely fraudulent bonus that waits at the end of the project. A pile of gold so big it sings to you in the dark. A quiet, seductive whisper of security, of power, of a future where money is no object. It’s a powerful fucking song.
But to get that treasure, you have to trade. And the currency is your own goddamn life force. You have to offer up another seven, maybe twelve, months of your spirit to a machine that doesn’t give a shit if you live or die. You have to walk into that cage every morning, a place that makes you feel small and unhappy, and you have to just… wait. You tell yourself you’re afraid they might fire you, but the deeper fear, the real, ugly, gut-shot fear, is that they won’t.
You’re afraid that on Tuesday, at the goddamn performance review, they’ll praise you. They’ll smile their clean, corporate smiles and they’ll offer you another golden bar for your cage, a quiet, respectable, and completely soul-crushing bribe to keep you hooked until the treasure is paid out, sometime at the end of next year. And as you wait for that phantom treasure, you can feel the man you are today just… fading. A quiet, slow, and completely respectable suicide.
And on the other side of the room? You’ve got The Leap into the Unknown.
On this path, you just… walk. You walk away from the cage, from the gold, from the whole goddamn circus. You leave it all behind. This path, it’s shrouded in mist. There’s no dragon’s hoard at the end of it, just the freedom of the open sky and the quiet, honest smell of the unknown. The eleven hundred bucks a month, that’s still yours. A little bit of walking-around money for a man on the run. But the big score is gone.
This path requires you to trust in one, simple, and completely terrifying thing: yourself. It requires you to believe that the life you’ve planned, the quiet, simple, and beautiful life in Mendoza, funded by what you’ve already got, is enough.
The fear on this path is immediate. It’s a hot, sharp, and beautiful pain. The fear of letting go, of walking away from what they “owe” you. But the feeling on this path is one of liberation. Every day you are not in that job, your soul begins to un-clench. The self-worth that’s gone missing, it doesn’t come back because some sonofabitch in a clean suit gives you a bonus. It comes back because you chose to honor your own goddamn happiness over a paycheck. It comes back because you chose to be a man instead of a well-fed ghost.
And that’s the whole goddamn problem, isn’t it? You’re weighing your spirit against a sum of money. But a man’s spirit has no price tag.
The review on Tuesday, that’s not about them judging you. It’s about you seeing them for who they really are.
If the review is negative, if they tell you you’re a piece of shit, that’s not a failure. It’s a goddamn gift. It’s a key, left in the lock of your cage by a careless guard, a quiet, beautiful, and completely accidental invitation to walk the fuck out and never look back.
But if the review is positive… Christ. That’s the real test. That’s the universe, that old, drunk, and completely sadistic bastard, looking you right in the eye and asking, “Can you be bought? Will you trade your one, beautiful, ugly, and completely fleeting life for our praise and our gold?”
The question is not what they will do. The question is what you will do. You already know this job is a cancer. The money isn’t a reward; it’s a goddamn lure, a piece of shiny bait to keep you hooked until there’s nothing left of you but a skeleton in a nice suit.
So ask yourself this, you old bastard. When you’re seventy-two, if that psychic bitch was right and you even make it that far, and you’re sitting on a balcony somewhere, looking at the goddamn Andes with a bottle of cheap, honest wine in your hand, which memory is going to bring you a moment of peace?
The memory of the bonus, the pile of gold you waited a year in quiet, respectable, and completely soul-crushing misery to receive?
Or the memory of the day you stood up, looked the whole goddamn machine right in the eye, and chose to start your real life, right then and there?
That’s the only question that matters.
The path with the most peace is the one you must follow. And peace is never, ever found in a cage. No matter how beautiful and golden the goddamn bars are.
