Another little freeform contemplation, as I was working on the publication schedule for the upcoming essays on Relevant Experience. It’s quite a job, because there’s a lot of them, and keeping them organized, keeping track of what’s going up and when and what the variation is — because I like to jump around.
I don’t want to move through these things in a linear fashion, as you’ve noticed. Today, as I was going through all these essays and jobs, and also reflecting on the fact — I mentioned it somewhere else — that these are all jobs except for the Skin & Sugar sequence. These are all jobs that I held before the age of 30.
My Chronicle ends in 1996. 1995, 1996. When I realized that — I know it, of course, but I hadn’t really let it sink in — all these experiences are basically from a ten-year period. The first one, the video game tester, is 1982, and then fast forward fourteen years.
When I look at how I jumped around from job to job and place to place, following experiences — some of them were baked into where I was living at the time: Tucson, Arizona, the college era, high school. But throughout my twenties, I was always following some sort of pursuit.
Of course I was following a pursuit — some inner calling. That sounds interesting. That sounds challenging, that sounds cool. Whatever it was. There was always some deeper element of me trusting my intuition. Yeah, I’m gonna go to Alaska. Why not?
Inherent in all of that is just risk. I was thinking about risk this morning. My calculation around taking risks is a little different. I’m willing to take risks, but to me it’s not just: I like risk, I’m a risky guy, I like to be daring. There’s a different calculus, because risk inherently suggests failure. What happens if this doesn’t go well? With business ventures, it’s obvious: I’m gonna invest $10,000 in this guy’s company, and if it fails, I’m out $10,000. That’s the risk.
But with pursuing all these different jobs and different experiences and not giving a shit what kind of pattern I was establishing on my résumé during the early part of my working life — if you’re a risk-oriented person, you would look at this and think you’re out of your mind. You’re taking risk after risk after risk. The calculus for me is that I never considered the alternative. I’ll have to go back and think about whether there are times I should have, but as far as pursuing these life experiences — once something sparkled for me, once this shiny object appeared, there was never: well, what if I just stayed here and did this thing that doesn’t feel fulfilling anymore? What if I just stayed in this place, this job where I don’t feel challenged?
The Thunderbird Archaeology job was fantastic. I look back on that, especially the first six months when we were working in West Virginia. We were paid to hike into some of the most beautiful terrain, looking for historic and prehistoric sites. Pinch me — I get paid to go hiking every day. It sucked at times, but even when it sucked, I was conscious of it being very cool.
Then that contract ended. The latter part of that job, I was in the suburbs of Washington, DC, traipsing around undeveloped land in between subdivisions. Even though it was undeveloped, it was still gross — forest that had probably been cut several times, the undergrowth all briers and invasive plants that come in once you start mucking with a landscape. It just wasn’t fun. It was kind of miserable. There was no question: I needed to change something. It was time for something different. That’s when I moved back to Tucson to try my hand at graduate school.
There was nothing ambiguous in my inner compass that it was time for a change. After about six months in Tucson, something in my inner compass was telling me: grad school, a career in academia, is not for you. There’s no risk involved with not sticking with something that wasn’t working. The risk was: what happens if you do stick with something that isn’t working? What happens if you stick with something that just isn’t you? That’s the greater risk.
If I look back on the risk I took when I shoved off from Tucson on February 1st, 1995 — I was out of my mind. Looking back now, I scraped together all my money and had about a thousand dollars in cash. As a later essay will show, that day did not go well. My plan was to drive up into the Pacific Northwest — an area of the country I hadn’t spent much time in. I had a Volkswagen Thing packed full of my stuff, and my car blew up the very same day I left. The whole plan shot right then and there. I had a thousand bucks to my name, sitting in a gas station in Indio, California: do I go forward or do I go back? I could figure out a way to limp myself the five hours back to Tucson, where I knew I had a room, reset the plan. But then what? Or I could keep moving — and I kept moving.
One thing led to another. I wound up spending three months in the Bay Area living in a tool shed, working odd jobs to save up enough money to buy an inexpensive car and a plane ticket to Alaska. The car was a funny choice, because I bought it, used it for a few weeks, and then garaged it for the whole six months I was in Alaska. One might say: was that a wise expenditure? But it turned out to be, for reasons I’ll get into later.
Every time I did something, what really baffles me now is how little money I had. The thought of uprooting and jumping into the unknown, not really knowing where I was going to land, what work was guaranteed — when I left for Alaska the first time, I had a friend working at the airport up there, and he said, you just kind of gotta show up. You’ll probably get a job when you get here. You gotta show up and talk to the boss. He doesn’t hire people unless they’re here ready to work. I’m like, all right, that’s good enough for me — buy a plane ticket for me and my dog, go to Alaska, and hope I get this job.
I was still hovering around a thousand dollars cash. The idea of uprooting, taking almost everything I owned, going to a different state, a place where I’d never been, a place where I had a single point of contact — because it sounds cool and I have a thousand dollars in my pocket. If I did the long-term math, that would get me up there. If I didn’t find any way to earn money, I could survive for a few weeks if I was thrifty. Then I’d start seeing the bottom of my bank account become the equivalent of a plane ticket home — and there was no home at that point. No place I was going to go back to and think: this is obviously where I will return. I had family stuff back east, sort of family stuff in the Bay Area, my little base in Tucson. None of them were places I really wanted to be. So that was always the crash plan: if everything crashed and burned, I would have to figure out one of those places to go. I’d be in Alaska with enough money to buy a plane ticket somewhere and then figure things out.
So that’s insane. But the real risk wasn’t: what happens if this experience doesn’t pan out? The real risk was sticking with something you knew wasn’t for you.
The same thing when I quit my job — and this goes a little past the reach of Relevant Experience Part One, probably Part Two as well. When I was working in New York City, working for a big IT consulting firm, making good money, the job going well. I was on track for a promotion, which I didn’t know until I gave my notice. The regional project manager said, you sure you want to quit? You’ve got a path here, a trajectory. We’ve got plans for you. And there was just not a shred of doubt in my mind. I’d spent a couple years in that job, and while there were things I liked about it, I felt like I was going to work every day wearing someone else’s clothes. I couldn’t do it anymore. I had the opportunity to move to Budapest. The amount of money I carried with me as a buffer had changed, my sensibility had changed over the previous five or six years, but still wasn’t a lot. I moved over with $6,000 to a foreign country where I didn’t speak the language and hoped for the best.
I laugh — it’s just silly. I didn’t really have a point when I grabbed the mic this morning. I just wanted to think through that risk element, because my father was a banker all his life, and for a long time his job was in risk assessment: corporate loans, financing, things I don’t fully understand. When there was a potential new lending client, he would spend time with the company, go visit, assess things, figure out whether it was a good place to do business. He would assess risk.
For a lot of my life, my decisions made absolutely no sense to my father. I gave the poor man an undue amount of worry and stress because of it, because he looked at the other side of the risk — the future risk, the risk associated with plowing into uncharted territory. The risk of: what if that goes wrong? I assessed risk by looking at the risk of staying on a path that just did not feel right. The navigational element for me was one I never doubted: that inner calling, that spark that said go to Alaska, seek adventure, go find work that really challenges you, get out of your comfort zone.
When I left grad school and set out on that trip, the decision came down to: I was twenty-four years old, and I’d spent almost all of my life in academic pursuit. I didn’t know the rest of me. I’d mastered the pursuit of knowledge in the academic setting. I could apply myself, do well, get good grades, make good relationships. But I didn’t know how I functioned in the world, and the only way to know was to throw myself into it and test myself. The calculus was: not doing that is simply not an option.
Staying in that corporate job in New York where I was making good money but wasn’t happy — there was just such a greater risk to my constitution. When you think about something and your heart just sinks, that ceases to be an option. The risk is just unimaginable to me.
To be continued. I’ve rattled on for a while, but this contemplation of the role risk plays and how you calculate it — I think it plays a big part in how you make life decisions. For better or for worse. Maybe my next one will be the times when my decisions did not yield the result I wanted, and what I did about it.
I don’t plan these audio dispatches. It’s just when something is gnawing at me and I need to work it out. Thank you for reading the essays. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for your feedback — I love hearing from people about the thoughts they have after reading some of these pieces. Be well, and have a lovely day wherever you are.
