Sometimes it seems very clear, what i must do: i simply can’t do the whole work a 9-5 white collar job and live in the city. to say so in damning especially if my future employers are reading this. However, despite that risk it must be said: without some kind of overarching mission, I don’t think that I will ever be happy. My life is never going to seem real, and it’s never going to be what it ought to be. It will always be a life half-lived.
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The up-side of “real” jobs is the structure they provide; I know a lot of people who have tried to freelance and found they cannot self-impose structure and discipline sufficiently. Approaching seven years at it, and I also struggle. I am grateful for the years I spent as cubicle fodder, though, for the lessons it taught me in terms of professional behavior and personal management skills. Those years, that seemed like an unhappy wasting of my life at the time, proved invaluable in setting me up to live as I do now.
It might behoove you to suck it up and get a job for a year; they would provide the external structure and motivation that are things you seem unable to create internally right now. I think you need to grow up and learn those rather fundamental life skills that you currently lack, and are why you haven’t embarked on the seemingly easy (to me) processes involved in being a successful freelance photog.
Join the club. I’ve felt like this for years. And yet…and yet…. There are the little things and the scattered and often random achievements that come frequently enough to make it seem worthwhile. That piece of music you love, the smell of a summer morning in the park. Schopenhauer said life was always sad, and that what we call “happiness” is simply a moment when the sadness lessens; the basic texture of life is grim. But there’s always enough to make it worthwhile, and we get something even out of the darkest moments.
Another, perhaps bigger point here. You say you fear your life is “never going to be what it ought to be” – no one’s ever is, and that is an attitude both romantic and fatalistic. The futility of the “ought”s! You have some distant, impossible idealized vision of your “perfect” life on the one hand and an expectation that it will magically materialize (or not) on the other. Little wonder you’re unhappy.
Happiness is found in setting achievable goals and finding the daily drip of actions that will accomplish them eventually.
Last weekend talks with my olf friend, I realized that I have my own self-destructive idealism, that I create fantasies around people, things, situations, myself in particular, and then get angry when they do not live up to my “ought”s. Not a productive habit, that one.
The perfect is the enemy of the good, and messy reality can be a lot more beautiful than the mundane limits of the imagination.