I used to ask myself that question all the time: how do you become like your parents? How do you go from being a child, to being a teenager full of hope and expectations to end up living in a bungalow, indebted, looking at your kid be the same way you once were, shaking your head and knowing better. It seemed impossible to me, back then, that classrooms full of tough, smart and ambitious kids would systematically end up like their parents. For the longest time, my generation and the generation before me seemed like two species alien to one another. But that is the past. I think I can give an answer to that question now.
The change starts operating right after you finish college. It is the exact moment where you stop being a prospect and society begins to ask things out of you. You need to become productive if you want to earn your keep, so you enter the adults factory.
In the adults factory, you wake up about an hour before you really should. You rush to a place you don't really want to go to, along with several people doing the same exact thing, trying to tune you out. You spend eight to twelve hours there, trying not to think about the outside world. Then you go home with the same people you went to work with, all trying to tune one another out. Then you have to sustain yourself and tend to whatever personal business you were supposed to tend to that day. Then, freedom starts around 8 or 9 PM. By that time, you're still on autopilot, dead tired and trying to tune out the ultimate truth: tomorrow, it's going to be the same exact thing, because in the adults factory, the conveyor belt is broken and right when you come out, it loops you back in for another turn.
You would be surprised how coherent and pertinent I can be, using stills from Nine Inch Nails videos.
This is not meant to be a hopeless piece. On the contrary, I am far from hopeless right now. I kind of dig my new grind and I find it refreshing to work with smart and driven people. But the point of this blog post is that I have learned to respect passion. The adult grind will break your will, so it takes so much strength of character to actually pick yourself up and do things just because you love doing them. From the struggling night time writer, to the wannabe martial artistsor just the middle-aged guy going to ballet lessons because he always dreamed of being a ballet dancer, it takes so much strenght to be that. It takes strenght to want things out of life once that life has started asking things out of you.
The adults factory is not and end in itself, but it's a place 99% of human beings will find themselves in at one time or another. It's a place that will reveal you to yourself and whatever you do that's outside your work * that will define who you are. Every passionate person that is strong enough to pull themselves off the couch and allow themselves to be different has earned my utmost respect. Because it's easy to follow the grind, be like the others and transform into a lifeless adult. Being different, being inspired, therein lies the challenge of adult life.
* Unless your work is your passion. In that case, God bless you, you might just have found the secret of happiness.
