Imagine you woke up in the middle of an indigenous tribe deep in the Amazon. You don’t speak their language. You don’t know what they eat, how they get promoted, or what education even means to them. Is it learning how to hunt? Learning guerrilla warfare to invade neighbouring tribes?
I don’t believe how we arrive on this earth is any different.
It’s a pity babies don’t talk, because if they could, they’d probably ask: “Who are you people?” “What’s a daycare and why are you leaving me there?” “You’re going to ‘work’ – what does that even mean?” “I said I’m full, why are you still trying to feed me?”
The point is this: from the moment we’re born, other people are making decisions about our lives, and oftentimes as they should – they’re your parents and they brought you here. The problem starts when this doesn’t stop, and you find yourself living a life you don’t want, to please them or society at the expense of what you actually want… just delaying pain and regret.
We follow scripts we didn’t write: go to this specific school, get this specific job, climb the ladder – without pausing to ask, “Is this actually leading to the life that I want to live?”
I remember sitting in a small house converted into an exam office in Mthatha, biting my pen, writing the NBT for pharmacy.
At some point I looked up at the other students – heads down, focused, clearly at home in the material – and then back at my paper, which might as well have been written in a language I’d never studied.
My poor mother was waiting in the car outside, hoping. And I sat there thinking: what am I even doing here? I hadn’t applied because I wanted to be a pharmacist. I’d applied because most of my friends had. The paper brutalised me, and somewhere in the middle of it I caught myself whispering: what are you doing with your life, bro.
Very few of us pause to ask ourselves this question: If I woke up at the same time, did the same things, hung out with the same people, and had the same conversations for the next 10 years – would I be happy with where I’d end up? The answer for most people is probably no, yet we still do it and act so shocked 10 years later that we’re not where we want to be, as if we had no part in course correcting.
There’s an interesting essay by Tim Urban where he talks about picking careers. In it, he makes the example of how, when we’re older, we have the choice of either being chefs or cooks. He claims being a cook is relatively easier because you follow recipes that have been invented by other people (chefs), while being a chef means “you’re not trying to reinvent the wheel, you’re trying to invent it for the first time.”
It’s not fair to say what’s objectively the right choice – some people want to be chefs, while some want to be cooks – but I’m almost convinced that, in our core, we all want to be chefs to varying degrees. Yes, you may be okay with the government setting up laws that every citizen must abide by, but you don’t want the government telling you what to wear, how to raise your kids, or limiting how critical you can be of them when they’re not up to par.
So we all have these unspoken boundaries where we’re okay being cooks (our jobs, following the law), but we definitely want to be chefs in other areas (like how we raise our kids).
Why am I saying all this? Because if you want to love the life you’re living, you can’t just follow someone else’s recipe.
You need to be the chef.
This applies to everything – your career, your relationships, how you spend your time.
Tim says being the chef means coming up with your own ingredients but what does this mean for you? It means understanding your inclinations – what makes your brain moonwalk from excitement, what topics you find yourself voluntarily wanting to stay updated on, what conversations swallow you whole with no concept of time, what kind of people you easily click with and why.
For example, I love work that requires me to use my creativity once in a while – though one would argue that’s hard to believe for someone in IT. But part of my work includes designing sites, editing videos, and teaching. Even though those don’t form the core of my work, they’re the most enjoyable parts because they tap into areas I enjoy: being creative and sharing knowledge.
It’s the exact same reason I built this platform you’re reading this from – it’s a combination of technology (something I already do in my day job) and creativity (designing something that looks good and using it to share how I see the world). It’s why I recently started learning how to play the violin, because I feel like part of me dies when I don’t exercise my curiosity or learn something new.
I won’t pretend I know what you like or don’t like, but here’s the thing: even though some things we do in life are things we don’t enjoy, you still need to be intentional about the things you do like… and actually do them.
At times they don’t even have to be careers, but do them for their own sake. I don’t believe this idea that we have one passion. We probably have many passions or things we enjoy doing, and not all of them (if any) need to pay our bills. But we still need to do them, no matter how quirky we look to other people, because it’s that important. It’s important because it’s literally the only way we will feel alive.
If you like creating videos, why the hell aren’t you creating videos? If you like music (like me), why not play an instrument or join a choir? If you want to write a poem, why aren’t you writing it now? What are you waiting for to do the things you want to do?
The life you want to live isn’t in some distant future. You can intentionally live it right now, even if in small ways. You can plan a weekend getaway right now if you want the thrill of visiting a new place before you visit whatever country you want to go to. You can start a small business and get the thrill of someone paying for your service before worrying about raising money if entrepreneurship is your thing. You can be kind now towards other people if you want other people to treat you better.
Most of the time, what we really want are the feelings – the novelty, the freedom, the creativity, the thrill of it all. And I’m here to say that you don’t have to wait to experience those feelings. You can access them now, even if on a smaller scale than how you’d experience them once you achieve your grand goals.
I’ve started to think the body doesn’t actually know the difference. It just knows whether you showed up for the thing or didn’t. The big life and the small start produce the same feeling – you just told yourself one of them didn’t count.
© Phumzile