Do I convince myself work is interesting so that I’m not crippled by a fear that I’ll lose my life doing it?
My Myers-Briggs type is ENTP. A career-fit assessment told me that for ENTPs like me, it didn’t much matter what I’d do for work. Any job that provided consistent challenges would keep me satisfied. Let’s try assigning that type to my hypothetical primitive Gary Sue.
Some innate condition in my brain doesn’t let me relax into mediocrity. I grow up a precocious child in a nomadic tribe in the Old World Midwest. As a toddler, my easy smile wins the hearts of the tribe’s women, who reward me with buffalo jerky when I prance and dance to amuse them. in my adolescence, the hours modern me spent gettin gud at Starcraft 2, League of Legends, and Call of Duty are spent instead on their primitive equivalents.
Spearfishing, a simple feedback loop in which increasing mechanical skill is directly correlated with more food and praise from the tribe, becomes an addiction. In no time, I compete with adults 20 years my elder. My affability and desire for communion sets even the most jealous and alienated at ease. The aging chief sees, along with the rest of the tribe, my potential and apprentices me with the gatherers, the hunters, and the shamans. Insatiable curiosity necessarily develops a keen empathy. As a young adult, I engage beyond the eyes of my fellow tribesmen. To speak to me is to speak to one whose hands have held the same spear, been callused from tying plant fibers, and sweat into some god’s oblivion on ayahuasca.
I light the pyre when the chief passes and sleep in his tent that same night.
But I am not that, because I have choice. That’s the rub: freedom. There is not a slight few roles to fill in this world. Infinite ladders of infinite length, going nowhere and hanging from nothing.
And I am tired from climbing. I’ve only just begun, too, but I look up into the clouds and see nothing; I look down and see the forest preserve I used to play in as a child. I feel like Sam’s dream-self from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, losing sight of the sun as skyscrapers made of video calls and marketing scrums rocket out of the ground.
Tired takes on new, disappointing meanings into adulthood. It is not fatigue. I lay on the couch after a long day of skyping and wonder if my exhaustion is from dehydration. So I get up and fill my mug with water from the Brita filter and take a nap before I drink any of it. I wake up from the nap, sip, and wonder if I should’ve powered through.
Hunter-gatherer me would have earned his naps.