Sometimes, as I’m standing at my desk and sweating while I try to focus on my dumb little tasks on days that I’m feeling particularly frustrated with my job, I let my mind wander through potential futures or alternate timelines. Twelve years ago, when I graduated college, I had very different plans for my life. I’d spent the four years of my college education finding out what I was interested in, what I was good at, and what I cared about, and planned to eventually return to scholastic pursuits so I could earn myself an advanced degree in some kind of writing thing and eventually further that with some kind of further degree focused on medievalism or the development of language or something. I was going to work for a few years, pay off my student loans by the time I was thirty, go back for more education, and spend my life burying myself in my beloved writing and research and education (of myself and then of others). That, of course, didn’t happen, but my dream of living a life of telling stories lasted until pretty recently and now I find myself adrift with no future I’m really working toward beyond being debt-free, no attachments to my present (geographic or occupational) and so I wonder what kind of life I might be living if I hadn’t been shackled by debt or might yet live should I find a way to remove my need to spend most of my time and energy on being a cog in a machine that does not value me.
Today, if I could follow through on my current frustrations and just leave my job without a second thought, I’d probably try out some streaming. Video games, maybe some tabletop games, and who knows what else. It was tiring but rewarding when I did it back in 2023 and I’d like to do it again some day. I could just make stuff, immerse myself in a form of entertainment I’ve never really had the time to try out, and find fulfillment in this kind of connective, audience-oriented creative endeavor. I could make videos, podcasts, and so much more as I explore what it means to tell stories in any and all self-published formats. There’s so much available to me that I would enjoy doing in a world where, by its very existence, I wouldn’t have to worry about my income (since that’s the only reason I would just walk out of a job). I could imagine myself doing a streamed full-playthough of Final Fantasy 14 geared toward some kind of extra immersive roleplaying experience (such as staying in character the entire time and, like, going full-immersive-sim on it) or just becoming one of those people who plays only survival/crafting games. Or maybe I’d get really into adventure games and just run through all the biggest hits of the last decade. Or I’d do a franchise playthrough of some of my favorite properties and host discussions about the themes and throughlines, turning it all into a sort of critical approach to storytelling in games where the theses are built via real-time gameplay and then eventually reformatted into highly edited video essays for an accompanying youtube channel. That’d be a lot of fun.
In an alternate timeline, I imagine myself a year or two into a doctoral program. I’ve got a masters in creative writing and have probably published some short stories or poetry books by now, but have begun shifting my focus to medievalism (the depiction of the medevial world in modern media) or specific authors of note in the development of modern storytelling or the creation of the modern English language. I’m spending my days bonding with my fellow students and educators, teaching classes as a TA, writing essays for presentations and journals, and just imbuing my every day with the academic exploration of creativity expressed via language. That one feels so remote that I can’t really get too specific without the idle daydream starting to collapse around me. I can’t think of where I might have wound up doing that studying without feeling pangs of sadness for the abandonment of a dream that I held so strongly I’d established contacts at universities with good programs and had a list of goals I’d need to meet in order to apply for programs that I knew by name. This alternate timeline, unlike all the others, was close enough to being reality that thinking of it feels like reflecting on a relationship that could have lasted forever if only one little thing had gone differently. It’s the alternate me that got away.
Most of these idle daydreams involve me having time to rest or being passionately engaged with the stuff I spend the majority of my time on, which is really all I want given that I’m currently spending at least fifty hours a week working a job that doesn’t appreciate what I do and often feels like it is trying to actively prevent me from getting any sense of satisfaction or successfully resting. All of that without even mentioning all the commute time I spend driving around, the time I have to spend recovering from the effort this job requires, and how much of my waking time outside of work is spent thinking about the details of my job (a mix of my frustrations and the actual work I need to do). Honestly, my daydreams of late have even involved simple stuff like everything else in my life staying the same but I’m only working eight hours a day instead of ten and how much of my life I get back just because I’m not constantly overexerting myself to keep up this financially necessary pace. It feels pretty pathetic that all my hopes for the future involve working less, these days, rather than pursuing any of my desires or passions. That’s what all this constant work does to you, though. That and the constant feelings of defeat stemming from how often I’m left carrying nothing but my frustrations at the end of a work day full of being ignored, having my expertise brushed aside, and having my experiences delegitimized by people who can’t understand anything that doesn’t fit into their narrow worldview. It’s exhausting and I’m so burned out that all I can really imagine for myself in terms of realistic, actionable positive change is leaving for a job that will at least pay me enough that I don’t need to work ten hours or more a day to get by.