Sometimes everything simply goes straight to Hell. Or even if it isn’t that serious it still completely rewriting your underlying assumptions about How Things Are. Moving away from home. Things going badly with a roommate. Having to move to another state because everything fell apart.
I’ve been through a few of these. For me they tend to involve moving as the core or a major side effect. See above.
On most of these occasions, I moved someplace completely different and changed almost everything about my life. Moving from home to stay with a guy I’d known since I was a kid. Getting out of that incestuous cluster by moving in with Anthany. Long-term illness killing my job and necessitating a move out of state in search of work. Having to put Anthany in prison, being vilified by the entire surrounding area because they thought I was his partner in crime, then moving back in with my old man and going back to skool.
Each time, my social group completely changed. Lost all my high skool friends when I left that little one-pig town. Lost the group of losers I was associating with when Anthany offered me his other room in exchange for a much better rental agreement than I had. Lost pretty much everyone I knew when we moved to another state. Repeated the process when I moved back. Did it again when I graduated tech skool each time.
At the end of all these shenanigans, the people I associate with are hand-picked. A few people I knew in high skool I reconnected with on Facebook. People I’ve met through work and skool. People I’ve met through shared interests. A few through Stacie.
What all of them have in common is they’re doing something with their lives and are decent, solid people. Through circumstance and being selective, I’ve culled all the losers I used to know.
As I did this, I discovered something. The people you associate with have an averaging effect, just like you (usually) do on them.
If you hang around with people who are going nowhere and doing nothing to change that, it’s infectious. It starts small. Bill and Jack are just screwing around playing video games all day, so why shouldn’t you blow off more important things too? Instead of doing something useful this Friday, just hang out with them and smoke a few bowls. Overtime or a better job? Nah, you’re getting by. Then you notice you’ve wasted a year or more of your life drinking, partying, playing video games, watching garbage on TV, and not improving your situation in the least.
Similarly, people who care where they’re going and aren’t completely amoral lowlifes will drag you upward with them if you’ll put forth the slightest effort to do so. Like I said, the people I associate with these days all have something going for them. Some run businesses. Others are artists and craftspeople. Another is a bartender in the same sense that I’m a clown and toymaker; he spends a lot of time turning his house and yard into a bar. Needless to say, his parties are pretty righteous.
This doesn’t have to be in person. If you spend your days watching the latest YouTube “influencer” babble endlessly about garbage that doesn’t matter or keeping up on the latest celebrity “news,” good luck. There are plenty of resources out there for self improvement. One of the best things I ever did to improve my life is the direct result of a YouTube video by some Belgian metalhead with some very odd ideas.
Me? I’m a coder and game designer. Been at it off and on for almost four decades. Started when I was six years old when I was simultaneously teaching myself Apple Basic on an Apple ][E at skool and reverse-engineering old-skool 3-hole punch red and blue D&D from the Expert Set and a few adventures I borrowed from the library. And most of the adventures weren’t even written for that version of the rules. From there I moved on to teaching myself TI Basic on a TI-99/4A and designing my own tabletop games. These programs and games sucked, but I had a single-digit age at the time.
Since then I’ve added Java, Python, Visual Basic, C#, HTML, CSS, PHP as it relates to WordPress, 3D modeling and Unity game development to the coding end. I’ve also written thousands of pages of game background for dozens of worlds. And I build robots professionally.
You know how much of this I did when I was hanging around losers? None of it. I was too busy being just as mediocre as they were, because why not? Not like anyone I knew was doing anything different. Didn’t matter if I was at home or the kinds of garbage jobs where they consider “we’re near a bus line” a major selling point and the requirements include things like “high skool or GED preferred.” Everyone I knew was going nowhere. Sure, we’d all complain about only making nine bucks an hour, but nobody was doing anything about it.
Part of it was the widespread belief among the so-called “working class” that this was just how it was. Work hard, scrape by, and maybe you can retire some day to an even more pathetic existence. Another part was a belief just as widespread that education is an Evil Thing for socialist librul commies and would likely turn you gay. Ask any of these people, and they either didn’t really know any educated people, or they had open contempt for them because education made them learn the evils of reason over blind faith in whatever the propaganda machine was spouting that week.
The biggest part, though, was sheer laziness and inertia. Why spend time improving yourself when you were working hard all day at the foundry? It was a long week, so the weekend was for partying and screwing around.
And before you know it, you’ve been more or less on your own for a decade and have nothing to show for it but a string of garbage jobs where you’re completely disposable and a series of “friendships” with people who considered you just as disposable as your former employers. And why not? When you have nothing going for you, you’re easy to replace on a professional and personal level.
I spent five years living like a monk while I was in skool. People talk about college like it’s supposed to be an endless party and drinking festival. I was either working, at skool, or taking online classes, and at the end I had two solid tech degrees with a nice GPA. Then I spent another two working my way up to a real job thanks to having graduated (twice!) into the worst job market in the last several decades.
It was like starting over yet again. I didn’t make a lot of the same mistakes this last time. When people tried to wedge themselves into my life I took a good long look at them. If they were just bumbling along, I didn’t keep them around. If they were looking for someone to fix their lives — or worse, outright support them — I ran the other way. However, if they had something interesting to say, did interesting things in their off time, and were generally decent people looking to grab life by the hips, it was a totally different story.
And if you go out of your way to show me that was a mistake, we’re done. On the spot. Go ahead and show yourself to be a racist scumbag who also thinks Red Dead Redemption is the best game ever because you can beat women in it. I’ll ignore you so hard even management wonders what in tarnation you did.
It cuts down on the amount of drama at work and in life when I do that. Which is nice on a personal and professional level. Because I don’t associate with the losers the boss is perpetually annoyed with, they leave me alone. Which means the boss doesn’t catch me screwing around very often. And that’s awesome when review time comes around.
Short version: stop hanging around with losers. They do you no good, and in fact tend to drag you down to their level. Find decent people to associate with. Things like this pandemic can help you do this because you’re being forced to cut yourself off from them.
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