Deja Vuesday – Passion Vs Security: The American Dream In Disguise

Hi everybody, and welcome once again to another Deja Vuesday!!

This week, we’ll be turning the clock back a full year to when I wrote the classic post Passion Vs Security: The American Dream In Disguise:

You!
You work all night,
And when you work, you don’t feel all right.
And when,
When things stop feeling all right.
And everything is all right.

‘Cos we will never listen to your rules, no.
We will never do as others do, no.
We know what we want and we get it from you.
We do what we like and we like what we do!

That excerpt from Andrew WK’s “Party Hard” pretty much explains my current mood.

I’ve been in Mental Kombat since I graduated high school, going up against my passions with my need for security. I feel trapped. I want to grow as a person, but I feel that I’m being held back from my goals.

At first, I blamed my parents. Living in the Midwest, I grew up in a working-class environment where you work or you’re considered a bum. I knew that working was important, but I felt like I was doing something wrong.

Turns out that “something wrong” was not following my passions. So I sat down and tried to figure out what I was passionate about. I want to do a lot of things.

I want to learn Japanese, become a voice actor, write manga, play guitar, sing, write songs, ride my bike, travel the world, meet interesting people, invent things, and grow as a person.

I also want to have a girlfriend who I’m totally into. I want to have kids, but not until I’m older and ready to settle down.

I have to say that moving out on my own has been the single biggest and BEST step that I have taken thus far to regaining control over my life after relinquishing my life’s steering wheel to denial and falsehood.

There were so many variables to being able to live by myself that I was stuck in Analysis Paralysis for several years. I didn’t think I had what it took to hack it in the oft-feared “real world” because I didn’t have a degree of any kind short of my high school diploma (I am the first of my family to graduate from high school without ever dropping out or failing), not to mention the majority of my work experience involves fast food.

Two months after moving out, I’m still alive and lo and behold, still clothed, well fed (I gained 4 lbs since moving out *shh!*), with a roof over my head, and employed. So if you’re contemplating leaving your family to strike out on your own like I was for years, take it from me: if I can make it out here, anybody can.

So how do I follow all of my passions and still make end’s meet? I’m still trying to find the answer, because the answer is different for every person. There is no DEFINITIVE answer to that question and there never will be because we are all different. We follow different paths. We live different lives. We need to find the solution that works for us and not the solution that society THINKS is right.

Not much has changed in a year’s time in this regard. I’m still trying to follow my numerous passions while maintaining a good standard of living for myself. Yes, I’m working for the man (for minimum wage at that!), but I’m still seeking my passions and looking to fully make them my sources of income so I can focus on them more attently. Last month, I have made around $28 total online. It is a far cry from the $100 a month that I’m shooting for by the end of 2009, but just think: it’s $28 more a month that I make online than I made a year ago, that’s for sure!

My local community is incredibly working-class. If you want something, you have to work for it. If you still can’t get what you want, work harder until you get it. That mindset has its pros and cons.

Pros: it strongly discourages laziness and promotes action.
Cons: it’s too narrow minded and adverse to alternate means of making an income.

Bowling Green is pretty working class too, and it’s definitely a college town so there are almost always minimum wage jobs readily available. Heck, I got a job a week or two after moving up here, and I had been seriously looking for work in the Celina area for three months prior with no such luck.

I’ve been trying to make an income with this blog for a couple months now and everyone thinks that it won’t really go anywhere because of my current LACK of income via this blog. I know that it may take months, hell even years before I really start seeing a cashflow here. Because this is a personal blog, I probably won’t get a lot of traffic.

However, if I incorporate a niche into my personal blog, then I might see higher traffic and thus, better cashflow. For example, if I were to review anime in one post and talk about what I did today in another, I would still tell people about my day AND about an anime series that people wanna see if it’s good or bad and why. There is the issue with topic inconsistency (going from anime to Magic: The Gathering), but I think it’ll be fine if I categorize my posts. I plan on going through ALL of my posts and categorizing them so you guys can better filter out what you want to and don’t want to read about.

Although people scour the Interwebs for information and facts every second of every day, myself included, ultimately it is the core human need for socialization that people are really after. The inner satisfaction of presenting TheAndySan.com as a blog about a very real person (last I checked anyway) with real interests and real problems with real solutions is why it isn’t a real niche blog. Really.

Granted, it does stay within a fairly consistent set of topics like anime and playing guitar, but I like the freedom of being able to talk about what’s on my mind, even if it’s just in a little off-topic paragraph or in a Tweet.

As far as the status of categorizing ALL of my posts, pretty much the majority of 2008′s posts as well as all of 2009′s posts are categorized. For every Deja Vuesday that I do, I make sure I categorize the original post as well as update the URL for improved SEO. Acronyms FTW!!

However, there still is a large amount of my back catalog that needs to be assorted. Also, I’ve added some new categories over time and need to go over uncategorized as well as previously categorized posts to see if they fit the new categories. Fun-Fun Umbrella Juice!

Getting back to the working man’s mentality, I find it to be similar to slave driving. Nobody really wants to work, but they have to if they wanna live comfortably. There are too many ridiculous rules and regulations that keep us from doing what we want to do. I don’t have a problem following the law in most cases, but to add more laws to break our free will just pisses me off! I think of myself as an independent thinker, a passive rebel. I’m not the kind of guy who’ll state his problems out loud, but rather, the guy who quietly breaks the rules because he doesn’t believe in them or thinks they’re unnecessary.

If I were truly a working man-slave, I would not find anything wrong with tedious labor that only gives me a small piece-of-a-piece of the pie. I would much rather do what I wanna do and earn money by following my passions, utilizing my talents, and working for myself and not as an easily replaceable cog in the work machine.

Some people think that because I don’t want to work that I’m lazy. Far from it! I do wanna work; it’s just that I wanna do it for myself and not for someone else. I wanna earn money because I’m posting good content or helping someone willingly, not because I’ll get fired if I don’t.

Sorry for the long rant, but I really needed to air and clarify some things that have been on my mind for a long time. Will this be the last time you hear about them? Probably not. However, I’m always moving one step away from a life of slavery, one day at a time.

TheAndySan

P.S: I found a plugin that keeps track of how long TheAndySan.com and SpicyMelon.com have been up as well as how long I’ve been posting content on the Internet. Check it out in the sidebar!

Wow, this paragraph pratically screams INTJ! If you don’t know what I’m talking about (don’t feel bad, not too many people do, including myself sometimes), click here to learn all about the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).

I’m definitely a lot calmer than I was a year ago, but don’t think that I’ve succumbed to the notion that the only real money out there is the kind earned from a 9-5, bust-your-balls job. Not a chance! I’m just not as angry against the work force as I used to be because I don’t see myself being a part of it forever. No, I’m not gonna quit my job tomorrow or anything rash like that. Believe me, I’ve learned my lesson from doing that before, haha!!

I’m just taking life one day at a time, one step at a time.

TheAndySan