New Topic!

Recently, I started listening to the podcast Question of the Day, with Stephen Dubner and James Altucher. I realize that they’ve since stopped recording the podcast, but I’m pretty sure that’s not BECAUSE I just started listening. I could be wrong.

Anyway, I’ve been listening to the episodes — each one is somewhere between 10-20 minutes — while I go for walks in the morning to start my day. And I quickly realized that I had one major issue with the podcast: Stephen and James are not asking me for MY opinion on the topics they discuss. This made it very hard to listen to the podcast, because I was thinking about my own takes on their discussions, and NO ONE WAS HEARING MY BRILLIANT THOUGHTS.

Then I remembered that I have an old, neglected blog, and even if NOTHING IS AWFUL in my life right now, I could, you know, blog about my thoughts. And if those thoughts are reactions to the episodes I’m listening to, that would give them some sort of narrative form. Maybe. 

So, I don’t know if I’ll write about every single episode (they recorded 178, I think, and then put the podcast on indefinite hiatus), but I have a LOT of thoughts in my head. 

On the first episode of the show, the boys (that’s what I call them) considered the following question:

Why are so many people content to work at regular, 9-6 jobs?

This, my friends, is an excellent question, and as a person who only held such a job for, like, a total of maybe two years of my life, I am TOTALLY qualified to answer it. 

Because they are dumb.

Ha, ha! I am totally kidding. Here’s the thing: I HATE being tied to a job. I recently re-proved this to myself. There are many, many reasons that I am a freelancer, but the biggest one is that, for me, the promise of a steady paycheck is simply not enough to ward off the INSANE BOREDOM that comes from doing the same thing every day. Also, I really hate being around other people. (NOT YOU. OF COURSE NOT YOU. YOU ARE AWESOME AND I LOVE BEING AROUND YOU.)

I am married to the most amazing Guy in the world. (HIS NAME IS GUY, SO IT’S FUNNY.) The very idea of being entrepreneurial gives him the newbie jeebies. It took him a long time to admit this, perhaps even to himself, so he used to pretend that he was mildly interested in my various business ideas and what have you, but Guy CRAVES that structure that comes with having a regular job. He likes going into the office. He sometimes complains about office politics and he really hates working with idiots, but for the most part, he is SO HAPPY to go to work, do what they tell him, and get a paycheck. 

His entire approach to life is different from mine. If he’s getting paid, he honestly doesn’t care what they’re asking him to do. Answer phones? Sure. File papers? No problem. Sit in boring meetings? RIGHT ON. He says this, in so many words. “If they’re paying me, I don’t care what they want me to do. If they want me to paint the office and they’re going to pay me what they would pay me to be a software architect, then I’ll paint the office.”

So, apparently there are people like this. People who truly feel content doing this. I am not one of them, but Guy is. And we need people like Guy, because otherwise people like me would have no one to marry to support us.