When I tell people I don’t want a “real job” they don’t believe me.
Not deep-down, anyway. Sure, you don’t want one, but you’ll have to face reality someday. You’ll come crawling back, oh, yes, you will.
So, I suffer their kindness. I get emails with job postings or notes about so-and-so’s brother at IBM. People will ask me, to fill a silence, “Did you find a job yet?” They sign me up for resume workshops.
And I just sigh. How dense are they!
But reality does set in. There are bills piling up and nobody’s taking the responsibility of paying them. I know it’s either get a real job or… or what?
I pace around my apartment and notice it’s a little too freshly-painted. There’s no baked-on grime to the oven burners and by apartment operator’s math that cleanliness is probably costing me $25 a month extra in rent. I start mentally subtracting things from the apartment. Fireplace – $100. Balcony – $50. No saintly person ever needed a machine to wash dishes. I don’t eat breakfast in the nook anyway. If this place was just a lot crappier I wouldn’t even need money.
So I do something that would have seemed impossible six months ago. I load all my stuff into a van and head out for small town Iowa, where I will occupy a dilapidated rental house in a low-cost-of-living paradise. And if for some reason that doesn’t work out, I’m not too proud to move in with my parents, get my old job at the grocery store, and re-enroll in high school.