The Palmer Press

On March 1, 2020, I published an essay "Why Aren't You Happy Yet?" Earlier today (in February 2024), I responded to another newsletter that I receive where the author was grappling with the arrival fallacy. I made the reference in my response to her about how "People who were unhappy before they won the lottery are unhappy after they won the lottery." 

It was the final kick I needed to finally get back to writing what I consider an important thing to say. I am personally still in an active battle of trying to stop thinking "I'll be happy when..." but I do feel differently now than I did when I wrote that essay in 2020. I think that I feel differently but others might not see any difference in me. It's the opposite of what a doctor told me when she prescribed me anti-depressants a few years ago, which was that I "won't be able to tell if the medication is working, but others will." I went onto the anti-depressants later that year in 2020, which for those that read the old essay, I had definitely gotten the reduction in travel and social activities to give me time to study for the GMAT that I asked for only a few weeks before my world locked down. I was still unhappy after winning that lottery.

Here I am, almost 4 years later and I likely have the life I would have described as the goal back then. I went to a top MBA program and through a series of rejections, layoffs, full-time offers being rescinded and sponsorships expiring, I successfully spent over 8 months as "my own boss" as an independent consultant and I am now a Director-level in a product organization in a healthcare company. Despite the MBA debt, I'd consider myself an on-paper success. (1) 

With my quote-unquote success, I am realistically still unhappy after winning this personal lottery. I am back on anti-depressants, for example. But the point is not that I'm likely just a depressed dude. The point is that I do feel differently than I did in 2020. Maybe it is burn out or I've reached the level of my own incompetency, but I am not driven by a sense of ambition to get anywhere next. In high school, I wanted to get to college. In college, I wanted to get into consulting. In consulting, I wanted to get promoted quickly. After I got promoted, I wanted to get an MBA. In the MBA, I wanted a job with high compensation and reasonable work hours. Now, being somewhere in the realm of ironically self-actualized, I actually don't want to "make it" anywhere else. The chip is no longer on my shoulder. Have I achieved everything that I have ever wanted? No. But where I'm at is so damn close to anything I could have ever imagined that it does feel like I can start putting my attention elsewhere. 

Where is my attention now then? A significant part is on the life milestones that Elizabeth and I need to play catch up on. These don't feel like goals or things to accomplish, but more so as representations of our connection and celebrations of finding our person. These are things that I get to do - there is no sense of "completing" getting engaged or married. (2) Another significant part of my attention is on music, which is actually what I had spent a lot of time on in high school, before I knew the rat race existed. The pace of life in East Liverpool, Ohio affords ignorance as bliss. (3) Once I finally get this essay off my chest, I think I'll be able to write essays on things-less-self-aggrandized, like what I've been able to learn about music and about myself and others by playing music with people again over the last year and a half. 

Maybe I'm still ignorant, and some other rat race will begin the moment that Elizabeth and I have children. (4) But I hope not, so that I can continue to operate in this sense that I have arrived somewhere. And while I'm not tearing the sheets off and jumping out of bed each morning, I do not feel the intense pressure to play a meta-game and rise or die trying. The answer to "Why Aren't You Happy Yet?" (5) is that the happiness I can imagine achieving someday is a myth. But I am in many ways contented or pacified. That, I can accept as progress. 

Footnotes:

1. I am Robert Kiyosaki's "Rich Dad". For those that haven't read the real-estate cringe-fest of a book: the "Rich Dad" is actually the poor one and vice-versa. He's at least not a rent seeker but I digress on that point. 

2. For the record, we are not engaged not because I was so caught up making other plans, but because of a mutual decision to "wait as long as possible then hurry up."

3. Not relevant but funny: The language in East Liverpool has morphed the word "ignorant" into the pronunciation "ignert" and has the connotation of being rude or disrespectful on top of being unintelligent. There is a local vernacular there that for some reason hasn't caught on anywhere else.

4. One reason that I don't think there will be a rat race in my own head about raising children is that, as a result of my own Ivy League MBA, I am completely unimpressed with the Ivory Tower and don't have a strong sense to force them up the social ladder any further than where I sit. The rich get richer and that privilege is without a doubt the largest contributor to why many of my classmates have the prestigious education and employers they do today. While the wealth of many of those classmates is beyond any scale I would have understood in high school, I did have both my parents who worked and loved me, and I was not born addicted to crack. Either of which could have been considered sources of privilege in East Liverpool. By nature of my being the "Learn" phase in the "One to learn, one to earn, one to burn" generational wealth pattern, my children's lives will likely (barring any unforeseen tragedy) be perfectly adequate and probably sit on the lower end of the privileged elitism spectrum that I was so uncomfortable around in my MBA program.

5. I reference a Wait But Why poster in that essay, which I did later buy and keep up with checking off each passing week of my life for about two years over the pandemic and my MBA program. It's run ended when Elizabeth and I moved in together. That kind of decor doesn't fly in our shared space.