The Curse of Intelligence; or, I Am Not A Number!

Great Debates
41

I tend to see the grand divide between the corporate world and the anti-establishment world shrinking and blurring. Once upon a time, say 50 years ago, it was a given that you had to sell out your individuality and any anti-establishment principles you might have in order to join the corporate world. Today, the corporate world is much more flexible than it used to be. There’s more room for quirky people, free thinkers, and anti-establishment expression. You may have to search around a bit, but you can find a corporate environment that will accommodate just about anything these days. Corporations are begging for creative, intelligent people who can think outside the box and express themselves well. And there are always work-at-home arrangements, consulting arrangements, independent contracting, assistance to start your own business, etc.

Conversely, anti-establishment causes have increasingly been corporatized. Whether it’s Greenpeace, NORML, the NAACP, or Nader for President, you’re still going to need a college degree and learn corporate skills if you want to have any real influence or advance beyond the rank of support staff or ward canvasser. If you start a candle-making shop and want to grow it beyond something more than a booth at the side of the road, you’re going to need to study business management techniques.

I’m not contending that society has achieved nirvana or that the process is complete. There are still plenty of old corporate hold-outs: If you go to work at most banks, be prepared to wear a suit and tie. And the 9-to-5 game is still the rule rather than the exception. But, on the other hand, there are indeed ways and means today to make a million while wearing sandals and a T-shirt and sporting a nose ring, and the range of opportunities is increasing each year.

Yes, it’s true that the corporate world can trap you and suck away your soul. It’s true that intelligent, creative people do indeed often get trapped in dead-end jobs and dead-end positions in the corporate world. But when that happens, I think they are trapped just as much by their own unwillingness to take some chances, make a leap of faith, and invest some trust and some effort in alternative paths to their dreams as they are by the corporate structure itself. Meantime, I think it’s also true that the anti-establishment world can trap you too. You can spend so long on the fringes that you lose all perspective and waste your life battling specters or lashing at the waves and commanding the incoming tide to turn back. Both worlds have their pluses and their minuses. To the extent that the two worlds are merging, hopefully we get to enjoy the best of both of them.

As I see it, the old lines are blurring. Social mobility is accessible to just about everyone if they want it badly enough, and corporate and anti-establishment worlds are increasingly merging and feeding on each other. More and more, the main thing keeping an otherwise intelligent and creative individual stuck on one side of the divide or the other is a feeling of alienation and a sense that “I don’t want to be one of THOSE people on the other side.” But does that feeling of alienation prove that such individuals are “special” in any way? No. Not in my opinion, anyway. It just proves that they’re alienated. It just says to me that they remain focused on the obvious social barriers confronting them and haven’t bothered to look past those barriers and research the full range of avenues open to them for self-expression and advancement of their particular cause or personal need, whatever that might be.

(By the way, this post isn’t meant as a slam at Esprix personally. I just want to re-phrase the debate along different lines and express my opinion based on my own experiences.)

42

First of all, Esprix, I can definitely relate to your desire to break out of your cage and do something you love. I’ve been temping since I moved to Chicago - bored out of my skull. In D.C. I had a stressful office job where I produced bullshit. Today, for 8 hours, I will surf the SDMB, file some stuff, and maybe, if I’m lucky, send some mail? Oooh, maybe they’ll have some documents that I can shred.

I know that I am happiest when I care about what I am doing. I never want my job/career to be the primary thing that defines me in life, but I know that I am searching for my niche and my passion. The good thing right now is that I am in a new city. I’m not tied down to any one thing. I can take some chances and try some things out.

You know why? Because I’ve met people who are absolutely in love with what they do for a living, and it is contagious. If they can find something they love that much, I can too, and I don’t want anything less.

I’m finding that the main obstacle to happiness or “career fulfillment” or whatever you want to call it is my own fear/laziness/lack of ability to choose something and follow it through. I have a friend who is a frustrated writer, and she is always denigrating crappy pulp novels and Chicken Soup for Shitheads books, saying “Good god, I could write that piece of shit any day. I’m a much better writer than that.” I finally got tired of hearing her and said “No, you are not a better writer. Someday you may write stuff that is better, but until you sit down and write something and put it out there, you are NOT a better writer. That author sat there every day and looked at a blank page, and created something. Even if it is crap, it’s more than you or I have done.”

Okay, it was a hurtful exchange, but we were both drunk and are frustrated writers, and I applied it to myself as well. But that applies to all of the people you are designating as “sheep.”

So Esprix - explore. Take a class. Get outside your comfort zone. Volunteer. Write your ideas down. Make a website, start publishing your advice and views.

It’s not easy. I think it’s especially hard for those of us who grew up being told “You can do anything you want to do, honey!” and believed that that made us exceptional somehow. Okay, I can do anything I want. What do I want? Life is work.
JTR, that was a fantastic post. And Scylla, bring that wand over here and bonk me over the head a few times. I could use it.

43

Yes, I’m reading; yes, I’m absorbing; yes, I have things to say; but I had to respond to this:

Bingo - nail, head and all that. Thanks.

Well, this is not an issue for me - one of the reasons I moved to California was to explore new things, which I’m going to start to do once we move into the new house. But in the meantime, I gotta pay the bills, and my most marketable and profitable skill are my administrative ones, so I’m temping again. And don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy temping - but, like you say, I have the overwhelming need to be happy at the place I spend 40 hours or more a week, and I’m actively working on finding that; until then, I have bills to pay. :wink:

More to come, promise.

Esprix

44

regarding your 1st post. i was wondering if you would say more about why you dropped out of highschool and hated college even tho you finally got thru?

do you suppose i’m anti-establishment? LOL!

i got the distinct impression in grammar and high school that some teachers don’t like smart students. not doing homework and still getting A’s on the math test didn’t go over, and then not caring about getting a B. i think it’s motivational psychology, you’re supposed to chase the carrot. i think it’s really odd in this so called capitalist society that you are supposed to pursue money/success they don’t make personal finance/accounting mandatory in high school.

it’s a PLOT. LOL!

Dal Timgar

45

I went to a good high school and had good teachers. Mainly I dropped out of the system due to typical teen-age rebellion problems—I partied too hard, couldn’t relate to anyone, and was too eager to get on with the rest of my life to put up with the tedium of my senior year. The problem was with me, not with the teachers.

As for hating college: I went to college after a stint in the military, so college itself wasn’t the problem. The courses were easy enough, and I could always ignore bad professors the way I ignored my superiors in the military. Mainly I was just impatient and wanted to bypass the system rather than admit that I needed to sweat through 4 years of bookwork like everyone else. Also, the courses that interested me (literature and language courses) didn’t lead to paying jobs, while the courses that did lead to a paying jobs didn’t interest me.

So I did a year and a half and then dropped out for a few years, then another year of college and dropped out again, and then finally held my nose and gritted my teeth and did that last year and a half and finished. During the times I dropped out, I did a variety of things to try to get ahead, including another three years in the military at one point to weather a bad recession and three years of bumming around, drifting, and trying different things. I thought I could beat the system, but all I succeeded in doing was stretching a four-year undergraduate program into ten years. I have no regrets with the way I did things (I wouldn’t change a thing–I had a lot of fun and gained a lot of experience along the way), but I have to admit that I ultimately needed to learn a little humility along the way—I was intelligent, adaptable, and pretty savvy about life, but that’s not sufficient by itself to guarantee success.

When I did occasionally attend college, I did the work legitimately: I eventually finished with a summa cum laude bachelor’s degree. It helped that I stuck with the courses I was interested in, and it also helped that I bailed out now and again whenever I got sick of college (rather than sticking around and racking up a lot of bad grades). After college I worked long enough and hard enough in my field that it eventually paid off, to my great surprise.

Ultimately, I’m not sure that there’s any grand lesson in my story for anyone. But based on my own experience I usually counsel people not to take college too seriously and have some fun along the way. Take some breaks and all that. Life is long, and there’s no hurry to get to the finish line. I didn’t hit the corporate workforce until I was 37 (I was self-employed for a few years after college), and it didn’t hurt me one bit. With all my life experience, I’ve advanced through the executive ranks much quicker than the people around me, which has helped to keep things fun and interesting for me.

No, my discussion about anti-establishment people had nothing to do with your posts. Esprix set up a dichotomy between himself (a temp worker looking at the corporate grind from the outside) and people satisfied with the corporate grind. I expanded on the theme a bit to launch a broader discussion of the corporate world and the anti-establishment world. I don’t actually know whether my discussion is really pertinent to Esprix’s case in particular. Like I said in my disclaimer at the end of the post, I wanted to re-phrase the debate a touch and put it in broader terms.

I haven’t read the books you cited in your posts, so I can’t say much about what you posted. But it sounds like you’re not anti-establishment. It sounds to me like you’re advocating working the system by taking an end run around it and cutting out the middle man (college, etc.).

I was unable to achieve that myself, but it can be done—I’ve seen others do it. Just one caution to those who try: If you hit the big time without going to college, then surround yourself with a bunch of advisors who did go to college. Otherwise you’re going to fudge a lot of important details through sheer ignorance and end up wasting a lot of time cleaning up after your mistakes (clashes with the IRS, liability lawsuits, harassment lawsuits, etc.) It’s a paperwork world, and you have to know how to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s. Just a little off-the-cuff advice, based on seeing some troubles that acquaintances of mine have gotten into.

46

You sound just like I did at 25.

ahhh, life, it gets you down sometimes.

If you read darwin ( selfish gene by dawkins is a good primer ) you can understand how life works but not why. Nobody really knows why.

I advise you to try be happy and content yourself, don’t worry about what other people are doing or what makes them content.

I have found that regular exercise and a loving partner makes my life bearable but its different for everyone.

If you think your really smart then take an IQ test and join MENSA ( they ain’t all stuffy types by the way ! ).

Work to live not the other way around, its important to remember that we all die one day and as such try and make good use of your time on this earth.

If you really need to then travel, it DOES broaden the mind, you can also annoy the hell out of people in accounts by going on about your time in Tibet.

Remember to remain true to yourself and NOT turn into a number, some people do, some pretend to ( covert action ! ) and others walk there own way.

as it says in ‘eye of the tiger’ … you have to fight just to keep your dreams alive… TRUE

47

I am also commiserating with Exprix on this one. I’ve often thought that one of the curses of intelligence, along with the way American society functions today, is to have TOO MANY CHOICES!

It’s incredibly hard for me to stay put in my life. This includes not only jobs, but places to live, significant relationships and what to order for lunch. Knowing that it’s ALL out there, and I’m bright enough and bold enough to go out and get it, makes me increasingly uneasy to “settle” for any one thing.

I’ve reached the point where I will only do things that make me happy whenever possible. Life is too short to be a drone. I undertand the maxim of, “work to live, don’t live to work,” but I can’t abide by it, personally. I’m broke a lot, but much happier on the whole. I’ve been called “childish” and “flighty” often for it, but I have to disagree. I’ve always paid my bills, I support myself, I’m a productive, functioning member of society. I move constantly, but that’s part of what I do (actress). I won’t apologize for anything. I’m pretty pleased, overall. I’m certainly happier now than when I was a practicing counselor, knocking myself out with 90 hour weeks and making big money. :shrugs: All comes down to priorities, I assume.

Disclaimer: I, like Esprix, mean no ill-will towards anyone that works 9-5, or am making any other judgements of any sort. Just my personal choices being spouted.

48

Think about your life, Pippin.