I am dying to give a shit about something.
Institutionally, you know? Like I want to contribute to making something not just good, but the best it can be.
The problem is there’s not much money in giving a shit about things these days, and especially, many things actively (mentally) punish you for giving too much of a shit. The last time I had an actual job at an actual company, I gave a lot of a shit, but within months had it sucked out of me by incompetent and/or malicious management and business practices.
Unfortunately, giving a shit about that job brought almost zero value to real people in the world, because the vast majority of it was reading and then not responding to social media comments, or responding with carefully crafted corporate boilerplate nothing statements to people who had real problems that we couldn’t help.
Please don’t go and look at my resume, I would hate to have to deal with a defamation suit because of something I wrote in my blog that literally nobody reads. It was a bad job.
I give a lot of a shit about my soccer club, and have for years. This is a thing that I started in 2015 and has brought actual value and friendships and healthy joy to dozens of people. But it’s only ever cost me money.
I give a shit about my band! I think we’re kind of good! But that only brings me to this weird headspace where I have to think about how far it can go and what the potential upsides are. I don’t know how far I want it to go, or what our ceiling is.
I do know I don’t want to be playing dive bar shows in front of 30 people who are mostly my friends in the first place forever (or for long) and I’m sure we’re good enough to grow beyond that. But, the mechanics of it are a mystery to me.
I guess what I’m really saying is that I’d like to be able to make money from something I give a shit about. I know this is dream-thinking and not realistic in American Capitalism, but here we are.
I’ve spent a few years now being able to make at least decent money doing something I specifically do not give a shit about. That money has been falling off lately, but it’s largely because my lack-of-giving-a-shit is making it exceptionally difficult to actually do the things necessary to get more of that work.
Maybe I’ve always felt this way, but it seems like the difficulty and outright trauma of the last year of my life has radically changed my feelings towards my work, for better or worse. It’s worse in the short term, at least.
I no longer possess the drive to run a consulting business doing web updates that I don’t really enjoy doing for businesses I don’t care about.
I want to run a community art space, or a local thing that helps facilitate excellent creative people making the things they want to make.
Maybe I’ll figure it out properly at one point.
For now, I’m going to go work on the new combobox tune, which I think I finally know what is about.