"An entire generation..."
Expanding on a quote from fight club...
Man, this little clip from fight club popped back into my world yesterday and it’s been in my head all day…
“An entire generation pumping gas.
Waiting tables.
Slaves with white collars.
Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes.
Working jobs we hate, so we can buy shit we don’t need.
We’re the middle children of history man.
No purpose or place.
We have no great war.
No great depression.
Our great war is a spiritual war.
Our great depression is our lives.”
First of all, this is just such a beautiful piece of writing packed with so much truth.
But a lot of what this brought up for me was some of my past…
I was a smart kid, I just didn’t care about school all that much, I pretty much only liked English and History because they only involved reading and writing which were what I truly loved.
When I was around 16 or 17, I became very obsessed with Fight Club, smoking weed, and taking psychedelics.
Pondering answers to the question, “What the fuck am I supposed to do with my life” interested me a lot more than Biology or Trigonometry.
Weed, acid, and mushrooms definitely were more interesting than all that nonsense.
It was movies like Fight Club which made me realize this traditional route was total bullshit, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew that I wanted to have freedom.
The idea of being trapped inside a cubicle was absolutely repulsive, so being a business owner seemed like a good route…
And logically I understood that money wasn’t the only thing that mattered.
But try telling that to a kid sleeping on a couch eating ramen practically every meal…
You can have knowledge, but knowledge only turns into understanding once it’s paired with experience.
So when I started into this whole freelance copywriting thing my only goal was to get rich because I just wanted to figure out finances in my 20s so I could enjoy my 30s more.
I figured out how to perform massive quantum leaps pretty quickly and this got me to the point where I had more money than I knew what to do with.
I bought all the shit, filled a whole house with furniture, bought an expensive sports car, bought all the clothes, and was still unhappy.
So I thought, why don’t I just get laid a lot?
That should make me happy.
News flash…it didn’t.
Then I thought, okay I’m clearly in a hell hole right now, I think I need to find god, maybe that will make me happy.
It didn’t but at least it kept me out of trouble and was a good environment.
And it wasn’t until I started this blog that everything came full circle…
I realized I was literally living out that part of that quote…
“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes. Working jobs we hate, so we can buy shit we don’t need.”
This is why I started focusing on fulfillment more in my life.
And one of the few things that truly bring me fulfillment and happiness is writing.
Being able to express my thoughts, my feelings, and my experiences with people who actually give a fuck has been one of the coolest experiences I’ve ever had.
And it’s that one line…
“Our great war is a spiritual war.”
It’s that exact concept that I’m trying to explain to all of you through my own interpretations of the world.
I don’t post about the gym because it’s the bro thing to do…
I post about the gym to motivate you to go towards things that help you self-actualize a better version of yourself so you can show up with a higher frequency in this world.
I don’t post about clients and making money because I want to show off…
I post about all that because I want to show you it’s very possible for you to go create your own version of personal freedom which keeps you out of the grips of corporate America.
I do all of this because I want to express these concepts to you in a way you’ll understand it.
And it’s cool to see that I’m now doing for others, what Chuck Palahniuk (author of fight club) did for me.
Waking people up to the fact that there’s something more.