Deciding between the real thing and the right thing

Are you doing what you must, or betraying yourself along the way?

A friend of mine is thinking about leaving her public service job to become a weaver and teach Appalachian Studies. Another is switching from a job in a downtown city doing budget analysis to working for the Park Service and collecting all my old folklore stories about ditch magic. (It is weird to be from a place that fascinates people from other places, especially when all you’ve ever wanted was to get out of Appalachia.) 

Another friend is so scared he can barely articulate his true dream – getting a bachelor’s degree in culinary arts in Italy, even though he already has two degrees in political stuff and a cushy job where he makes a difference. Even my own kid, a gamer most comfortable behind a screen, recently discovered wicca and plants and rocks and rituals. 

I don’t know if it’s just the natural outcome of a post-Covid world or if we’re all, collectively, having a midlife crisis at every age. But all the people I love are in flux, desperate for a piece of themselves, a space and time that’s only for them. 

More than that, though, their desperation is driving them to crave a world of real things. 

Things you build with your hands, land you touch, food you share. A world that makes more sense than this one.  

A writer I met in a fellowship recently did this great piece that has stuck with me for weeks (she’s great, subscribe!). She shared this quote that has lived in my brain since I read it: 

SOCIETY REWARDS SELF-BETRAYAL. 

It’s maybe the most true thing I’ve ever read, even after years of studying society and politics and economics. Maybe you’ve felt it yourself.

I think we all felt it during Covid, when we expected to come out of lockdown into a different world, a realer world, a world where we could get back to the things we truly want. 

Whatever lockdown looked like for you, it was the first and possibly only time in history that literally everyone on the planet had to just…stop.

Stop pushing. Stop doing for the sake of doing. Stop consuming. 

We had no choice but to stop doing what society said. Society was, finally, silent.

Humans, collectively, faced the brutal truth that whatever it was we were so busy doing before, whatever we were so invested in…was not what really mattered.  

We had to realize how little we actually missed – and how simple it became to get aligned with ourselves. To fully appreciate what we would miss if the world came to a sudden end the next day. 

Covid forced us to realize just how much self-betrayal we had done to keep society happy. 

But even after all of this, we are still very good at choosing safety, and terrible at choosing ourselves. 

No one grows up wanting to be a consumer for a living, and yet that’s what most of us are doing: working, to stay alive, to buy things, to feed and care for and give opportunities to our kids and selves and families.

But we do this in a world that is often utterly disconnected from actual, physical reality. The sun that shines, plants that grow, dirt under your feet, long meals with funny people, having a good idea and following it, exploring a physical world that we so often move through with our faces in our phones.

When physical reality is forgotten, we make choices that do not serve who we truly are. 

We betray ourselves, over and over. We want the realest thing, but we settle for the closest thing. 

We want to be creators and builders and artists and makers and train drivers and astronauts and firemen. 

We settle for being content marketers and fintech programmers and event planners and operations specialists and clerks in music stores. 

It doesn’t feel like a terrible decision, because it’s the safest choice. It’s close to the thing we truly want.

We justify it because we have to, because it is hard to afford existence these days and we all have to pay bills so we can buy more stuff so we can stay alive. 

But these choices aren’t really aligned with who we are at our core. These choices are adjacent to the thing we truly want to do – if we’re lucky – but they’re not the real thing itself. 

We settle for the adjacent things because they are safe. They make sense to people around us. They help us keep our credit scores up and buy houses and clothes and cars and food. 

Adjacent things convince us this is the best way. They tell us that we are being responsible – and that we’re one step closer to the things we actually want to do. 

That’s what makes adjacent things so dangerous. They’re deceptive. They’re jobs and places that seem like what we want, or close enough.

So we do them, year in and year out. We build careers out of them. We choose cities and families and friends and lifestyles based on them. 

We put all our time and energy into the adjacent things, without realizing how far away we are from true alignment with what our souls want to do. 

The most dangerous part of this, of course, is: do this for a few decades, and you wake up nearing forty, or fifty, or sixty, realizing you’ve only ever done the safe things, the meh third cousins of the things you actually want.

You’ll realize that you keep switching jobs or houses or partners or cities or laptops or lamps or friends, not because you can’t find the right ones, but because underneath everything, you are always unsettled. 

At sea. Unmoored.  

That is your body saying: pay attention. 

That is your mind saying: we are denying something inside ourselves.

That is your soul saying: this is not the right thing for us, even if everyone else says it is. 

When we let society define what the right thing is, we will run all our lives to the next right thing, and then the next and the next.

Worse, we will keep on investing in the right thing, the thing that is close-but-not-quite-the real thing, until all our skills and opportunities and networks and the little social capital we have are in this adjacent thing. 

This makes it incredibly hard to leave. It narrows. It constricts. It squeezes the giant, messy, beautiful, chaotic self into ever-more-claustrophobic pathways.

Adjacency is dangerous because every year that you live it makes it harder to ever go back to the real thing you wanted in the first place. Most of us will die one day without ever having actually attempted the real thing we know we wanted more than all the rest. 

The natural argument to this – and believe me, I listened to it for decades – is that there is no other choice. That we can’t afford to leave our adjacent jobs, our health insurance, our retirement savings, our house.

That we can’t live without money and we need the things our work buys us to simply stay alive.  

But as a dear friend said to me this month, when I was considering an MFA program even though I’ve already got a master’s degree and 20 years of experience in something completely unrelated: can you really afford not to? 

Can you afford to die having lived your whole life adjacent to the things you truly wanted?

Can you afford to stay alive, rather than to live?

Can you afford to spend your “one wild and precious life” scraping to live adjacent to the things that make you who you are?

Can you afford to stay adjacent, or is it time to dive in? 

My answer to that question is that I really can’t afford the MFA. But I also can’t afford staying adjacent and playing small.

I have a chance right now, as I send my kid off to college before I’ve yet hit forty, to take a different path. I can’t afford not to do the real thing, because if I don’t do it now, I might die never having done it. 

What I can afford is to make a different kind of investment in my own real thing, which has always been to live a life surrounded by words.

I can turn the internet to my advantage; I can build my own program; I can invest what little I have into myself, almost forcing myself to believe it: yes, this is the real thing, not the right thing, and I have permission to do it anyway.

Your decision will look different, but no matter what you decide, remember that adjacency isn’t alignment. 

It might look like the thing, and some days feel like the thing, but it’s not the real thing. It’s the right one that society has decided for you. 

And when you are considering your next move, whatever it may be, remember to ask yourself: What would it look like to feel like I live fully inside the life that I have?

Am I following the real thing, or the right thing?

Am I being true to myself? Can I afford not to be? 

Until next time, friends, 

Emily

P.S. Sorry for the lateness of this newsletter. I’ve been fighting my way out of what’s probably 20 years of repressed anxiety and struggling to write.

But it’s beginning to brighten a bit, so expect more in June and enjoy your summers, Northern Hemisphere folks!

If you want to follow along with my version of the DIY MFA, let me know by dropping a note in the comments! I’m such a dork that I have an entire international conference agenda and four semesters of syllabi to share.