Do You Wonder: “What the Hell Am I Doing"?

I don’t mean to indulge myself by saying I’m an artist, writer, or creator. Much like I call myself a powerlifter because I compete in the lifting of heavy things or call myself an investor because I buy businesses with all the money I have, I write every day so I will call myself a writer too. This is all a preamble for me to associate with other writers, ones who everyone (myself included) admire. Specifically, to associate myself with the crippling question that frequently envelops my mind: “What the hell am I doing?” 

It’s funny when I hear novelists talk about such a syndrome. Neil Gaiman spoke about a similar fear where he thought someone would come to him one day and tell him the jig is up and he would finally have to get a real job. I’m not comparing my essays to Gaiman’s bestselling novels. On the contrary. My first thought is to think how amazing novelists are to share elements of the human condition through stories. Particularly, stories that expand the reader’s imagination and/or make them feel normal for having wondered similar thoughts. Simply, I realize I’m not the only one with “fucked up” thoughts. 

This makes me wonder if the works of screenwriters and novelists are meant to provide outlets that make misfits feel like they belong somewhere. A virtual tribe that they don’t have to interact with but know exists through asynchronous consumption of the work. 

I doubt it’s just writers or myself that ask this to themselves. I wonder if musicians ask this of themselves too. Why they bother putting words and sounds together to create a song. I wonder what a photographer asks herself this question when she is taking a photo of a person or landscape that might seem eerily similar to the bajillion others on the web. 

When it was my job to be a stock picker, I admit it was surreal to think I was getting paid to read about companies and pick the best ones. But, the output was a promise of making clients wealthier. Not that there is a guarantee but a promise that we will do our best. Quite the direct output if you think about it. Most jobs in one way or another are about doing things to make a company richer so it makes its shareholders richer. Places like the fund I worked at are the shareholders who are an extension of the people who give us their money to manage. With ~90% of the people on Earth striving to make more money, this was an easy job to justify the existence of. 

When I was an auditor, I didn’t think my work had any value. Not the profession but what I did personally. Yet, it was mandated by law so it was something everyone had to do. So, I guess the law gave my work value. It gave value in that the investors, like the one I became, relied on them to forecast the future (however terribly). 

When I was a consultant, much of my work really didn’t seem to have value. Sometimes, it would be considered valuable when we were tasked with firing hundreds of people to pump up the bottom line of a client. I guess you see the value in the profit figures my investor counterparts saw but I daresay I didn’t see any value in the PowerPoint decks I made with symmetrical charts and punctuations. In some ways, every major profession I had served a stage to make investors wealthier. It’s funny to consider for a moment that billions of dollars moved on trust on the work done by a bunch of 20-something-year-olds who couldn’t give a shit about the survival of their clients. But none of these professions gave me the kind of odd visceral feel I have when I write my essays.

None of these jobs ever put me in multi-day funks where I'd sit for hours looking outside, paralyzed and unable to write anything down. It’s not nihilism but an inability to make sense of It all. Maybe that’s just it. That some things don’t have to make sense. Sense as in within the "realm of the explainable". 

I’ve considered telling myself that what I write is entertaining and will achieve what I intend to in that it may help people explore, understand, and even create the self they want. I think this is the case for movies and books. Really great movies and books leave me awed. Just thunderstruck by the creator’s ability to grasp the human psyche. It inspires me but also makes me truly fear whether I am capable of similar feats. I guess a mix of arrogance, naïveté, and confidence is required to push on in such a field. Or maybe an extreme fear of failure could be a driving factor too. You’d be surprised how many high-functioning people I know in coveted positions use fear (and possibly anger) as their motivator.

When I consume the works of great creators, I also think the value in what they do is that it shows how life can be so very interesting. Not merely in the stories but in the fact that something like this was created. That someone was on the other side of such a creation. A value that only seems to be realized after meticulous hours of pounding one’s head somewhere wondering “what the hell am I doing?"

As I sit here, typing away furiously, I admit to having flickers of hope that my own essays have value too. Some more so than others, though I cannot predict it when writing. Some essays on business or investing insights might have value to someone trying to build wealth. Some essays on getting stronger may have value in applying it further to one’s own health. But much of what I write (I have 284 unpublished essays) aren’t those. They are insights into how one person (yours truly) thinks and lives. How one person examines his own life in tandem with the lives of others and the greater collective he finds himself in. 

I wishfully think they have value. Which is why I still write and publish. In fact, I don’t know what else I’d rather do. At the least, I enjoy writing them. I’ve even wondered if such an act denotes me as a narcissist as I rattle on about this and that. The reality is that I probably do hold myself in high enough regard. Not conceited, but convinced. 

I guess the value to these essays, similar to a novel or film, could be that it may help one other person out there to think that they aren’t alone. That there is another misfit here thinking the same weird thoughts, the same paralysis that grips him, the same fear that makes him wonder about the course his life has taken. Maybe such an essay can help another continue living: To see life as a hard but interesting endeavour filled with weird people. Maybe that’s the value of the weird and self-indulgent topics I write about.