The Art of Plodding: 1981 and the Luxury of Being Lost

This is the prequel to The Career I Didn’t Plan

George Bernard Shaw famously said, “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself”.

It’s a great sentiment, but looking back at my senior year of high school, I wasn’t creating much of anything. I was just… there.

College was on the horizon, but it felt more like a looming weather pattern than a choice. I applied with no clear idea why. I never really had a “dream school.” I just filled out the paperwork for the local state college because that’s where everyone else was going. My grades were “good enough”—the kind of solid B-level performance that kept people off my back—and I went simply because I was told that was the next step on the treadmill.

Up to that point, my only major life decisions involved showing up to practice and maintaining a “C” average so I could keep playing hockey. I had a part-time job, gas in the tank, and no real stress. Life was good, if a bit mindless.

My first jump into college was less about “higher learning” and more about the sudden, intoxicating smell of freedom. I spent my time screwing around, exploring the boundaries of not having a curfew, and generally treating the campus like a social club. Predictably, reality caught up. My grades tanked, I contracted a miserable case of mono, and I ended up missing the entire second semester.

Suddenly, the “Grand Plan” or lack of one was dead in the water.

The new plan was survival: work full-time and maybe take classes at night. But there was a kicker—what was I actually qualified to do? I had no real job experience; filling the toy shelf at K-Mart does not fit a good life projection forward. I had no resume to speak of, and a skill set that began and ended with a hockey stick.

I found myself floundering. I eventually landed a job in a drafty, grease-stained warehouse with a buddy of mine. We spent our days moving crates and our afternoons at the gym, trying to build muscle to make up for our lack of direction. My parents were starting to give me “the look”—that quiet, vacillating wonder about whether their son would ever launch. I was stuck in a holding pattern between that dead-end job, a girlfriend, and the occasional night class I took to say I was doing something.

I assumed this was all okay. It was 1981, after all. I didn’t have to pay rent, I was still living at home, and I figured I was at least following in my father’s footsteps. He ran a warehouse; he owned a home; he was doing alright. Maybe that was the path.

Computers were still a novelty back then, something you saw in movies or read about in magazines. I did manage to enroll in a class for BASIC—the general programming language of the time. I could barely spell “computer,” but it felt like I was touching the future, even if my worldview was still incredibly narrow.

There was no real urgency. I was just plodding along, a confused late teen with a compass that wouldn’t lock North. Looking back, I realize that my generation had a luxury that today’s kids don’t: we were allowed to be lost in the dark. We didn’t have to “find” ourselves on a public stage with 500 Instagram followers watching our every stumble. We weren’t “fake content creators” trying to monetize our confusion. We were just kids in warehouses, taking BASIC classes, and waiting for the world to tell us who we were supposed to be.

Mark Twain said, “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear”. Back then, I didn’t have courage; I just didn’t have enough information to be truly afraid yet. I was creating myself one boring warehouse shift at a time, and I didn’t even know it.

This is the prequel to The Career I Didn’t Plan

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