Always darkest before dawn.

Whoever said "it's always darkest before dawn" had a very poor understanding of optical physics. Anyone who's ever gotten up at four in the morning and stared at the eastern horizon knows what I'm talking about. In fact, anyone who's stayed up all night knows that it's darkest at the exact point when the sun is at its nadir; that is, the point at which the earth most completely occludes the sun.

Here's a picture:

Nature is not human-hearted. The sun is a huge ball of hydrogen and helium, fusing into lithium and carbon and eventually iron, on its very gradual way towards becoming too hot and dense to contain itself. Around five billion years from now, it'll consume itself and take everything in the inner solar system with it. The elements flung off from the death throes of the daystar will in turn birth new solar systems, and so it goes.

And the heart is not much more than an engine forged from the remnants of past dead stars; it too is subject to the laws of entropy, and will give out at some not-quite-certain point in the future. And the fortunes of most people are governed by similar laws: rise and fall, peak and trough, but the general trend is towards decline and extinguishment.

Point is: don't let some threadbare cliché fool you into thinking that hard times always come to happy endings at some predictable point in the narrative. This is real life, and not the stories we tell ourselves about real life. Anyone who's stayed up all night waiting for the sunrise knows what I mean: by the time the sun's rays begin to illuminate the upper atmosphere, you regret staying up all night and want nothing more than to go back to bed.

Practical lessons to take from this: (1) try to see a sunrise on a regular basis, because they're glorious and worth waking up early for, (2) get some sleep while you're at it, and (3) try not to sink into a pit of bibbering despair when things go south. Because sure, the universe is trending towards entropy, but it's no excuse to not try and make something of it in your brief tenure as participant and witness to the universe's unfolding.

2014: Let's do this.

It's been a wild year. I started the year off in the worst mental health of my adult life, a period I decided to call later on my 'psychosomatic rebellion' --- mind and body refused to cooperate. There were mornings I couldn't get out of bed, despite trying to leverage the last remaining shreds of willpower I had. It's easier when you're younger to just 'suck it up' and do it, but as we grow older, it becomes increasingly difficult, and that's partly because you begin to see that just sucking it up is not an end in itself: it's a means to an end. And I had lost that end.

How I lost the plot

The end was to do research and teach, but after spending two years in the belly of the academic beast, I realized that it would not lead to anything that I would call a meaningful or fulfilling life.

There's this myth that academia is a meritocracy: if you're smart and hard-working (and even a little creative), you'll get far, but the truth is that the vast majority of academic superstars came from advantaged backgrounds, and even though I'm a white male, coming from a poor family means that if I pursued a PhD, I'd be nearly guaranteed to be more than $100,000 in the hole after finishing, instead of the relatively tamer $40,000 that is my current and final debt load.

Let me restate: I've seen smarter and harder-working people than I am get sunk by academia, because they believe (despite abundant evidence to the contrary) that academia is a meritocracy, when in fact, it's anything but. Let this be a warning to anyone who thinks about pursuing grad school.

The grass isn't any greener on the other side

The corporate world isn't much better: I worked for a major educational corporation throughout my entire grad career, but the difference was that I could make a living from it. I watched as it went from a network of more-or-less independent franchises to centralized corporate control, in a business where the majority of clients and referrals come through personal networks that can't be managed from a corner office in New York. I watched as it was mismanaged into the ground by the investment firm that bankrolled the centralization and consolidation: as a contracted employee, I wasn't all too affected (i.e. I still made a living), but before anyone reading this starts thinking that academia is somehow uniquely shitty, I want to head you off at the pass and reassure you that there're many worse places to be than academia.

The audacity of hope

So here I am: only a thesis away from graduation, my future already mortgaged, and having spent the last two years of my life training for a career that I'm no longer willing to pursue. I'm increasingly self-employed, because I think having multiple hustles is far more practical than pinning your hopes on one career or another. I've traded my one big hope for a dozen smaller hopes: hopes that people will pay me to write and teach, hopes that I can learn from everything I experience (no matter how painful).

Hope is a funny thing. It's the backbone of my ability to suck it up and move forward. I lived on $9,000 a year for many years with the one big hope that my sacrifice and struggle would pay off, but after ten years of struggling, I've come to see it as the dead end that it has been the entire time. I don't hope that people will pay for my writing: people already have, and all I have to do is step it up big-time.

Regrouping and retraining

So I'm taking my degree and using it. By May, barring any unforeseen circumstances, I will be awarded a master's degree in anthropology. Many anthropologists have done fairly well for themselves outside of academia, but everyone I know who has done so has made it through a combination of luck, creativity, and perseverance. I am no different. I don't see my schooling as my education. The countless hours spent studying Marxian political economy, social statistics, global development, and human-environment interactions are hard to spin into a paying career, but that's not the point: unless the Internet collapses tomorrow, people who can think and write will always find some means of making a living.

So in conclusion: 2014 is going to be one hell of a ride. Let's do this.