When I was fifteen years of age and struggles with my parents began to reach a fever pitch, my mother one day came into my room after a row and told me she was afraid I would not be able to provide for a family when I grew up. She was not concerned for the socioeconomic disparity between hers and my generation nor the wage stagnation of several decades, but was instead trying to shame me into going to work on my Dad’s construction site that weekend even though I had homework, swimming practice, a swimming meet, church, piano practice, student council, and a school dance. I didn’t know what was wrong with me at the time but as an adult I now recognize how severe my depression had become and how stressed out and overwhelmed I was as a teenager, with an incredible amount of responsibility while living under the thumb of people who regularly utilized such emotional abuse to suffocate and control me instead of teaching me tools with which to survive in life. I mean, even when I went to work for my Dad he never actually taught me any construction skills but instead just made me do all the cleanup work, where typically the point of passing on the family trade is to endow your children with a way to provide for themselves, and following his instruction I was only going to be any good at sweeping up sawdust, installing sod, and telling everyone around me how bad they are at everything they do.

Luckily I had developed an introverted talent at being an artist and when finally forced from home at the age of eighteen with no resources and no support on account of my being homosexual in a family of conservative Christians, I was able to leverage my skill in ways which both saved and inadvertently hindered me. Almost immediately I got a job in a senior position at the paper/magazine of the University of Utah and as a result free tuition (although I also unknowingly suffered from the disease which causes alcoholism which prevented me from actually going to college and that is another story you can read about here or watch here). But because I already had the talents that most people go to college for I was able to support myself reasonably well and thus less motivation to risk the time and effort it would take to go to college. This had its own benefits and problems in that I would have no student debt but instead missed out on a great opportunity to develop as a person, make friends, and better discover who I was and what I really wanted out of life, which really is the point of higher education.

My parents and many other people with whom I have come into unfortunate contact in my life have the inexplicably antisocial and self-righteous habit of declaring to others how much or how long they have worked and what stuff it has enabled them to buy. My Dad was very fond of bragging about his first car purchase at sixteen years of age was a 1960’s Jaguar E-type convertible. He conveniently plays down the fact that he got it from someone in bankruptcy for about half of what it was worth, that wages then were much higher in relation to the cost of sports cars and houses, and also that he had absolutely no extracurricular activities which conflicted with having a job (most which were not even my choice anyway). I once had a person whom I thought was a friend kick me out of his apartment where I was staying after moving back to Utah after my suicide attempt for not having secured a job within seven days of arriving, even though I had a job offer on the way from a successful interview as a graphic artist for an advertising agency which I got a few days later as he smugly lectured me about “having a job since he was sixteen,” which was as a clerk at the library part time involving none of the kind of manual labor I’d been doing since I was fucking twelve years old, doing things like shoveling fifty-year-old insulation from attics in sweltering summers, getting first degree sunburns and still forced to work in the sun without protection, nearly dying from a falling board with a nail in it which went into my shoulder instead of my head, dislocating my knee when shoveling broken concrete, and cleaning the excrement and piss from toilets in my father’s office buildings.

Even as a young kid I sensed that these people’s protestations of virtue originated from a sense of insecurity, so I never really gave them much weight, though that fails to address the harm such behavior causes to their own relationships no matter the actions of the intended target of the manipulation. More ridiculous to me it seems the total irrelevance of work ethic and talent and the ability to actually find, secure, and work a job, never mind the market forces usually beyond our control which determine how much compensation we are able to eek out of it. My father’s convenient ignorance to his benefit from an explosive American post-war economy in an underpopulated and wealthy country which had absolutely nothing to do with his self-aggrandizing worldview is a telling gap between the life experience of the boomer generation and their attitude toward material things and those of us learning the hard way about the reality of markets, jobs, money, and resources. Because I was born just a few years before and was not some omniscient spirit possessed of the history of mankind, I thought the way I grew up—with an excess of food, reliable shelter, and innovations like electricity and hot, running water was just the way all humans lived and had ever lived. Of course you should be able to make enough money to provide not only for yourself but your wife and your six kids without any difficulty. Always enough food on the table and clothes in your closets and cars in your driveway in a detached home in a peaceful neighborhood with no warlords or gangs terrorizing the population. The boomer generation is the richest population of human beings to have ever lived on the face of the planet, and their contempt for it is disgusting (obviously not all of them are, but it’s definitely a majority). For the entire history of mankind the struggle for food, shelter, and community has always been a herculean effort from cradle to grave. The obscene accumulation of junk and crap and excess simply for the sake of it when presented with an abundance of opportunity has all but obliterated the chance to make real and lasting shifts in the human experience, hoarded by a generation who whines as much as they do while also possessing such unimaginable wealth and prosperity.

This really is a lesson on an animalistic human nature of a prey animal which mostly operates on fear. But instead of great terror birds or saber tooth tigers taking us in the night, the things which threaten our safety and security are generally only those which are caused by the presence of other humans, such as greed, selfishness, neglect, and conflict. These are very real threats to our survival and satisfaction, but the basic human instinct to these threats is to in turn employ them ourselves, and then humans who feel justified simply for having an emotion do the very thing to other people they fear to experience themselves, especially if they can afford to. My mother was right in a sense about my *willingness to work hard*, which is what she so gracelessly implied during that confrontation as a teenager. I was already tired, overwhelmed, and despondent. I saw no reason to exert the kind of energy it took to reap mostly nothing. The generations before us saw opportunity in their hard work. Ours sees monotony for the sake of it. In the intervening years I have had many opportunities to exert myself greatly and because of my exceptional artistic and technical abilities was paid far more than what anyone my age might be able to command with only a high school education. When I was first starting out in my former career one of the first jobs I got in broadcasting was at a local station in Salt Lake City. In our graphics department there was an old computer about the size of a huge suitcase with a monitor built into it and performed only the most rudimentary photoshop functions like placing text, cutting out photos, and applying solid lines of color. No gradients, shadows, or other nice effects—just literally text, photos, and solid blocks of color. My boss insisted I learn how to use it but I refused, since photoshop on our Macs could do so much more we would never be using this box if we could help it. He persisted after revealing how much the box had cost the company more than ten years prior—$250,000. In 1990. For fucking Photoshop. For a computer that cost almost three times as much as the average price of a home in the United States at that time. The pricetag for that piece of shit is a perfect example of the obscene disparity between opportunities then and now. There used to be real money in motion graphics design, with artists and companies alike making hundreds of thousands of dollars for their skills, not just able to support families but becoming outright wealthy. Just at the time I realized that the earning potential in my chosen profession was waning the Bush recession gutted the entertainment industry which corporations used as an excuse to further withdraw budgets and funding from projects and systems even though marketing and brand identification is one of the most important components of art and media properties and they suffered not at all from the recessions and instead merged into bigger, crappier, less creative conglomerates. A perfect example of this disparity of quality is a show on which I made the titles for the Travel Channel called Mysteries at the Museum, which is still running now ten years later with the same graphics and branding identity I created, because those are important for a show and tells the viewer that you value your own property and idea enough to make it look nice so they might actually not waste their time investing theirs. But immediately after this show aired to great success the production company fired the talented producer with whom I worked and replaced him with an asshole to tried to steal my source files for a followup, derivative property and instead ended up making a shitty title sequence through his editors in an editing suite. It was promptly shut down after a few episodes even though it was in all other aspects an exact clone of the original.

Not a single one of my five, married siblings and their partners, every one with a college degree (one is a rocket scientist!), have been able to buy the kind of homes and lifestyle my parents had on just one income with no more than a High School diploma. The struggle I went through after getting cancer and having my life fall apart gave me a fresh perspective on the purpose of career and the realization that my pursuit of success and financial stability was a desire held by others in my life who revered money and things, and it was not at all an interest of my own. I left my career to write my book and begin working directly with other people, and the tools I learned from practices like the personal and fear inventory in the chapter on spirituality in my book freed me from the motivations to succeed which were only based on fears and misconceptions about life. Tired of the fruitlessness of laborious and unrewarding labor for others I instead sought to spend my days enjoying myself, other people, and though making far less money use my energy to get the most out of my life. Though it seems like our chances for success and financial wealth have in some cases broadened with the advent of things like professional gaming, crowd funding, and social media stardom the reality is that most honest labor nets depressingly less reward for even more required effort. I can understand maybe the obsession of real life equivalents of characters in shows like MadMen to exhaust themselves for the glittering fortunes and admiration which they promised. But now when doing that kind of labor does not even result in a salary sufficient to purchase a house or apartment commensurate to your skill and contribution to the company it no longer makes sense to even do it! I left an industry (and company) that sorely needs me because it did not offer the opportunities worth the effort. It’s a strange concept of labor and value that boomers have adopted, promised incredible wages, pensions, and success forgetting the value of labor done for them, thinking it just happens magically by the selfless willingness of drones of human beings grateful for the crumbs that fall from the table? In what reality is this the case?

Finding satisfaction and financial and material success as a human in this day and age (in Western and Capitalist countries) now requires a shift in what we find valuable. Money is no longer the carrot at the end of the stick. But that’s alright because there are far more carrots in other forms which simply have not been paid attention. One of my favorite films is the movie Minimalism on Netflix for its inspirational message about the inherent value in the space around things, which is as much as the things themselves, including time. To me, the idea of living in a tiny house in the middle of a quiet garden is worth more than the money my parents paid for some of the sprawling, sterile, development homes in which we lived (not the ones my Dad built though, he’s truly an artist when it comes to architecture and building, though they were needlessly large). The freedom which comes from claiming one’s time, health, and talents for ourselves instead of service to exploitive and abusive bosses has exceptional monetary value. The time I spend sleeping in till 8:30 or 9:00 every morning, cooking a good breakfast, pursuing creative projects, making homemade bread, debt-free and helping other people with their health in a schedule which is neither restrictive nor exhausting has great monetary value. Precisely, the exact difference between what I made as an un-empowered pawn for an ungrateful and uninspiring malcontent and what I make now (and more). Of course, I dream of having a garden and a swimming pool, but I still wouldn’t have those things at my last job unless I saved up and then absconded to some other place and left my job anyway. An ex, who is from another generation and also doesn’t understand video games, had a similar obsession with money and an equal inability to save any, spending most of his salary on travel, luxuries, and other distractions from his unhappiness, and upon our unamicable breakup sold all of our furniture, kept the money, demanded I pay him (which I did), and went into debt borrowing from friends and loans services to remodel and refurnish his new apartment that he was renting, and I have never met a more unhappy person in all my life. He often rolled his eyes when I told him I would have been happier as a Native American pre-colonization living off the land within the tight bonds of a close community than in our modern societies with all its conveniences (the food was probably excellent!). He also loathed me for turning down a contract to construct a 3D model of a gun for a company’s marketing pitch to sell to the military, you know, to kill people.

The future of material fulfillment for our generations takes on a form of more communal and fundamental aspects of existence and prosperity, increasing the quality of the things that are everyday requirements of existence rather than their quantity, and interests and satisfaction in basic human nature like farming, cooking, and developing or practicing innovations to achieve this increase such as regenerative agriculture or just taking a cooking class (or just watching instructional videos), with less dependence on simple material accumulation and cheap shit which pollutes our souls and our planet anyway, an increased appreciation for the value of beauty, organization, efficiency, togetherness, friendship, peace, and cooperation. The cultivation of talents, intelligence, and leisure based not on novelty and price but healing and wellness. One of the best things I have seen in all my life were messages from young Iranian men to young American men who have been playing computer games and watching YouTube together all their lives declaring their opposition to the ridiculous pissing contests and childish tantrums of their whiny and disgruntled grandparents who, thankfully, are swiftly nearing the end of their time on this planet. There are things that money can always provide such as security and opportunity, but the idea that money itself provides fulfillment is the very reason why boomers are so commonly angry, depressed, and insane. One thing you will hear in the coming decades is the burden of the aging boomer population on the economies of the world—but this is actually an excellent time for workers since their talents will be in demand, so don’t listen to the rhetoric of gloom which is instead designed to promote corporate and shareholder profit. We will have some struggles but for the most part a future of general prosperity and true satisfaction is coming for us, so long as you pay attention and learn the lessons that life is trying to teach. Money and stuff has never brought what most humans think it does, and so the apparent misfortune in our economic situation is really a chance for us to have the kinds of lives which are truly satisfying, enjoyable, and wonderful—lives full of good food, beauty, innovation, creativity, friends, family, quality, health, and a true sense of self-worth and sense of reverence for our position in the cosmos. Instead of an accumulation of things, satisfaction in the current economic environment can be found within its limits, ironically paring down your possessions, living in a small but cleaner and more beautiful footprint, improving and indulging in the quality of food, with more time invested in creativity, innovation, and togetherness.

If you are one of the many millions of people who have jobs that involve sitting and being indoors all day, you might like to read my article Health For Gamers, which talks about how to stay healthy when sitting for long periods of time indoors. My new book, The Perfect Child, guides the reader through very helpful and effective trauma therapies which help to resolve the pain of our childhood and discover newfound confidence, self-respect, and exactly how to enjoy mundane things in life and build and sustain relationships with others.