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Rick's October Tirade Beyond Work Note: After last month's sequel to the previous month's tirade about work, you'd think I'd be done grazing in this particular field. But I've tarried a little longer to munch more of the choice grass that grows here. I hope you enjoy this month's ruminations -- the third and final installment of my "Work" trilogy. What if you left the office one day and never returned?  Suppose your job became more unendurable than a hair shirt or a Barney the Dinosaur marathon. What if, in a moment of swift and terrible insight, you realized that you were marooned in the professional equivalent of Odessa, Texas, far across the windy plains from real opportunity and contentment? Imagine feeling that if you couldn't escape by the end of the year, your job could conceivably frazzle you right into the local obituary column. What if the maddening rush of deadlines and details, the chronic frustration and sensory deprivation, the petty politics, rules, reprimands, long hours and malfunctioning office furniture all converged in a single day to drive you beyond your usual tolerance for torment? Or if the rookie you just finished training for the past six months -- an upwardly mobile young upstart who took to wearing eyeglasses and loafers exactly like those of your boss -- suddenly BECAME your boss? What if your new boss made you wear a company sweatshirt with the words UNDERPAID DRUDGE or, worse yet, DEAD MEAT emblazoned on the front in bold red letters? We all have a point at which our very chromosomes scream for us to drop everything and save ourselves. What would it take to make you bail out?  And suppose you did take the leap. Would you go out in a brilliant blaze of indignation, like a systems analyst I knew who jumped onto the boardroom table and hurled churlish epithets at his superiors? Or would you slip away quietly in the legendary manner of author Sherwood Anderson, who reportedly stopped in mid-paragraph as he was dictating a letter and calmly walked out of the paint factory where he was a manager? Would you regret your decision the next day, the next year, twenty years later? Or would you eventually celebrate it like the Fourth of July, with annual festivities of fireworks, beer and burnt hot dogs? It's not a decision to be made in a moment of frivolous bravado. Quitting a job is almost like dying, even comparable to suicide: you leave people behind  to stitch up the hole you've opened in the communal fabric; once the hole is mended, life goes on without you. Some of your former colleagues will remember you for a time with fondness and regret; others will remember you only when someone mentions your name in conversation; still others -- the ones you'd pass in the hall with a generic nod of acknowledgment -- will simply nod to other people in the hall and lose even a winking glimmer of your memory. You no longer exist in their world; you've become a vague and wispy shadow, a mere insubstantial name that will be filed away like an old correspondence folder and eventually forgotten.  The difference between death and quitting a job is obvious: we can be reasonably certain that you'll continue to exist as a conscious being, assuming you don't spend your free hours watching soap operas or professional wrestling matches. The key to quitting successfully is to make sure you're escaping TO something, not merely FROM something. A suitcase full of $100 bills wouldn't hurt, either. But suppose you had all the money you needed to maintain a reasonably comfortable, congenial and debt-free existence... that you could be independently middle class in your earthly hereafter. If you could finally escape from the daily depredations of the job establishment, what would you escape to? Here's where you need all the ingenuity you can summon from your inner Thomas Edison, because it's not easy to invent your own life; it requires the vision of an architect, the free spirit of a hippie, the good sense of an accountant and the half-mad audacity of the man who gets shot out of a circus cannon.  If you think about it, simply taking orders from your boss is a safe and uncomplicated way to live. It can demolish your morale and most of your nervous system, no doubt -- especially if your boss's primary talent is for driving his or her underlings to a state of chronic overachievement. But at least your day tends to structure itself and it's a simple matter to stay  focused. Like a cart horse with blinders, you can't divert your eyes from the task ahead; you have no choice but to trudge onward. If you stop to sniff  another horse or swat a fly with your tail, you soon feel the sting of the driver's whip. In fact, you can blame any unhappiness and ill-luck on the fact that you're an enslaved hireling -- mere human livestock forced to pull a cart against your will. But once you set yourself free... then you no longer enjoy the luxury of denouncing the establishment for your sundry disgruntlements. Your life is yours alone to create, yours alone to bungle. What will you do with your ample time? Will you become a professional long-distance walker, enshrined in the books for completing the first-ever trek around the perimeter of Minnesota? Will you buy an ostrich ranch or grow your own kiwi fruit? Do you see yourself sketching fire hydrants and pedestrians from a shaded seat at an outdoor cafe... creating a website for descendants of Millard Fillmore... bidding on vintage Howdy Doody memorabilia... inventing a nose-harness for left-handed snorers? Will you write the definitive history of Camembert cheese or travel to Guatemala in search of the elusive quetzal? There's no limit to the lives we can create outside the confines of our old jobs; we're free to make them as inspired, noble, dissipated, useful, wretched or silly as we are. You might even find, to your astonishment, that you can earn actual money on your own -- without the aid of bosses, cubicles or a forty-minute commute.  This option isn't nearly as far-fetched as you imagine. In fact, your town probably shelters numerous citizens who earn a living in this outlaw manner; we call them entrepreneurs. They operate restaurants, car dealerships, dating services, tattoo parlors, funeral homes, ballroom dance studios and chiropractic clinics. They're self-employed roofing contractors, florists, scrap haulers, beauticians, demolition experts, caterers, optometrists, exterminators and insurance agents. The Yellow Pages are full of them.  But here's the catch (and you knew there had to be one): most entrepreneurs work brutal hours, without plush benefits like free dental care or even the reassuring arrival of a regular paycheck. You don't want to declare your independence from a ten-hour-a-day job so you can earn the right to work fourteen hours a day. No, if you require both freedom and domestic tranquility, there's a better way to liberate yourself. I should warn you that this route is not for everyone; those who long to dwell in mass-produced tract mansions with half a dozen bedchambers and round-topped Palladian windows (how elegant, how upscale, how indicative of exalted socioeconomic status!) should look elsewhere, as should parents of future Ivy Leaguers and  aficionados of German automotive engineering. You might have to sacrifice some of the obligatory trinkets of haute-consumer society: the Jacuzzi in the master bathroom, the home entertainment center with monster woofers, the nannies, the unused fitness equipment, the shiny brass faucets -- even the electronic toy du jour for the seven-year-old. (Coloring books and Lincoln Logs are the way to go -- if all else fails, teach your kid how to carve zoo animals out of soap.)  If you've already shed the illusion that stuff buys happiness, you're on your way to enlightenment; if you never bought into it in the first place, you're a better cynic than I am. You're ready to join the ranks of the happy few, the free, the merrily and productively eccentric: you're about to become a  PROFESSIONAL AMATEUR.  Imagine earning your livelihood from something you love, something you'd do with pleasure even if nobody paid you. Professional baseball players know the joy; so do self-employed photographers, carpenters, bush pilots, caricaturists, tour guides, private eyes, children's book illustrators, potters, printers, bakers and kite-makers. Professional amateurs ditch the nefarious job establishment that oppressed them in the prime of life; they recover their senses and live the way nature intended them to live: free yet focused, admirably self-possessed, dignified rather than merely respectable, silly when it suits them, and abundantly happy in their work. They know how to live smaller and slower so they can live better. They don't need the solace of corporate leadership meetings and semi-annual promotions to assure them that their lives are working out.  When you've made your escape from bondage, you see the world through your own eyes again. The blinders come off... you look around, sniff the freshly cut grass, hear the mockingbirds in the trees. You begin to live by your inner clock. You're no longer forced to adapt to someone else's schedule, absorb someone else's corporate mission statement, fit into someone else's hierarchy of vice presidents, directors, managers and teammates. You belong to yourself now. That's the beauty and the risk of going it alone. Never underestimate the risk. Creating your own life is both exhilarating and terrifying, like being an explorer in the age of Columbus. You never know if your ship is headed off the edge of the earth and into the waiting gullet of some dark, devouring leviathan with bad breath. Could the pursuit of happiness make you miserable, even destroy you? As much as my cynical instincts tell me to look for the monster at the edge of the earth, I'd rather focus on the prospect of discovering a dazzling new continent. I await the first sighting of seagulls, the scent of spices carried on the breeze, the hazy blue outline of a coastal headland.  Of course, the establishment doesn't let most of us follow our bliss until we're sufficiently wrinkled and infirm. Try exploring a new continent when you have to wear a truss; try trekking through Guatemala with a three-pronged aluminum walker. But remember the happy lot of the humble professional amateur, and think about what you'd have to sacrifice to find your way there. Can you do without the hard-earned status, the tract mansion, the respect of your discerning peers, the reassuring predictability of the regulated life? Do you really need the latest electronic personal organizer with wireless Internet connectivity? Can you be ruthless and wise enough to send your kids to good old State? Or wouldn't you think of bailing out until you put them through Princeton? Whether you think you can liberate yourself in two years or twenty, it's never too early to start drawing up your escape plans. Make them romantic and a little reckless (long live Zorro!), but above all make them as real as your mundane daily goals at work. Write them down, create intermediate steps, assign dates and start putting those little check-marks in the margin. That's right -- you're using the time-honored techniques of dutiful managers to plot your own getaway from the Organization! Isn't it a hoot? Savor the delicious irony of it while you keep your subversive plans in your desk drawer and sneak a peek at them daily. Your boss will wonder why you've suddenly become so motivated. Here's the complete archive of Rick Bayan's immortal tirades for your reading pleasure: December 2002 — Hello, I Must Be Going November 2002 — A Raving Moderate August 2002 — Is Western Civilization Worth Saving? July 2002 — To Scam or Be Scammed June 2002 — I Read the News Today, Oh Boy May 2002 — Speechophobia April 2002 — Fanatics on Parade March 2002 — The Prestige Gap: A Lament February 2002 — On Becoming a Dullard January 2002 — Art for Slackers December 2001 — An Unsolicited Christmas Card November 2001 — A Tale of Two Tribes October 2001 — On the Fallen Towers August 2001 — Why Do We Bother? June 2001 — Notes from a Doomed Planet May 2001 — The Museum of Discarded Names April 2001 — Indecision March 2001 — A Slight Case of Insanity February 2001 — Letter to a Conscientious Critic January 2001 — The Cynic's Inaugural Address December 2000 — The 50th Tirade November 2000 — Travel Advisory October 2000 — Beyond Work September 2000 — More Work August 2000 — Work July 2000 — The Doves' Nest June 2000 — Great Affectations May 2000 — Tale of a Virtual Village April 2000 — The World Is My Obstacle Course March 2000 — A Living Heck February 2000 — On the Treachery of Time January 2000 — A Letter to the Future December 99 — Rare Bird November 99 — Not Just Another Obscure Ethnic Group October 99 — Extinction Reconsidered September 99 — Good Life, Bad Life, Better Life August 99 — Household Relics: An Elegy July 99 — A Meditation on Profanity June 99 — In Praise of Sloth May 99 — A Bug's Death April 99 — Obligations! March 99 — The Courage to Be Ordinary February 99 — A Grave Story January 99 — What's Left for Men? December 98 — On the Uses of Friends November 98 — A Cynic's Thanksgiving October 98 — Grand Illusions September 98 — Filth August 98 — Will the Real God Please Stand Up? July 98 — Adventures in Downsizing June 98 — Lady Longevity May 98 — Uniquely Human, Uniquely Clueless April 98 — The Mathematics of Excess March 98 — Humbuggery February 98 — Love and the Single Cynic January 98 — By the Sweat of Your Brow December 97 — Is Suffering Unfashionable? November 97 — The Tao of Housekeeping October 97 — The Sensory Deprivation Blues September 97 — Down with Natural Selection! August 97 — Noise July 97 — On Eating Our Fellow Creatures June 97 — Trouble in Book-Land May 97 — Interview with an Unemployable Man April 97 — The Cynic's Dream March 97 — Inequalities February 97 — Flesh and Mortality January 97 — How to Be a Success December 96 — Why I Can't Hate Christmas November 96 — How I Became a Cynic

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