Shedding irrational behavior and Financial Independence

In my previous post I talked about my jolt into a more relaxed and confident world, suddenly absent of the fears that were hidden beneath the surface, and without fear I am have been free to objectively analyze my life and consider questions that were a little too scary before.

These questions include "do I like my job" , "do I have to work here to have a future" , and "do I have to work in this industry to be happy." The second that I had put together that my love for games and knowledge of games could turn into a career, I was stuck on the conclusion that I would for sure be happiest, if not happy ONLY in the game industry. Recently I have been questioning this assertion, even though I haven't even held it for very long.

A quality of mine, although it scares most people, is that I can change my mind very quickly. What this doesn't mean is that I am indecisive and like a feather in the wind. What this does mean is that I am open to other people's opinions; however, on the outside many people get the impression that I am stubborn in my opinions as I defend them with conviction and often with the zeal of a locomotive. Actually I am convinced that if you do not defend your beliefs with conviction and try to construct the most convincing arguments to win over your opponent (the other person in the argument with you) then you never believed in the ideas in your head in the first place, so YOU are the one light as a feather and full of fluff instead of stuff. I on the other hand enjoy a good heated argument full of extremes and what ifs and "does that mean you..." statements.

It's seems I'm digressing here... ok back on topic...

In order to proceed, I have to figure out what I like about a job. This question in itself is quite assuming in itself, but I'll get to that later. The people at my work are nice. My boss is nice, the people around me are nice, my supervisor is nice, and his supervisor is not the nicest guy I know and hates when someone uses a casual tone to talk to him, but overall he's not out to get you either.
But I am not at work for people to be nice to me, I WANT MONEY. I'm not at work to be social - having nice co-workers and being social is additional. I am going to go out on a limb here and say it is actually a bad thing overall, as when people are "nice" and inbred social groups are abound, people are more likely to accept their crappy pay, crappy benefits, crappy cubicles, and crappy jobs. If all of the adjectives above are "happy" instead of "crappy" then nice becomes a plus - it is not an independent variable. Where would you choose to socialize, in smoke filled cubbies with people forced to play with you, or in a nice cafe by the beach? If you pick the second one, it's safe to say you are not a robot or company spy and I will continue.

Without fear in my system I realized that friendship was a stupid reason to stay at a job. Down irrational reason #1, on to irrational reason #2.

Irrational reason #2: For convenience for my outside work life. If you have ever caught yourself saying this, you are probably in denial (unless you have no other income and have a family to pay for or a war to fund) - I was. I want to stay in China and learn about China and learn Chinese and live like an average chinese person etc etc so I am going to stay at this job and focus hard outside of work. After the hammer of reason nailed me a new one: Work takes up 75% of my life, and the other 25% I just want to fuck around because I've been working too much. The worst thing: I got this idea from someone else. If I want to learn things about China and chinese, then I should get a job doing that, or at the very least not make that an excuse to not look for a better job in the nation's capital - which I'm going to assume is very possible.

Do I have to work here to have a future? This constitutes irrationality at it's best, and is definitly the result of victim thinking by masses of people who are uneducated about the world, business, finance, etc. I am one of them. I have heard countless times from countless people that "this is one of the fastest growing companies in this industry, and so if I want the best future I have to stay here to gain experience." I have said this myself and it is a load of crap, and a self-fulfilling prophecy / cage. When people think this way, they are more willing to accept lower wages and worse working conditions and not look for anything else. Well, I should add that the chinese market is competitive and so people are also thinking "if I don't work here, where else will I work," but I'm not sure I buy this. If there are so few jobs and so few workers, why don't more people just start businesses due to low labor costs? Then pay will increase as more companies come into the market and labor becomes more scarce and more companies compete for top talent. I sense that there is foul play going on somewhere, and don't tell me it's not a market economy either, but I'm off topic again. The point is that I don't have to "endure" anything - happiness and success are determined by a lot more factors than "did you ever work in perfect world? oh only 6 months? Sorry no happiness or success for you."

Finally, Do i have to work in this industry? I've actually struggled for a long time with my "addiction" to video games, and yet here I am satisfying it, feeding it, giving it pet names and letting it take over 75% of my life. I am an expert in the field (relatively speaking of course) and thus feel obligated to stay in the industry - until the iron fist of epiphany came and smashed the mask of fear and assumption, giving me a good look at the face behind: this job sucks. Gaming is one thing, but playing a WoW copy copy copy that happens to have decent graphics but the worst gameplay in the world is another(not to mention that I hate WoW). I am addicted to RTS (real time strategy), FPS, (first person shooter) competitive style games, not brainless clicking, time wasting, beefed up instant messaging. Sure I like MSN, but I don't want to use MSN on LSD for the rest of my life 9 hours a day.

Well, that's this particular company's game, but in reality even in an RTS company I would be bored as shit. It's not gonna be one big tea party of designing games and traveling the world from trade show to business deal to game trials and deep discussions about where games are heading and creative talks about marketing and business strategies. No. This is not freedom, this is a beaurocacy, the BOSS is the BOSS (in the US too, not just in China), and the real world of business does not work that way (well, not everywhere). After working in the game industry, I'm not gonna want to play games ever again. I already can't play dota anymore and am losing my love for starcraft. I don't want to become a one sided person either (but I will for a while if the price is right).

At least what this means is that I realize that I would be just as happy working a crappy job in any industry (well, not any), but that way I would at least not become numb to the fun of video games.

All of this is not meant to complain about how shitty my job is, and its not actually as shitty as I have made it sound, but to throw away the reasons I have been giving myself to not even consider other options. The ultimate prison is the one that you do not know is there, which translates to not even allowing myself to consider other options. There are other reasons that I give myself, such as "i need to stay here until i get a title", "I need to stay here for at least a year for my resume", etc and I could take them all down one by one but I think I proved my point.

This all as lead me to think one step beyond these questions, and think: Why do I have to have a job in the traditional sense anyway? Why do I always have to balance the pros and the cons and accept whatever I can get? Why can't I just do what I want?

The answer: Money (duh). And the answer I have found to that is financial independence. With passive income and investments, or at least owning my own steams of income I would no longer have to give myself excuses for my actions and start living with 100% willingness, for 100% of the time. Too bad this takes from 15-30 years to accomplish.... wtf world, can't you be fair for just one minute?

Luckily happiness is on the inside (right?) God I have so much more I want to write... too late, it'll have to wait. World 2 - 0 Jason