Aging and Reaching for the Dream

I recently had my birthday. I'm 28. If you had asked me what I was going to be when I was 28 when I was half my age now and just your average middle schooler, I would've said, "I'm going to be a book author and editor. I want to read and write for my job."

Well, I'm not there, but I'm quite happy with where I ended up. As a journalism major, maybe I'm a sellout. Maybe I'm working for the Man. But you know what? The Man (or Woman in my case) makes work enjoyable.

I've noticed a lot of people in my age group are still searching for something to make them happy in work. Millennials will change careers (not jobs) on average six times in their lifetime. Does this figure hold true for everyone? No. Take me for instance. I'm a millennial, DINK (double income no kids), have not moved more than 30 miles from my home town, and have been in the same industry doing marketing for going on six years.

Have I thought of leaving? Sure, particularly when I first started out. Do you know how hard it is to learn structural systems and the difference between a RFQ and RFP. But my parents always taught me anything worth having was worth working for. So I stayed. Plus the recession scared me. I didn't want to be a starving writer because God knows I'm not that good (not nearly as good as my baby sister and I'd be competing in a pond full of my sisters) and I like to eat.

Honestly, I think there are tons of millennials just like me. No one likes ramen so we all find a fit at a company that makes us happy being desk jockies. And unless we can be nomads, like one woman I know, who bailed on the construction industry with her husband to work remotely and write a travel blog, we get along watch the years fly by as we refine our crafts and make a place in this world (and write on the side).

But something struck me on my birthday as I was listening to the podcast Millennial. The just-a-year-out-of-college podcaster, Megan Tan, made the point about taking her 9-to-5 over continuing to pursue her independent projects like her podcast full time:

"So I started to wonder, is this what it means to grow up? To sell your time so you can live comfortably? And then what happens to the projects you make in your closet, that make you feel like you are living on the edge of your seat, that make your gut churn and make you feel like you are challenging yourself?" 

She took the 9-to-5. (We all need to eat and passion projects don't always pay the bills.) But I do know what happens to those dreams she's talking about. They get shunted aside until we can "find time." Finding time is the most difficult excuse for dreams when you have a corporate job. Not one of us works 9-to-5. We go in early, we stay late, and we stare at screens all day, so who wants to essentially continue working when you get home? Not to mention you have to fit in meals and exercise - but you know what? Dreams get impatient. They demand to be experienced. Mine, the pursuit of writing - the one I always said I was never really great enough to do full-time - is demanding now after decades of quiet seething to be released, which is why the new blog. And also why I find myself sitting at my kitchen table at 5 am yet again.

Reaching for Happiness and Living in the Moment

I think everyone has this innate desire to be happier, even if we are considerably happy. Maybe it's that we have been told we can always be better or to strive to be 110%. I personally blame the winter, it makes me melancholy since I am a summer girl all the way.

At the beginning of January, I experimented with the idea of training myself to be happier, if such a thing was possible. There are articles, podcasts (if you are looking, I suggest NPR's Ted Talk and Gretchen Rubin's Happier podcast), a 30-day challenge from Huffington post, and even an app to track Happiness over time. I hypothesized that if I could change small practices about my days, then I would gradually become more happy, which I would definite as feelings of contentment, less anxiety, and overall more buoyancy of spirit.

I won't bore you with the day-to-day minutiae, but mostly I utilized the Happiness tracker (which I have since deleted - more on that later), the 30-day challenge, and listened to the podcasts to get tips. Here's what has worked for me so far:

1. (My mom is going to be shocked with this one.) Making the bed. It starts the day off with a neat slate - and keeps my dog out of the sheets. This one act also makes the room appear clean, even if the rest of the room is a mess.
2. The one-minute rule - this one is from Gretchen Rubin's podcast. She suggests that any task which can be completed in a minute or less, should be performed right when you are thinking about it. This clears out the clutter of the tiny tasks so your mind can focus on the bigger tasks.
3. Plan a trip. I realize not everyone is at a financial place where they can go to Ireland (which is where we decided to plan go) but even a day trip can increase mental well-being exponentially. For instance, we took a day trip to Tallulah Gorge and a weekend trip to Asheville.  
4. Preparing dinner made me happier. While it was time consuming, my body craved the detox from the barrage of high fat and sodium content of our 7 days a week of take-out.
5. Using positive words. I went to a panel with successful women business owners and one woman said that in all her correspondence and communication she replaces negative feeling words with positive ones. With that in mind, I've been working on doing the same. I think it has positively changed my outlook when I'm dealing with less-than-ideal situations. 

Things I'm trying next:

• Read Gretchen Rubin's, The Happiness Project. She spent an entire year trying new ways to make herself happier. 
• I've noticed I am incredibly screen dependent and it deters me from disconnecting from work - so I constantly feel drained. My new goal is to not check my email or play games on my phone while I'm at home. With this, I am deleting unnecessary apps or apps that make me phone dependent - including the Happiness Tracker. While I mostly enjoyed the tracker for the short time I had it, it constantly pinged me with requests for data, so I was looking at my phone for notifications that much more. The data it gave me more or less told me I was happiest when I was productively working on things I enjoyed (duh!). In the end, I was just providing data for the app makers science experiment. So with that - delete! LivingSocial - delete! Redfin, Groupon - delete!
• Working out needs to become a priority.When I workout, I feel stronger, more alive, require less sleep, and have fewer headaches. Plus I need to get ready for a race in July.
• Work on getting better at the one-minute rule mentioned above. In our one bedroom condo, if one thing is out of place, our entire apartment will look as if a bomb went off in approximately two hours because clutter attracts clutter. 
• Make sure Hubs and I have time together, whether it's just a walk at night or a dinner date.
• Create a vision board. Research shows that ambition can make you happier -- so why not make it tangible? 

Happiness is a mostly subjective variable in this experiment, making it difficult to measure. I personally can see my happiness quotient in 1) am not overly tired and having extra energy, 2) people telling me I'm smiling a lot or seem to be in a very good mood, or 3) productivity - when I'm happier more things seem to get done.