How to escape the Rat Race, stop being a rat

The rat race.  We all know it, most of us participate in it.  We are told to go to school, sit in rows and pay attention.  If we do good enough we can pay a lot of money to do it four more years (or eight if your lucky).  Then if we do well there, we can start to get paid to sit in rows at the office.

School, career, family... death.

So the story goes.  This is always coming from people who are telling you to buck the system, to kick conventionalism to the curb and do your own deal.  Quit that dead end job and become an artist.  Don't be a follower.  It sounds so good, but the truth is the system is not at fault.  School and career and family are not the problem.

You are.  You are the problem.  Stop it. Stop being the problem.

The reason most of us are suffocating is not because of our job or family or school.  Its because we have built a water line in our lives so high that our noses barely sneak above it and every now and then we take in a breath of water and blame everything we can except ourselves.

The truth is, there are probably only two reasons you are unhappy.

1)  You have to much stuff

2)  You don't have the guts to be anything.

Let me explain.  The stuff thing is huge.  It usually starts with our calendar.  We have it filled to the brim and if your job is like my job, if it is not filled to the brim we add meetings to it so we can try and figure out how to get it more full.

Next we actually fill our lives up.  Usually this is two fold because it involves a lot of debt.  Debt is bad and makes you heavy like fat on the body.  I will only spend a moment on debt however, because debt is only part of the stuff problem.  I know somebody who is debt free, no car/home/school/credit card debt.  Nothing, nada.  Owns it all outright.  His house is full of garbage and is rarely clean because there is too much stuff.  He spends so much time fixing his stuff, upgrading his stuff, talking about the next thing he is going to get.  And again, this is somebody who has no debt, but they are still fat and weighed down.  What would happen if they needed to move, what a nightmare.

Secondly, you don't have the guts to be anything.  This is about so much more than a career or an accomplishment.  Most people I know dream about having a business or investment that "makes money while they are sleeping".  You've heard it.  I've said it.  The issue is we don't want to do anything, we want to be so well off we can do NOTHING.

This is where the line from Office Space comes in so well, "Well you don't need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Just take a look at my cousin, he's broke, don't do shit."

I think we really do forget this, we don't HAVE to do anything.  We can all be Bartleby the Scrivener. 

(If you don't know who Bartleby is go to http://www.bartleby.com/129/, it will take you an hour tops and change your life.)

We all want to be so successful people will leave us alone, but we forget that to whom much is given much is required.  The more money we make the harder we need to work, forever.  If you are wealthy right now and you are only concerned about yourself you are a bad person, period.  If you have twenty dollars to your name you have the freedom to only worry about yourself most of the time.  That is simply the way it works.  And the scary truth is, if you have a job and live in America you are wealthy, you might be squandering it all, but you are wealthy.