Epicurus and the Modern White Collar Career

Being 22 in an office of middle aged MBAs is a strange experience, especially if you live in the debauched and hedonistic isle of Manhattan, while your cubicle cohorts are domesticated yuppies of the suburbs of Westchester and Greenwich. Its almost as if you have to straddle two worlds—one where you are doing pivot tables and reformatting Powerpoint spreadsheets and another where you’re constantly texting and calling college buddies with messages like, “yo dude, where the fuck you at?”

Really though, you already know the answer to that question, or at least you know your answer. You’re at a bar, preferably a cheap one because you live in Manhattan and even a cheap bar is beyond your meager means as a first year analyst living in a luxury high rise midtown apartment. You’re a dumb bastard for not doing anything remotely close to balancing a budget or at least identifying it. You blindly spend…never on anything substantial, but substantially hedonist yes. The drinking is constant…to a degree that even your college self is impressed with your tenacity and relentlessness. The one thing that surprises you is your ability to get away with this outlandish behavior while at a white collar job of coworkers that have been known to be church ministers, senators, and all around moral administrators. Despite this unnerving fact however you recognize others like yourself…more like your future self. Thirty somethings that embrace the comfort of a great night amidst friends and drinks fermented. Your humor, though toned down and not quite as in your face vulgar as your repertoire among friends is still widely accepted for its off center irony and wit. What you do know is this, your hours are now clearly divided. No longer is their a murky haze of school and partying. Now there are two definite worlds, the hours of the work week when you’re in office and any of those outside of it. You try to be well kempt, responsible, and speak in grammatically correct sentences while in the array of cubed alleys. Outside of this world of self and mutual respect you live in a land of broken dreams where you’re constantly in a battle to arrive at your better self. Though nowhere near that state of being you spend the journey towards it idling in booze and arbitrary acts of self amusement, getting yourself into any sort of adventure or trouble that crosses your path. The working world may be different, but am I?

The drink in my hand tells me no, and the 8 previous drinks of varying alcoholic concoctions seem to confirm this. I enjoy the learning and interactions with those in different life circumstances then myself. My view broadens, my horizon widens, and my thirst deepens. It’s at this point I realize the real thirst that drives me isn’t that of alcoholic assortments, but that of learning and new experience. Should I be so lucky, I will continue this reckless trek through undiscovered wilderness and my discoveries will be endless and unexpected. Either way though true intoxication is like a passport to bad behavior but more importantly an irreverence towards consequence which opens the gateway to new experience.