There is this commercial for Sam Adams Boston Lager where Jim Koch, owner of the Boston Beer Company which brews Sam Adams, where Mr. Koch says "I had a good job, but I thought to myself 'I don't wanna do this for the rest of my life. I don't want to do this tomorrow'. Those words play in my head every morning when I walk out of my apartment on my way to work. No one wants to work for "the man" for their entire lives, so it's not like this is some unique thought native to Mr. Koch and myself. For me, the difference is that I know that I can't do this for the rest of my life.
I don't want to be your boss. I don't dream of business meetings in downtown Chicago sky scrapers or getting the big promotion or having hordes of fearful peons cowering and kissing my ass when I walk into a a room or...you get the point. I try my best to understand the people who live their entire lives trying to chase the dream, but I always find myself looking down my nose at them and coming off as a colossal douche. I can't help it. I'm sure they look at me as some sort of head-in-the-clouds slacker/loser who can't get a grip on reality. I'm fine with that because I know we will have to agree to disagree on this one as our approaches to happiness are on opposite ends of the spectrum: theirs is to collect the most toys while mine is to do something I love.
I hate corporate life. I hate the plastic, ass-kissing, saving-up-for-a-Volvo, cookie cutter, lifeless people I have to pretend to like on a daily basis. I hate the pointless work that the empty suits seem to think is the most important thing since opposable thumbs. I hate it all and they day that I can leave it all in my life's rear-view mirror I'll probably explode.
This is my salute to Jim Koch and every other person who has given up being a drone to the job. A shout out to all those people who decided that their soul was worth more than a killer dinette set (word to 'Old School'). The idea of giving up everything you have to do something that you were born to do is the scarier than most empty suits can ever understand, but it is something I have to do...
