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The Unconventional Life

How conventional is your life? If you're in your 30s as I am, think about how much you and I have in common:

Spouce? check
Kid(s)? check
Job? check
House? check
Debt? check

Obviously there's nothing wrong with conventional living, but if that's all there is, it seems kind of robotic to me. We have our freewill, and yet we all go through similar life stages, and we all share basic common experiences. What makes my life any different, then, from a million other lives in the Western world?

This bothers me, and I yearn to make my life more unconventional. Of course people that are "unconventional" often find themselves being unconventional in uniform ways. So, perhaps there's no way out of the box. There's no way to live a life that someone else hasn't already lived. And maybe that's okay. I would just like to be able to add some unconventional elements to the satisfactory conventional elements of my life. The question is: How can I do that without seeming to be needlessly eccentric or hopelessly selfish? Because doing anything unconventional in this life will make you open to scrutiny, and people will quickly judge you without making any attempt to understand you. That's just how things work. People are very conventional in that regard...

Comments

  1. Just a guyNovember 11, 2010 at 3:59 PM

    I've got 2 of the 5 listed. A year ago, the 2 were different, and a year before that, I was only at 1/5.

    Then again, I live in San Francisco, so YMMV

    ReplyDelete
  2. Bret R. FullerNovember 12, 2010 at 11:30 AM

    Some day soon, you may be at 5/5 -- or at least 4/5, as I know you're too smart and thrifty to ever go in for debt...

    ReplyDelete
  3. Just a guyNovember 12, 2010 at 12:04 PM

    I've got debt, which is one of the five, now. That debt was a result of the other one of five for now.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Bret R. FullerNovember 12, 2010 at 1:16 PM

    Oh yeah... but nobody counts the kind of debt you've got. :)

    ReplyDelete

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