Life As Performance Art 138

I have just about finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's book "Outliers." It is an interesting read. He argues, convincingly, that success is owed to more than simple talent and hard work, though they do play a significant role, but also in all kinds of circumstances beyond our control. For this reason you will have a Mensa IQ that is also a gifted artist standing in a food line, and rather a mediocre nonentity sitting on a board of directors. One spends his time foraging through dumpsters for food and items to resell, the other on the golf course, or booking his next luxury vacation on his smartphone, business class, of course. I am in the former category. Though I do not stand in food lines, or go through garbage bins, still, I have never been able to make significant connections that would help improve my opportunities and lifestyle. I am a case of wasted talent and potential. It was always hard for me to find employment, and I could not understand why. Later, when I was working with employment counsellors, they all told me I was doing and saying all the right things, and they couldn't understand either why it was always such a hard sell for me to get someone to hire me. For me, it was a matter of finding work, any kind of work, and the only employers who would accept me didn't pay much of a wage. There were for me no alternatives, since I still had to pay the rent at the end of the month and Mom and Dad were simply not available to bail me out. Except, I have never found the alternative attractive. So, I wasn't able to finish post-secondary. I couldn't pay off the student loan afterward because there was never any money leftover at the end of the month. By that time, I was so persuaded that I was almost unemployable and felt so paralyzed by constant employer rejection that I simply imploded, accepted that I was an outcast and that I would always be subsisting on a very tiny income. The job market is cruel and vicious and there is absolutely no accountability taken for how they end up destroying people's souls. I could think only of survival. Successful people cannot understand this, and it is useless trying to explain this to people who are only going to judge you. Did I really want to work? Well, I did want to survive. The only work that I liked was where I felt most useful, and in this case as a care provider during the many years that I worked in home support. Unfortunately, a series of right wing governments did everything they could to claw back funding and keep our pay and hours limited, making it impossible to live decently while doing such vital and important work. Why didn't I look for other work? I didn't have time. Finding a job is full time work and if I had to already work for a living, then where would I find the time to seek other work, given that even when I was looking full time for as full time job, it was so hard to find anything? Why didn't I go to school at night to upgrade? I tried that. It was too exhausting and I needed my energy for my job. Care-giving is very tiring work and at the end of a long day of bed pans, bathing stroke survivors and fielding verbal abuse one is not going to have a lot of energy leftover at the end of the day. On the other hand, I do still feel rather short on envy for those who did make it up the career ladder and ended up doing quite nicely for themselves. There always appears in this process to be an ongoing bartering off of one's soul in order to succeed and achieve. And this is where I part company with Malcolm Gladwell, who seems to believe that social and career success are still some kind of desired apogee by which we ought to measure our lives. I flatly disagree and reject this concept. The meek shall inherit the earth, and even though we are poor we have been able to conserve our souls intact. it is worth the suffering. Success diminishes our most human integrity and if we can avoid the crushing wheel of the machine we can also come through it all as much stronger people, though others are also going to surely fear us.