My alternate universe

Not too long ago I ticked over a year in my current job, my first full time gig. For those that don’t know, I work at a federal government department out of an office building in Melbourne, Victoria. I started as a graduate in September 2011 and became a full employee after my twelve month anniversary. I had a path like this in mind for quite a few years, and my journey getting to this point taught me some interesting lessons.

The process of getting into a graduate program like the one I recently completed is drawn out, competitive and sometimes emotionally demanding. I spent the better part of a year after I finished university chasing such a position. First you do online applications and written responses, then aptitude tests and written assessments. These are often followed by phone interviews, city-based assessment centres, then perhaps a final assessment process in Canberra. The processes vary between departments, but they all follow a similar trajectory: it’s a long term commitment, with people being cut off the list at each stage. In the end, they are like nerd reality shows.

I had resigned myself that I would most likely be moving to Canberra if I was to be successful. From all the assessment centres I attended it was made clear to me that the chances of getting to work outside the ACT was very slim. I wasn’t particularly thrilled at the prospect but I would be doing what I wanted to do, and the idea of rebooting my life in its entirety appealed to me on some level. My entire education was spent at three institutions - my primary school, the nearby secondary school and a university. I had never once started with a blank slate; I had always carried my past with me, for better or worse. I could’ve been someone new for the first time in my life.

My first offer was from my current employer. The most extraordinary aspect of it was that they wanted me to work in Melbourne. I figured you should always take the first offer, because you can always walk away if something better came up. But with this one though, I wouldn’t have to go anywhere. I could stay at home and see how I liked it. I could still play in my bands and watch my favourite sports and hang out with my friends and family. I would always be able relocate to the ACT later if I ever felt the need.

My second offer was from the department I thought I would enjoy the most. They had been amazing during the application process, had flown candidates to Canberra for a final assessment, and were offering me a position in the exact area that I wanted. I could’ve had my finger on the pulse of the national economy and would have been working a couple of hundred metres from Parliament House. It was a brilliant offer and I turned it down immediately. The poor lady on the phone must’ve wondered what kind of noises I was making: they were the sounds of indecision. My heart sank. From that moment, my alternate life begun.

Of my fellow grad cohort, only 5 of 65 went back to their home states. Spending the first two weeks up there with them all, I saw them stress over moving and renting and relationships and families. I had bouts of survivor guilt, I won’t lie. So many of those people would have done anything to have traded positions with me. Why had I been chosen, I wondered? But just because others would’ve liked to have been in my position, that doesn’t mean it was the right choice for me. Just because other people want something badly, it doesn’t that choice is necessarily right for you too.

I realised from the start that I might regret that decision for a long time. I also knew that it was the safe option, the more boring option, the traditional Jon option. Whichever path I took, I would have my dark days and reflect on the outcome of that decision in a negative way. The best I could hope for was that it wouldn’t haunt me too much. I was always going to wonder what life would be like in my alternate universe, I just hoped I wouldn’t grow to hate my actual one.

I feel like so much of my identity is tied up in this state and in this city. It’s a privilege to step outside onto the footpath on a sunny afternoon and be in the heart of such a magnificent place, a place with which I share so many passions: sport, music, food, culture, broadcasting. And for the time being I return to the Peninsula each night. I return to the water. I return home. And this is not to mention my family and friends; just as I am honoured to live here, I am honoured to know them. I could’ve gone, and one day I still might, but it’s going to take something pretty magnificent to drag me away.

I don’t think about how Jonathan is going in that alternate world that often. I figure it’s because I’m busy enough now and am kept distracted by other things, real things. I’m glad. Life doesn’t have an undo command. Making big decisions is hard. Often, we have to make choices and live with the consequences for a really long time. We can weigh up options, make lists of pros and cons, seek advice or toss a coin, but in the end it doesn’t matter; eventually you have to pick a path. I’ll never know if I made the right decision, but at the moment I’m sleeping alright. If that changes, I suppose I’ll write something about it.

Pay not to know

It’s taken me a while to come to terms with it, but there’s a lot of things I’m not good at. Many of these things I’ll probably never fully understand. Perhaps it’s possible that if I wanted to learn about chemistry or typesetting, I could probably figure it out eventually, because I think I’m a pretty good learner. But I’m not sure it would be worth it for me to commit a lot of my time to improve in areas that I don’t have much natural proficiency, am not that interested in and are unlikely to negatively affect my life in any serious way if I don’t grasp them. What we need to do to achieve great things is figure out what we can do well, what we can do decently and what we need the help of others for.

As citizens of the Western world, we are fortunate in that most of us are in a financial position to ‘outsource’ a lot of activities we might otherwise had to have done for ourselves in previous eras. Generally speaking, we do not hunt or grow our own food, nor do we build our own houses. This specialisation is one of the benefits of capitalist economics. Using money as a medium of exchange means we can do our work in one field and take the product of this effort and exchange it for help in another area of our life. It might not be perfect but it’s served us pretty well for quite a while.

Forgive the reductiveness here, but let’s talk this out. When I get sick, I take some of the money I have earnt from my job and give it to the doctor in exchange for access to his knowledge and time. He tells me what he thinks is wrong with me based on his years of study and hands-on experience. With a bit of luck, I follow his instructions and get better. The plausible alternative is pretty weird - I’d have to maintain a working knowledge base of illnesses, ailments and injuries and the most effective ways to treat them so that when I get sick I can figure out what is wrong for myself and try to fix it. For all of you people who have actually spent time doing this on WebMD, please don’t. It’s a good system because when I’m not sick, I don’t have to read medical journals or go to classes. I do what I enjoy in my spare time and when I need help, I give the doctor fifty dollars to help fix me.

What we are doing when we give someone money in exchange for a service is paying not to know. I may never want to get underneath my car to change the oil or replace my brake pads. Bang, mechanic. If my phone doesn’t work properly, I’m not opening that thing up, I’m taking it back to the Apple Store. If I want to be entertained for an hour or two, I’ll buy a ticket to a movie or concert. When you think about transactions in this way, I think you start to understand the kind of value these people are actually providing you. A lot of these things aren’t cheap if you understand them as an expense, but in a lot of cases, these transactions are subscription fees for your sanity. You pay them so you can do more of what you like to do.

In areas that I care about, I look for someone to do a particular kind of work for me and that I can have an ongoing relationship with. I take all my guitars to the Jim and Brendan out at Cargill Custom Guitars in Seaford. They do excellent work, know what I want, can answer my nerdy questions and give me advice when I need it. They aren’t the cheapest around, but they are experts and my instruments are better after they’ve worked on them. I enjoy playing them more; how much is that worth? It’s both a premium experience and a personal one. For a few hundred bucks a year I get decades of knowledge, great service and tremendously playable instruments. It’s a goddamn bargain, I tells ya.

Sometimes taking the cheap route is the most expensive way. It’s a concept that I’m still not entirely comfortable with, but the economic idea of ‘utility’ as a measure of happiness has some merit. Sometimes the cheap option can be the right one, but if you skimp or cut corners where you shouldn’t, that nagging voice that in your head can get pretty loud and there’s certainly an amount of stress that comes along with that. How much is it worth to you to be able to not have to worry? If you’ve found someone who you trust to do the work that makes your life simpler and easier, give them your money. Understand there are very few one-off expenses in life; like rent or fuel, everything that you care about will continue to take up resources as long as it continues to provide you with value. Removing friction from your life costs money, but it’s probably money well spent.

Designing a life

The old saying is that life is what happens when you’re making other plans. I understand the sentiment, but thus far I can’t say that’s been my experience. Let me explain.

I’m a planner, I plan. It’s what I do. Not so much the short term stuff, like planning a party - I’m hopeless at that. I mean for the long term. I have had vague roadmaps for where I would like to to go in life for as long as I can remember. I knew early in high school I wanted to go to university. Not long after that I knew what I wanted to study there. I knew then what sort of employment I would move into and and ideas about how I would go about getting there. Somewhere along the way I knew I had to change my lifestyle, so I did that too. Roadmaps. Plans.

It all happened. I had tremendous support from my family and great friends that came along for the ride. Without this help, none of this would have been possible. Everything I’ve done up until this point has been about making things happen on my own terms. I always wanted to be in control of the key changes in my life - to take on one thing at a time, get it done and move on. I have succeeded in this thus far, for what that’s worth.

But the next part of the roadmap is different. I’m moving out. I can hear you groaning out there. It’s not that big a deal. It’s time. My family have been perfect and if I wanted to they would probably let me stay and use their electricity even longer. I’m doing this to learn more about myself. So whilst I’m only in the early stages, I’m back planning again.

I figure that when most people move out for the first time they do so for a more tangible reason than mine. Maybe they are moving for work or study. It might be to live with their partner or to get away from their family. In these perfectly valid circumstances, people are at the mercy of a whole range of things - time, location, the type of place they need. I do not really face any of these constraints in any serious way. So much of this is entirely up to me. It only dawned on me what I’m really doing the other day: I’m designing my life.

I now get to ask myself the sorts of questions that I have never given serious consideration to. Where do I want to live? By myself or with others? What sort of place? What do I really need to bring with me? What can I live without?

These questions are all practical ones. In of themselves they lead to asking more abstract ones. What sort of life do I want to lead? What do I really value? Convenience? Proximity to social activities? Do I want peace and quiet, or do I want to be in the middle of the action? From a young age, so many aspects of our lives are out of our control that we very rarely get to start with a blank slate. It’s exciting and terrifying.

The reason this process is interesting is that I don’t know how much about my priorities because so much of it has gone unexamined for my entire life. Understanding what is really important to us demands that we also know what is not important. I have so few points of reference my tools for making decisions will be extrapolations at best and guesses at worst.

I think a lot about the concept of option paralysis, the idea that we often are presented with too many choices in our lives, and trying to understand the impact that these choices can have on our decision-making. That’s why I’m fishing for some constraints. I just need to find a couple of housemates, decide on a suburb, anything, but the feeling of sitting in front of a real estate website without any way to narrow down the search results is too much.

Another thing I don’t know is how I’ll go living with other people who aren’t my family, and how other people will go living with me. I think I’m a pretty neat person; how will I respond to a messy sink? I have had an ensuite for the last three years, how will I go sharing a bathroom again? I just don’t know. I suppose these are the things I’m hoping to learn about myself, but with the learning comes the unknown. After this experience, I’ll have a clearer idea of who I am and what I can tolerate. It’s going to be a true journey of self discovery.

There’ll never be a better time for me to do this. I do realise that for so many people this is a process they have already gone through and there isn’t much I can say on this topic to enlighten those people. I’m fortunate enough to be in control of so many aspects of this transition and for that reason I think my experience seems different to that of many others. What I’m learning is that even being in control of some aspects of a change like this doesn’t mean that no uncertainty exists at all; it just means dealing with different kinds of uncertainty. After doing my best to shape the situation I find myself in for my entire life, maybe it’s time I embraced the uncertainty.