Becoming A Man

   The United States as a country has some of the least productive 20 somethings out of any developed country but hands down the most productive 30 somethings out of any developed nation. That statistic has stuck in my mind for a long time and didn't fully make sense to me until very recently. 

   When I turned 30 I did not feel like anything changed, I didn't feel any different, didn't want to play video games and sit around and be lazy any less, overall it was kind of a disappointment. I guess like everyone does, I had built up the number in my head as some magical day that I will all of a sudden feel reborn and feel like this brand new person. I was also extremely disappointed when this didn't occur. I was blessed with some pretty damn good genetics and like my dad throughout my childhood, look much younger than I am. I still couldn't buy a pack of cigarettes anywhere without my ID if I wanted to, and have had more than one shocked reaction from clerks when I show my ID for alcohol purchases. 

    I think in retrospect this kind of allowed me to elongate my 20's for a bit too long. A lot of people that I have known didn't grow tired of partying or being lazy so much as kind of started to look to old to be partying, at least from my perspective. Feeling uninhibited in this way, I guess I kind of felt for a while that as long as I look extremely young and therefore didn't really have societal judgements placed on me by people that don't know me for doing young things, then who cares. If I had to sum it up in an honest manner I would say that I kind of had a Peter Pan syndrome for many years of my life. 

    I've never been one to truly care what other people think about me. A lot of people, myself included oftentimes won't fully speak their mind on subjects or how they feel towards you and even if I could know what other people's full thoughts of me were, they have no idea who I am as a person so why should I care? Again something that I think attributed to the Peter Pan syndrome for a long time. 

   Combine Peter Pan syndrome with nihilism and you get a nice cocktail that is guaranteed to leave you unproductive for a few years. This doesn't mean that I spent 31 years of my life living as a complete loser but it does mean I lived 31 years of my life with no true motivation and with a completely selfish mindset. I worked in politics, through which I got to live in Maine and Indiana, I started two businesses in my early 20's, travelled a lot and did many things throughout the years to test myself. While I always passed every test I set for myself, after a while the nihilism would usually kick in and I would question the grander purpose of whatever it was I was pursuing. I think this was also so easy for so long because I didn't have a passion for anything I was pursuing and couldn't see any hope of ever getting there. I have always been really really good at sales but hate selling, I didn't like politics for a variety of reasons, same with academia, which to me for a long time left no other options. 

  Once I found out I was becoming a dad, all of this, once again, changed. It is no longer me that suffers due to the bad decisions I make but what will soon be my family, and to me that whole change in thought process has been amazing. My girlfriend and I had many conversations early on in which we both expressed the same fear about not being able to be home with our infant child because of long, outside of the home work hours. It has become a driving desire in my life to see this goal to fruition and I want to make it happen more than I have ever wanted anything else. I still apply on all of the local job boards first thing in the morning to any new jobs that pay a livable wage and that I fit the qualifications for but I have never been a big company type person and so outside of sales, retail and politics is what I mostly have to rely on. My problem with politics is that no one that I ever worked with who was married at one time was still married beyond the age of 30 unless they were a politician. So that leaves retail, sales, or retail sales pretty much. Since a significant portion of those types of jobs either don't pay a livable wage whatsoever or are scams, I apply to the few that don't fit into these categories every time I see one but I know a lot of people in the same boat as me and have decided to not put all of my eggs into this basket. 

   Now that my side ventures are starting to bring in small but definitively growing amounts of revenue I have found that more people in my personal life are becoming understanding of the idea. I do not want to generate streams of income that I can do from home because I want to be lazy, though I understand how it is very easy for it to come off this way. I am devoting more blood, sweat and tears into my business venture and my articles than I have into anything in my entire life. I have known for a long time that to be truly successful you have to make opportunity rather than rely on opportunity. For too long however I didn't really truly care about making opportunity happen. Flipping the switch on this thought process the other way was an immediate response for me to hearing the news that I was going to have a child. The only times I have been happy in career have been during the times when I was running and managing my own business and completely in charge of my own destiny. I find that when I am working for myself I don't feel like I have to work for 12 hours that day when I wake up although that's what inevitably has been happening. If a core value that I want to pass along to my child is that they should pursue the career path in life that makes them the most happy I feel almost hypocritical pursuing anything else with as much fervor as the the career that makes me the happiest. 

   I know that there are still some people close to me who are worried about my future or perhaps the direction I am devoting my efforts in, to them I say I understand. From the outside the most sensible choice is to take an $8 an hour job now and stick with it. Having spent more time during my life working these types of jobs than I ever wanted to, I can honestly say these jobs are the biggest honeypots I have ever seen. They sap your motivation and make you feel worthless and dependent on a wage that isn't even enough to support yourself let alone a family. I know my path has question marks but I have found ways to create revenue streams that I never thought possible and that I am currently making money off of. I have faith in myself, and I have faith in my girlfriend and am extremely thankful every day for the faith that she has in me. Outside of her and my soon to be unborn child, for the first time in my life it is not a significant influencing factor to me what anyone else thinks about my decisions. I truly believe that I am smart enough, creative enough, and have thoroughly researched through all of my ventures enough to be able to provide a better lifestyle for me and my family than wasting 40 hours a week working a job that will not ever come close to being able to provide for my family. I have thought every decision through not from my perspective but from my future families perspective, and as a result of this process so far can honestly say for the first time that I truly understand what it means to become a man. 

Becoming A Dad-Pt 3: I Never Wanted Kids

  Up until a few months ago I could never understand anyone's fascination with kids or with babies. Babies especially, they all look the same to me and they don't ever seem to do very much. I wouldn't say that I was a baby hater but I definitely did not want to ever be anywhere around babies period. If I was at a restaurant for example and I saw a family come in with a baby and get seated in the same section as me I would be silently irritated. Then they start develop reasoning skills and they all become these little snobby slightly arrogant beings and that continues on for another 20 years or so.

  Apart from that, I have never felt the urge to create a family or to pass on my legacy or anything related. I always considered myself atypical in this sense. I never at any point in my life felt a desire to have kids. In retrospect I think I always felt that I wasn't ready to be a dad because I was selfish and I wanted to hold onto being able to be selfish. I liked the thought of complete freedom and being able to do anything that I want to do at anytime but looking back on it now I feel more free than I ever have. In the past few months all of these feelings have vanished and I feel like a completely different person than I was even a short time ago. I realize now that a big problem in my life for a long time has been that I truly haven't cared about myself. Of course I have always wanted nice things and to live a good life but at the end of the day I think the best way that I can sum up the last few years of my life is that I had been living in a self imposed prison for a long time. To the point where I started to view this prison as freedom.

   My other strong argument I would always bring up whenever the conversation of kids would come up in some random conversation was that the Earth is overpopulated as it is so why add one more? In retrospect this is also a reflection of the complete nihilistic approach that I often took towards much of the world. My mindset with regards to this particular topic has done a complete 180 over the last few months. I still believe that the world is oftentimes not a wonderful place but I also see possibilities to change and fix this that I never saw before. Your world often becomes what you surround yourself with and by realigning what I surround myself with over the last few months I have found it to be one of the most rewarding experiences possible. I haven't played League of Legends in months and no longer have any desire to. Instead all of the time that I wasted for so long playing video games I instead put into trying to launch a successful business. Had I not received the Earth shattering news that my girlfriend was pregnant I would not have even tried to launch a business at all and surely wouldn't have a blog which has turned into multiple blogs as well as a few paid articles.   While I never wanted kids for 31 years, I found that my mindset shifted almost overnight with regards to the issue and my whole life in general.

Becoming A Dad-Pt 2: Take A Good Long Look At Yourself

I remember waking up the next day feeling different. I wouldn't describe the feeling as better or worse than any other day, I just remember having this sense that my life from this day forward would be forever different even if I didn't know how. I tried to go about my normal routine, but I started to find myself questioning everything I was doing as part of this routine and framing it in a larger light.

To be quite honest, this feeling was fairly new to me. Looking back it is difficult to examine myself before receiving the news, because I now feel like a completely different person. My entire thought process throughout most of my life, until that point, had been very me driven. If I'm also being totally honest with myself, I think looking back on the first few days after finding out; I struggled with feeling a sense of loss. For a few days I coped with the loss of being able to think selfishly all the time, but these feelings immediately faded and I have yet to look back.

My initial reaction to all of this—like anyone's, I would imagine, was fear. I thought, “Up until this point I have been able to pretty much do what I want, run my life how I want and make decisions that only effect me.” When I began to look around at my surroundings, and my life in general, I found that while I had been able to lead my life however I chose—I was completely miserable almost all the time.

I have always been a person that cares a great deal about others. I think a large part of the reason why I was so ok with living a selfish existence prior to the big news was because my care for others never truly translated into caring about myself, and I was horribly unhappy everyday for a long time because of it.

I can remember having the same conversation many times with my girlfriend where she would ask me "Why don't you care about yourself?" and honestly I was never be able to provide her an answer, but I always knew it was true. The simplest explanation I have for this is that I guess college, and life in general kind of turned me into a nihilist at some point. I was raised Catholic and now consider myself an Atheist and I think the combination of guilt and not believing in any form an afterlife whatsoever kind of morphed itself into a weird personal philosophy that involved treating anyone else with the utmost respect, but not giving a damn about myself. I remember feeling like I existed simply because I woke up that day and other than that I felt no general purpose.

I am so glad that my life has changed. Now I wouldn't take back a single second of anything for the world. I have never felt this way before—In fact my girlfriend and I had the discussion about kids very early on. I mentioned—much to her dismay—that my feelings were very strongly against procreation and that I never foresaw that changing for anything or anyone.

Going back to personal philosophies, I tend to have a lot of principles that I try to uphold for myself, that ultimately I don't believe are applicable to society as a larger whole. For example, I’d say on a personal level that I am very pro life, but being a man I feel like I have no right whatsoever to tell a woman what she should and should not do with her body. Although I am politically pro-choice, I also don't feel that abortion should be taken lightly, by any means and since I am not a drug addict, in dire poverty, in an abusive relationship, etc. I feel that in my personal circumstances abortion for any reason would be unjustified. I had also developed a thought early on that made me believe that I could never go through with that process personally.

This baby was conceived despite birth control that is supposed to be 99.9% effective, that to me means that he or she really really wants to be a part of this world, and I for one, cannot wait for their arrival very soon.

Back on topic, in Part 3 I will go more in depth into why I was so anti-child before this whole experience.

Becoming a Dad-Pt 1: The Before Times

My life was completely different two months ago and between then and now I have become a totally different person. If I had to describe my former self, overall, I would say that I was very self centered individual--even though I am, and have been for all of my life, a very caring individual. I also never wanted kids and could never imagine the possibility of having kids. I don't relate to them, I have always thought they were often kind of snobby, and mean, and don't have developed reasoning skills.

About a week before having the bombshell dropped on me I was up late playing League of Legends, a game I was quite addicted to for a couple of years. I played many games with many people, but for some reason this one interaction in particular stuck out to me—I thought about it for days afterwards for no particular reason.

I was in champ select and the fourth pick keeps spamming chat with "mid Teemo" "mid Teemo". Obviously not caring—first pick decides to take the mid position, I pick my role second and when Mr. Fourth Pick’s turn rolls around the guy auto locks the Teemo—who is typically played in the mid position.

Frustrated at the thought of losing the game, I type into the chat window "Oh you must be 12." To which he responds "Actually I'm 30 with 2 kids how about you?" His response took me aback and so I said the only thing I could think of at the time to say in return, "31, no kids."

I wanted to type "knock on wood" afterwards but just as I started typing the game started to load. I remember even thinking during the loading screen that I should knock on the table or something just in case, but then pushed the feeling aside as being needlessly superstitious. My team ended up having a great game, Mr. Fourth Pick’s Teemo ended up being a non-factor in an easy victory, and life went on, but for some reason I’d thought about this particular event for several days afterward.

Fast forward to a week later and the day starts out like any other, I don't honestly remember what all I did that morning—I think I went out with my girlfriend to get coffee or something like that, but I do remember that later in the day we ended up getting into a heated argument over something insignificant that made me walk away out of anger. As I was sitting outside alone still a little angry, my girlfriend came out and said the words, "I think I'm pregnant."

Being a sexually active 31-year-old guy, this was not the first time I heard those words strung together in that particular order. After having heard it a few times, and it always turning into nothing to worry about, you start to develop a kind of immunity to the words.

I quipped back, "What makes you think that?" I remember feeling pretty nonchalant at that moment, thinking she was going to say something like, “I’m a few days late for my period,” and that we would go get a test that would inevitably come back negative and life would continue on. Instead she replied with, "Because I took two pregnancy tests and they’re both positive.”

Well then, I would say two tests with reported 99.9% accuracy saying you're pregnant warrants a little more than an, “I think I might be pregnant,”—In the mean time, Why is the room spinning all of a sudden? I remember my internal dialogue firing off in my head, thinking a thousand different thoughts a minute as time seemingly stopped. My first real thought was to burst into tears, and my second thought was that I didn't want that to be the first reaction to having my first child.

What happened the rest of that day all seems like a blur now, filled with fleeting thoughts, emotions and feelings. My girlfriend and I talked about all of the things regarding parenthood we could possibly think of at the time, which wasn't much and the day continued on. The one consistent thought that I had throughout the rest of that day is that I didn't know exactly how yet but I knew my life would forever change and almost everything would never be the same.