How Not To Get A Real Job

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Photo credit: Flickr / The Library of Virginia

“You need to get a real job.”

It wasn’t said as bluntly as that, but my grandma had made it perfectly clear in the way she asked about what my current job status was and what I plan to do next.

I know what I want to do with the rest of my life, but I knew telling her what I had planned wouldn’t go over well. I want to travel the world, spending most of my time away from Australia.

But grandma was born in 1930s, in an era when the only thing expected from her was for her to get married and look after her husband and future children. To her, what I was planning on doing was so reckless and incomprehensible that she didn’t know what to say.

Whether she knew it or not she had become a Chirpy.

Chirpys are people who seem almost designed to bring out your worries that are hiding in the back of your mind and make them ten times bigger, something that started so small into an almost crippling fear. Chirpys do not want you to break out of the mould and go and explore the world.

They want you to get a real job.

A job where you are stuck in a cubicle for the majority of your adult life. They want you to sit on the computer, hating what you do, but making no move to change. Spending the best days of your life in front of a computer, playing on Twitter and Facebook while you dodge your boss.

Chirpys do not like free thinking people, they don’t like anything that goes against the norm, and anything that goes against what they have grown up being told and now are forced to believe. Chirpys are constantly sitting on your shoulder chirping away like annoying birds.

Chirpys want you to stay in the one place; they occasionally take the form of your parents, friends and co workers when you tell them your plans to stay away from home for a couple of years just travelling around.

To not get a real job, you have to ignore the Chirpys of the world.

Plain and simple. If you want to travel the world, or whatever it is in the world that you want to do the most, you have to push through the fear and ignore the Chirpy that will be sitting on your shoulder.

To not get a real job, you need to stop thinking like a regular person, getting a real job has been force fed into your brain since birth. Remember those lectures in high school about what you were going to do once you are out in the real world?

The real world doesn’t exist. Millions of people at the very least don’t have a real job and the universe still keeps turning. What’s out there is whatever you believe to be there. Think travel is expensive – you are never going to travel because you think you can’t afford it.

You can travel around the world for a whole year for only $14,000. That is well below minimum wage, working along the way you can stay away even longer. Travelling is pretty much as far away from getting a real job as possible.

But already I can see the Chirpys, $14,000 they have read this a little laugh. It’s not possible.

The human race once thought that the earth was flat.

To travel, to not get a real job you have to stop thinking like a Chirpy. You have to find something you do believe in.