I didn’t know it then, but the cycle would continue for years: job after monotonous job, title after title, commuting back and forth on an endless highway, promotions and small bonuses, two weeks’ vacation, slowly losing motivation with each job, the black hole never far away.

But for a moment, before the first job, the bright light of an escape hatch flashed before me. In those early days, I believed that there was another way to live and I just had to figure out what it was.

Isn’t that always the way adult life begins? You think you’ll become something different, something new. At first, you swim violently against the tide, your body straining until your muscles give out, until you can’t push any harder, until you stop fighting and float, letting the water take you back to shore, where the rest of the world is already at the office, typing on their computers beneath buzzing fluorescent lights, toiling away in the glare of permanent productive daylight.