Ranier

Like many 17-year-old unsure creatives, I started to feel like the world around me was fake, and my life was one giant movie just like The Truman Show.

The performative nature of living in Silicon Valley started to wear heavy on my brain.

When I wrote this Myspace blog post in my Junior year, I didn’t realize it at the time but I was writing about my feelings of alienation under capitalism.

I have always identified as a creative since I was a damn toddler — but at 17, I experienced a deep creative identity crisis:

Do I become a happy starving artist or do I become a wealthy unhappy techbro?

My heart wanted to pursue a seat at the San Francisco Art Institute and chase a creative career, but I wasn’t confident or experienced enough in any particular medium so I couldn’t decide what route to take in art school, and I was afraid that whatever job I would end up with wouldn’t pay well.

My head told me to chase a career in tech and become a badge-wearing techbro with a two-story house with granite countertops and a garage for a silver Mitsubishi Lancer.

My family and those around me said I should either become a nurse, or get accepted into a prestigious business school and become an insufferable little s**t.

The lack of choices made me claustrophobic and I started to wonder...
..what else was out there?

Can I create my own career path? Combine them into one?
Do certain jobs exist in the future that aren’t available now?
Are there people with answers and pathways that I don’t know about? Can I learn from them without knowing them?

Being forced to choose between two caricatures of my future pushed me to question those very same expectations, pathways, and pressures I felt were in my way.

I started to question my self-worth, my purpose and value of my life, the value of education, a degree, money, homes, luxury, and success.

Someone created these limitations and set these arbitrary standards.
I wanted to know who was across the fence.

I felt lost, unaware I had actually escaped.