The One-Week Job Project: One Man, One Year, 52 Jobs - By Sean Aiken Page 0,1

a student.

When I graduated, it all changed. No longer a student, I was suddenly expected to provide a legitimate answer to the question “What do you do for a living?”

I wanted to accomplish great things, help others, make a difference. I wanted to do everything and be everywhere. I had big ambitions, but I was totally directionless. I’d been thrown ill-prepared into a wide open landscape in which I could create anything. I thought this freedom was what I’d longed for—a chance to achieve my goals, to live up to this alleged potential many saw in me. But with no course schedules or professors to guide me, I experienced this freedom as a daunting reality rife with expectations. Now it was up to me to determine my path.

In the back of my mind I knew that I was lucky to have options at all—since so many people, especially at a time of economic downturn, don’t—yet I found myself overwhelmed by the expectations of others and my own self-doubts.

A few months removed from my student status, I became depressed. I lay awake at night asking myself life’s big questions, and I wasn’t finding any answers. In July, I and a group of close friends went a few hours up the coast to my friend’s cabin, as we did every year. I wasn’t much fun to be around. Admittedly it would have taken some extra energy given the best of circumstances—I was the fifth wheel in a weekend getaway with my two best friends, their girlfriends, and their dogs. I’d go for walks on the beach by myself and think about the routineness of everything. I could see my entire life laid out:

I’d come home from my unfulfilling nine-to-five job and cook dinner. Then, by the time I’d cleaned up, I’d finally have a moment to relax. Exhausted from the day, I’d flop on the couch, flick on the TV for a couple of hours, then go to bed and wake up and do it all over again the next day. My friends and I would keep our annual tradition and go up to the cabin. But now we’d sit in lawn chairs, watch our kids run around, our dogs dig in the sand, and reminisce about the past.

It wasn’t just the thought of routine that scared me but the idea of not having passion in my life. Life without passion meant finding trivial ways to pass the time. Nobody could convince me otherwise.

In search of answers, I decided to travel. I spent the next year and a half alternating between stints at home and on the road. I backpacked throughout Europe and Southeast Asia, taught English in Thailand, and moved to Quebec to learn French. I never stayed in one place long enough to feel that I needed to plan more than a day ahead.

Avoidance became my self-prescribed coping mechanism. If I was always in transition, there would never be enough time to build up the expectation that I should be doing something more with my life. As soon as questions about my future began to surface, I could move on, hoping an answer would appear in the process.

Traveling taught me a lot about myself. I experienced new cultures, met all sorts of people, and was forced outside of my comfort zone on a daily basis. I learned to appreciate the small moments where life becomes simple and the beauty in all that surrounds us is crystal clear. On the road, people I met accepted who I was that day, in that moment. A certain anxiety always accompanied me when it was time to go home, where friends and family had preconceptions about me and what I should be doing. At home, it was all too easy to slip back into comfortable routines and conform to the established expectations of familiar faces.

Around Christmas, a year and a half after I graduated, I moved home, knowing that travel wasn’t providing the answers I wanted. The holiday season made for an easier transition. Friends were between semesters or on vacation from work, and there was always something to do.

But when the new year came, my friends went back to their normal lives. And there I was, twenty-five years old, living in my parents’ basement, and still without a clue about what I wanted to do with my life. I didn’t even know where to start. I knew that unless I still wanted to be living in my parents’ basement at age thirty, I