The Viable Alternative

I remember it clear as day (although it was at night).

I had just turned 21 years old, and I was working the night shift for a summer internship at Con Edison for my major in computer engineering and I was suddenly confronted with the meaning of life and success and found myself feeling totally empty.

Don’t get me wrong, life at that time was really good to me. I had an amazing year of being 20 years old, namely because I saw myself transition from an angry, miserable, angst ridden teenager who was contemplating suicide in his dorm room the previous year to one, who, due to a change in attitude, wound up loving his life and was damn proud of myself for being able to do that.

Instead of seeing myself as a loser and a victim who nothing worked out for and hating people for all the pain they caused and for not giving me the permission to have the things I wanted in life, I had decided that I was no longer going to spread negative energy by hating anybody, I was going to let go of all my past pain, and I was going to use my own internal resources and treasures and give my own self the permission to create my own success because I deserved the best in life.

As a result, my life changed and looked totally different than the previous year. I now had something that I wanted since I was 12 – success and confidence with women. My grades got better. People seemed to just give me stuff like discounts in stores and free entry into clubs. I felt attractive. I was able to attract this internship I was working at which paid me well for a college kid just because I believed everything worked out for me.

In addition to all this, I had great friends, a great family, a great social life, and a great future due to the fact that I was majoring in a field that was sure to land me a good job.

It was the first time in my life that I really felt “cool.”

But here I was, standing at one of those gigantic data storage machines at the job, deep in thought, suddenly hit with a huge pang of emptiness, disillusion and hopelessness.

“What does all this stuff I have mean anyway? What’s their purpose? Why does it seem all empty and meaningless?” I asked myself as I started going deeper down the rabbit hole of disillusionment.

If there was no point to the money, the success, the girls, then what was I to do? I visualized myself dropping out of school and being some deep, spiritual guy who just wandered the world, homeless, searching for the meaning of life, proud to have the skills, intelligence and capability to be successful by society’s standards, but choosing to walk away from it all for something not as glamourous but more fulfilling.

What a noble vision! One sure to make me never feel the way I did in that moment ever again.

As I waded into this whole alternate reality, I suddenly snap back to my senses and chastise myself for thinking these stupid, silly thoughts, suppressed all these feelings I had, assured myself that I was on the right path and had a great future ahead of me and went on to live my life…the good times continued.

Fast forward three and a half years later….

I was now 24 years old, had graduated from college after killing myself to get a computer engineering degree, and landed a very good paying job at IBM/Lotus Notes as a consultant. However, though I was society’s definition of successful – a college degree in engineering, a white collar job and a good salary – it all felt just empty and unfulfilling. I remember at times looking out one of the windows of the office where I worked out into the street while thinking about my life and asking myself, “Is this it?”

On top of that, the previous year, a college girlfriend had broken up with me and I was still depressed over that. I had felt so guilty about the type of guy I had been that I decided to “change” which just meant beating myself up constantly and suppressing what I deemed to be my horrible personality.

Looking at my life, I saw how it had given me everything I had ever wanted.

I wanted to be able to be successful with girls since I was 12, and now, after being awful at it during my teens, had become pretty good at it which had been almost UNIMAGINABLE to me when I was an awkward teenager. In fact, now that I had deemed chasing girls empty and shallow and taken a vow of celibacy as a way to change from being the horrible person I thought I was, (no need to say, I was an idiot), I found it even easier since I was no longer looking.

Then there was the college degree. After all the years of failing tests, sleepless nights, getting sick sometimes from lack of sleep, frustration, repeating classes, taking a year and a half off from the college I was enrolled at and taking classes part-time at home, I now had that coveted “piece of paper” in what a speaker at my Graduation ceremony deemed one of the hardest majors in the school that meant I was now “educated.”

Finally, due to the job I started a few months after I graduated, money no longer was an issue for me and because I was still living at home, I was able to stack over a grand a month, which went a lot further at that time and invested that money in stocks and real estate.. I was also able to buy whatever I wanted.

In my 24 year old mind, I felt I had attained everything that life had to offer and saw no joy in it. I also didn’t think there was anything else that life had to offer that could possibly fulfill me.

I was bored, bored, BORED. Bored with my life, and bored with life. Now that the “struggle” was over what else was there to do?

On top of being bored, for some reason, I also felt terribly alone. I felt that now that I was successful, I was now alone in a big, old scary world that didn’t care about me. Also, the fact that being able to now afford whatever I wanted didn’t make me any happier made me feel more empty and unhappy. In addition, I felt this piercing guilt that I didn’t deserve what I had gotten. I looked at my friends who were still struggling to figure things out and people who were struggling financially and I felt guilty for somehow “slipping through” and having it so easy, and “weak” for not having struggled enough.

What didn’t help dissuade me from that line of thinking was that though I was hired as a consultant, I wound up staying on “the bench” for months where I wasn’t sent to any client sites to work so was just stuck in the office not learning anything most of the time, so I felt like this fraud who was earning all this money for nothing.

It was truly a desperately miserable existence.

My mind went back to when I had just turned 21 to the kid who was having “early life” crisis at his internship. I began to think that maybe that dude who thought it would be cool to be that deep spiritual guy who, despite all his intelligence and education, had decided to eschew wordly success and settle for a life of mediocrity and struggle in search of fulfillment was onto something.

I began to think that maybe if I played small in life, I would never have to deal with the daunting issues I faced now concerning success including disillusionment, boredom and guilt.

Well, you know that phrase, “Be careful what you wish for because you might just get it? Welp, that’s what my life would slowly become.

Damn, if only I could reach back in time to slap some sense into myself..

I stayed at my job for a little under a year and a half before the employer, seeing that the relationship wasn’t working out, gave me the option to stay under strict probation or leave with a severance package.

I said “Screw that,” and chose the severance package.

The next year was spent with me wandering aimlessly, working with a startup company, but truly having no desire or motivation for anything. Then, towards the end of that year, I was in a bookstore and I discovered the book, “Think and Grow Rich: A Black Choice,” by Dennis Kimbro, and that book lit up a spark in me that I hadn’t felt in a long time that made me want to be successful once more and harness my potential. My goal was to get another job in my major and start living life.

This is when the real struggle started.

First off, for months I couldn’t find a job for the life of me, and with the dot.com bubble bursting at that time, that further didn’t help things. Then, with 9/11 happening, that was the final nail in the coffin of me looking for a corporate job ever again that had to do with my major, with me deciding that it wasn’t in my cards to be an engineer.

Furthermore, after a year of not being able to find anything, all my savings had run out and money now became a constant issue in my life. I was eventually forced to settle for one low end paying job after the other just so I could have money in my pocket. People at these jobs would marvel at how a guy so intelligent and educated was working there an not doing something more befitting.

I then became a real estate agent, and I struggled there as well too. I was never able to get that “big break” that would give me consistent success like some of my friends or fellow agents who stuck it through the business and instead wound up living through cycles of feast and famine. Again, higher ups in the business saw me as this guy with all this intelligence and potential who somehow couldn’t get it together. After 3 and half years, I eventually had to leave the business when I hit a very bad streak where, within a span of five months, I couldn’t close a deal to save my life and wound up penniless. I figured that this was all a sign that I had to go.

In the midst of all this, I was pursing my dreams to become a successful model but didn’t have any major success there like some of the people I knew. It took me years to be able to walk down the runway properly and take a good picture because I had so many emotional and mental blocks that were difficult to overcome. I never was able to get signed to a major agency because I was told I was too short, too “big,” too “ethnically ambiguous”, or too commercial looking. Out of all the casting calls I had gone to, unlike others I knew, I never wound up booking any major gig.

After leaving real estate, I fell into art modeling, which, at first, was a relief because I was so broke it felt good to have money once more and not have to worry about whether withdrawing money from my checking account would cause me to go into overdraft. It enabled me to move out of my parents’ house at the ripe old age of 34 (yes, I said it, a pathetic 34) and more or less, except for summers, it gave me consistent money, but all in all, I wanted more but somehow felt blocked from getting it.

Six years after I left real estate, at the urging of a couple of “intuitives” who told me that I would do well in it this time around, I decided to return to real estate. However, when I did, the disaster continued right where it left off, with me taking almost six months to close my first deal, and then only closing three whole deals that entire year.

Now seeing this as proof that I was destined to be this ne’er do well loser who was cursed to work hard and get nothing in return, there were many times during that year that I would be standing on the subway platform watching the train I was waiting for coming down the tracks and be seized with this urge to throw myself in front of it in order to end my misery of a life of failure.

Things did get better the following years, but it was still nothing to write home about. I still struggled and still lived from hand to mouth, barely getting by, not doing as well as I POTENTIALLY could. This story still continues to the present.

In the meantime, throughout all my years of financial struggle and seeking success, I’ve thrown myself into finding a solution. I’ve read tons of books about having an abundance mindset, removing mental obstacles to money, and how to attract money. I’ve gone to seminars, watched videos and listened to podcasts about the same subject. I’ve also broached my money issues throughout my almost five years of therapy.

Over the past year, and now thanks to all the free time afforded me due to the COVID-19 lockdown, I’ve reflected a lot about my financial situation.

-Why the HELL have I struggled so much?
-Why have I worked so hard only to often get a trickle in return?
-Why haven’t I been able to get a break?
-How may I be causing this?
-If I am the cause of this, is there any benefit I may be getting from this?

Don’t get me wrong, I have definitely asked myself these questions throughout the past 18 years of financial struggle, but I wasn’t as fully prepared to face the truth as I am now. The truth I’ve had to face and now deal with is that I created these years and years of struggle back when I was in my mid 20s when I was bored and disillusioned with life.

Funny, though I remembered that time period along with what I was going through, I never made the FULL conscious connection.

What clued me in was whenever I was presented with an opportunity or was on the verge of a breakthrough that could potentially turn my life around, a HUGE pall of fear and anxiety mixed with guilt, depression and feelings of abandonment would wash over me that would cause me to sabotage myself or emit an energy that would repel the opportunity or breakthrough that was coming my way.

Yes, there you have it, I’ve been terrified of success. Terrified.

My fear is that if I become successful, life would become boring and unfulfilling because there will be nothing more to struggle for. In other words, the struggle for money has kept me “entertained” and has given my life a sense of meaning.

Then there’s also the fear of feeling guilty for having gotten it too easy and not deserving it because I haven’t struggled enough. Then I also fear facing the fact that money doesn’t buy you happiness which I don’t have to deal with when I’m preoccupied with wondering what it’d be like to have the money to buy the things I want. I’ve had the money before to buy the things I wanted and it didn’t take away my misery, in fact, it only served to remind me how miserable I was, so what’s the point?

Finally, I have this fear that if I have money, I’m going to be all alone. Somehow, I feel that not being successful protects me from the big, bad, cold world where no one cares about you. With the success, I’m fully an adult and the next thing to look forward to is death.

Yes, I know, a manchild issue.

By avoiding success, I get to avoid dealing with these issues which I had no idea how to deal with when I first got out of college when I didn’t know anything about self improvement, finding your purpose, or being of value to the world.

Upon uncovering this, I’ve had a mix of emotions. I’ve had a huge rage and contempt against my past self for effing up the past 20 years of my life. I’ve also had a lot of regret and sadness over all those wasted years of struggle. In fact, I’ll admit that I’ve shed a tear a couple of times while writing this.

I’ve also felt empathy. Empathy for the fact that I was just a 24 year old trying to make sense of things without the proper tools, wisdom, guidance or experience. Empathy also because anyone who would come to conclusions such as he didn’t deserve the success he worked his arse off for was truly dealing with some childhood trauma that he wasn’t even aware of.

I mean truly, what the hell did I know?

But you know what? I have to admit that this whole journey has given me a ton of wisdom. Wisdom that can benefit me in the present day, and wisdom to share with others who are dealing with the same things that I was when I was in my 20s.

Maybe it was destined for me to be in the proverbial wilderness for 20 years so I can use what I learned to benefit mankind?

I believe everything happens for a reason so who knows. In the meantime, I have a lot of demons I have to face and overcome to get to the other side of this.

Oh, and also, I don’t really think I’m a “Loser.” I just made the title like that to catch your attention. 🙂

This is The Viable Alternative

Hope this helps,

Ike Love