What am I doing with my life

You can have some existential dread and ennui, as a treat

More than once I’ve sat on my couch in my little studio and thought about how there’s so much wrong with the world that even if I spent every waking moment of the rest of my life just working to fix the problems I personally consider to be absolute emergencies I would barely be able to make a dent. I’d pace, but I don’t have the floor space.

I was Baptized at our Southern Baptist church when I was five in Huntsville, Alabama. That same year my dad taught me how to shoot a .22 rifle. One thing I loved about Evangelical Christianity was the sense of meaning and purpose it gave to my life. But even as a child, I wrestled with the specifics.

In the Bible, Paul writes, “It is good for a man not to marry.” Yet my Sunday School teachers told me motherhood was every Christian woman’s calling. For years, I would intermittently lay in bed at night wondering how I could get married and have kids when there are already mouths to feed and souls to save from eternal damnation.

It seemed obvious that helping as many people as possible avoid hell was the highest leverage way to spend a life. But, I hated talking to strangers. On every mission trip I chose manual labor over talking to people about Jesus.

Since then I’ve come to believe the New Testament is not a timeless rubric for moral decision-making. Paul’s instructions to the church were letters written to specific people to help them deal with specific issues they were dealing with at that time. When Paul was writing he thought Jesus was coming back like, soon. Like definitely within his lifetime, and maybe before dinner.

But a sense of moral responsibility toward the world has stayed with me.

My life is far more affluent, easy, interesting, and fun than I would have ever thought possible as a child in Alabama. Yet guilt downs out my feelings of gratitude. To whom much is given.

I left the non-profit world in 2015 because I wasn’t able to stick to my principles and earn enough to save money. I’ve spent many an hour resentful that I have to consider my likelihood of becoming a financial burden to my family. My consolation is that I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have to work who isn’t also more miserable than I am by a lot.

But for four years I struggled. What’s the highest leverage way to spend a life? I had a friend who insisted that I should get rich first and then try to make the world a better place. Hard to argue with the logic, except that a lot more people try to get rich than do.

So I wrote essays about my vagina. I started a column for a local news outlet and spent a year becoming an expert on housing policy. I studied for the GRE, thinking I would go to grad school and become a housing policy wonk at a think tank. I went back and forth in my mind about charging for my newsletter. I started an OnlyFans. I was agreed to become VP of Communications for the SF Sex-Positive Democratic Club. I flirted with tech policy.

Last year I settled on working a for-profit job to save money and doing my projects on the side until I feel like I have enough financial cushion to try to work on my projects full-time.

Still, what to work on in my spare time and what working on my projects full-time might look like eluded me.

I think it hit me while listening to the Sex and Psychology podcast walking to a date. This episode was research for a story I wanted to write about the ethics of race play in pornography.

“Those authoritarian fuckers are going to replace the War on Drugs with a War on Sex!” I thought to myself. Suddenly, I had a purpose.

In those four years, I couldn’t fully imagine myself doing any specific job. Every time I’d think about talking to who I needed to talk to to figure out what I needed to do to work on my passions full-time, I froze.

But when I got curious about race play and pornography, I didn’t hesitate. I conducted four interviews with experts in two weeks in my spare time.

I think I was unconsciously hindered by the unacknowledged fact that I’m never going to be one of the top 10 housing policy analysts. I’m never going to be one of the top 10 tech policy analysts.

But no one has written comprehensively, to my knowledge, about the War on Sex. As far as I know, I might be able to be one of the top 10 people working to stop or at least ameliorate the War on Sex. I’d been early to the Drug War. I’d been early to the housing crisis. But I had wondered what I was on the vanguard of now. Suddenly, I knew. In a moment, everything became less important to me than understanding the contours of what I suspect we’re up against.

As someone who grew up religious and conservative, I tangentially follow the “trad” discourse. I understand, from personal experience, how comforting it is to believe that I know the one right way for everyone to live. I also know, from personal experience, how profoundly disquieting it is to not know the best way for anyone to live.

What gives me peace is having realized there is no one best way for everyone to live. Humanity benefits from all kinds of people living all kinds of ways. We benefit from people who focus on helping the world, and from people who focus on their families and communities. We benefit from people who relentlessly pursue wealth through innovation, and from people who give selflessly to others.

I want to solve the housing crisis, prevent tech from being regulated as corruptly as finance, decriminalize sex work, abolish police unions, etc. I want to do a lot of things. But it helps me get off the couch to know that people who are better equipped than I to solve those problems are working on them. That isn’t to say we don’t need more people working on these problems. We absolutely do. And it isn’t to say I couldn’t help if I put my energy there. I certainly could.

It’s to say I think it’s acceptable to accept that I can’t do everything. And that I’m going to be more effective if I specialize. And that doing a thing I’m somewhat uniquely interested in and capable of, even if it’s not the absolutely objectively highest leverage way to spend my life, still helps humanity.

I’m excited about this project. I’m more excited about it than I was when I started falling in love with housing policy. But there’s no shortcut to here. I needed to spend years reading about the Drug War, human trafficking, porn bans, sex work decriminalization, police abuse, social media, Section 230, etc. I needed to join the Sex-Positive Dems. I needed to join OnlyFans. I needed to keep putting one foot in front of the other, following my interests, connecting with like-minded people, and asking questions to get here. I needed to spend years asking myself, “What am I doing with my life?”

I don’t know where this project will take me. Maybe after a few months I’ll realize I’ll never be in the top 10 people writing about the War on Sex. But I’ll know who those motherfuckers are. I’ll have read them and understand the problem. And that alone is worth the effort to me.

I don’t know how to spend this short, precious, agonizing life. I don’t know how to offer the most value to humanity. But I’ve found a direction to run in for now. And for that I’m immensely grateful.