I’ve been working for nearly a decade now. I’m almost 25 as I started writing this and I will probably be 25 by the time it sees the light of day. I was a very lucky kid because my first job was as a youth employee of an urban farming non-profit. I worked there from my junior year of high school to my freshman year of college. I was lucky enough to work for them as a leader in their youth program right after graduating from the program. I liked the job in retrospect, but I decided to move away from the job and the scene because I was young and didn’t know better. I thought, “I need to experience a bad job like a normal person”. I later recognize this as my philosophical disposition. This was before I even learned about philosophy. So I walked away and I ended up working at a local grocery store.
I pretty much immediately learned that this wasn’t what I wanted to do, but I was in. I had a steady form of income and it wasn’t easy to give that up. I stayed working at this grocery store for years. I took a break from College before my Sophomore year, and I soon returned to school after I started at the grocery store. I had a sense of meaninglessness when I realized I only had this job going on, so school helped give me purpose. This is when, on a whim, I learned about philosophy. I learned I had been doing philosophy my whole life, but learning that there was a whole area of study dedicated to learning the truth about the world around us was huge for me. For a long time, I felt like I was the only one asking these questions. I would annoy friends and family by questioning them about everything. I needed everything to be justified and it was not pleasant for those in my crosshairs.
Eventually, I stopped school. I was deep into philosophy and, surprise!, was questioning everything. I decided school wasn’t working out for me, and with no clear career prospects, I decided to quit. So then all I had was work. I landed a pretty cushy position in the meat department in my store and it was easy to just go through the motions. Work, play video games, repeat. Well, those video games would toss that all up.
I have been playing games since 11 or so. During this period of my life where the grocery store was my only responsibility, I was playing Smash Brothers competitively and then found a group of people to play Overwatch. We all started playing a little after Thanksgiving 2017 and by March 2019, I moved to Colorado because of someone I met through this group. This took me away from the grocery store, naturally. I was now across the country and jobless. I defaulted to what I was doing before I moved, I looked for a retail job. I got hired at Target 3 months after moving to Colorado. At first, I liked it. The organization, the pay, and the people were all an improvement. I was content.
Everything was fine until 2020. That is pretty par for the course for 2020. Once the pandemic hit, work became my only out-of-the-house experience. Given that I wasn’t doing much besides working, I had a lot of time to reflect. I did a lot of pondering about what I wanted to do. I started to work on making youtube videos. I have consumed youtube content for years now and I always wanted to give it a go. I wrote a few scripts for video essays. I did a few gaming scripts and one about politics. When I went to read my script for the first video, I learned I don’t speak how I write. I feel like I was writing a college paper and I can’t speak it confidently. I loved the process of writing these scripts and it helped me conclude that I love writing.
Writing never seemed like something I’d actively pursue, but in retrospect, it makes a lot of sense. I’m very analytical. I love analyzing things I care about and usually, it’s just in my mind or spoken to some sad sap who has to hear me. It makes sense to start putting these ideas into words. I also have a philosopher’s style. I like to write things in a clear, digestible way because that is very important in philosophy. If you’re to convince someone of something, it must be easy to comprehend. One of my proudest moments in college was getting an A+ on my “Intro to Philosophy” paper final. The professor wrote “Best essay I’ve read” on it. It made me ecstatic and probably had something to do with me loving philosophy, although I was loving the class even before the final.
Something else I wanted after reflecting on during the last year was freedom. I want freedom. I feel immense pressure from having a schedule. Having to be somewhere, at a certain time, 5 days a week is not appealing to me. It takes away spontaneity in life. You can’t go out with friends Wednesday night, because you work at 4 am Thursday morning. You can’t decide to go visit family if it’s not 3 weeks in advance. I hate that feeling. I also hate how it drained me. I hated dealing with people. Eventually, I didn’t even work with customers, but I still didn’t like the interactions I had to have with management.
This all sounds like someone who wants no responsibility and could be considered lazy. Maybe I am. I’m not sure if that’s the case. I do want to work. I want to support myself and eventually others. I want to be responsible but I also want to be happy. Happiness is key. It promotes healthiness. And what’s the point of working if you’re not healthy enough to enjoy what you worked for? If my 20 hours a week retail job was too much for me to handle, who is anyone to tell me I should power through it?
So, the title of this work, “The Sweat Pants initiative”. What does it mean? Well, I want to never have to wear anything other than sweat pants again. I’m working towards self-employment. I started working towards this before I officially quit my job, so I have a little bit of an idea of what I need to do. I’ve been writing for the last 2 months or so to kick off a freelancing career. I’m going to be doing a few other creative things in conjunction with freelance writing but I will also be doing doordash on the side. Doordash is nice because it will allow me to get money when I need it to cover the gaps in income. It’s nice because you don’t need to have a schedule. You can work when you want or even not work at all. I love that. I’ve done it a few times so far and it’s much less stressful than working in retail.
So sweats on, computer on, let’s get to work.
Bernard Lamar Rice 