Thank you for being annoying - by Adam Mastroianni

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We send kids into the world with that mantra in their heads, and then they return shellshocked and ashamed, because they couldn’t do it. Many of them end up believing that they are the one person on Earth who just doesn’t fit in, the sad sap whose preferences and talents—whatever they may be! If they even exist!—simply do not match the opportunities available, like a puzzle piece that got mixed into the wrong box. Some of them feel that way forever, always a little unsettled and unsatisfied. A few of them turn into cynics, convinced that the idea of a “dream job” is, like the all-seeing Santa Claus, a fiction foisted upon children to keep them docile. The problem is that nobody ever tells you what it feels like to love something. Everybody thinks love feels like perpetual bliss. It doesn’t. It mainly feels annoying. I’m at the point in my life where I know plenty of people who have “made” it, people who have become the things they always hoped they would be: doctors, lawyers, academics

photo cred: my dad “Do what you love” is the most dangerous sentence in the English language. We send kids into the world with that mantra in their heads, and then they return shellshocked and ashamed, because they couldn’t do it. Many of them end up believing that they are the one person on Earth who just doesn’t fit in, the sad sap whose preferences and talents—whatever they may be! If they even exist!—simply do not match the opportunities available, like a puzzle piece that got mixed into the wrong box. Some of them feel that way forever, always a little unsettled and unsatisfied. A…

Thank you for being annoying - by Adam Mastroianni

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