is this... adulthood?

01 Jun, 2025

Earlier this month, I graduated from college. An even shorter time ago, I started a full-time job. It's not really a permanent thing, considering that I'm not planning to stay in this country for long and this job is to fund my trans-continental relocation --- but it has all the trappings of one, and I'm pretending to everyone at the office that it is one.

It… sucks. By the time I get home, I'm exhausted, and factoring in the time it takes to commute, eat breakfast and dinner, etc., I only have four hours to myself at the end of each day. The project I've been assigned to do is terrible, my coworker spent an hour telling me about its fundamental, intractable problems, and how much he hated working on it. It's something that will make things shittier for anyone trying to buy from this company.

Is this just what the adult world is like? Your entire life, you wake up and spend the entire day sitting at a desk working on meaningless tasks that don't make the world better, and when you get home you think "finally, my time is mine" but you're too tired to do anything that feels meaningful or make any progress towards your true goals?

I take comfort in knowing that, secretly, this isn't a permanent state of affairs – working at this particular company, that is. And yet --- will it be any different after I move somewhere else? The endless monotony, it hasn't even been long at all but already I feel it crushing me. The falseness with which I try (probably unsuccessfully) to act positive when I'm at work, when really I'm stressed and frustrated by my job and anxious about moving to a new country, anxious about the little spare time or energy I have to continue my clandestine job search, worried about how long it will take and how much time I have, what with everything in the US unfolding as rapidly as it is.

Certainly, some of this stress will melt away when I have found and settled into a job in the new country, to be replaced with other migration-specific stress I'm sure. When I move abroad, I'm definitely planning on giving myself at least a month to set things up and enjoy life a little before I start a job. But in the here and now, this double life is just a lot to maintain. I told many of my college friends of my plans to move, because I want them to know where to find me. But now that I'm here in this region again I have to carefully control who knows what, to maintain the secret from my employer.

The truth is, I don't even want to be in this industry. I spent four years forcing myself through a bachelor's degree in a field that I hate. I get no joy or satisfaction whatsoever out of software, I was gritting my teeth every minute I spent writing code.

What's more, I've known this. I've known I was in the wrong field for a very long time. It was supposed to be an employable, respectable placeholder until I figured out what I really wanted to do with my life, but that turned out to not happen until halfway through my very last semester.

I just somehow imagined that after I was done with my bachelor's degree, after I had finally made it all the way through college, I would be free. No more midnights in the library, no more fire alarms going off at 3am, no more communal bathrooms with sinks that some drunk person vomited into, no more grade point average determining my future employability to agonize over. It would just be over.

I imagined, somehow, that I would have time to make art.

But instead! Instead, I made the mistake of starting right away. (don't do this, don't ever do this.) I took a week to unpack, to clear out the junk my family had been storing in my unused bedroom, and I started work after that straightaway. And… it sucks.

The thing I always wanted to do was just make art. Have a little studio, maybe in the mountains, and sell paintings, prints, illustrations. Being an artist isn't a real job, I was told at every turn growing up. And yes, I have interacted with a career artist who told the students in my oil painting class that yes all of that is true, that doing this full-time only works if you have a wealthy spouse, good connections, or are just extremely lucky. I'm willing to shelve this dream, and let it stay as a fond fantasy for maybe when I'm old, and have saved enough to just do this instead.

In the meantime, that leaves a "real" career. Law!

In my class on surveillance, the professor described it on the first day as being like a "pre-law" course, and I recalled being glad I'd chosen this course. I had been a child that always liked to read, a high school student who loved philosophy, and for a while I had planned to major in linguistics. I had considered law school as a vague possibility since early on, but I sure as hell didn't want to tie myself down to only being able to work in the US, if I studied US law. Reading and discussing case law in this course settled it. I do want to go to law school --- and it will be in Europe.

When I look back even just on this blog, seeing an essay I wrote in the far-off time of 2023, privacy has always been something I've cared deeply about. In my sophomore year, my university rolled out an invasive "smart lock" app for students to be able to get into our dorms. Students were never consulted, the first I heard of this was when I received an email in the summer that the lock had already been installed on the dorm I would move into. I went to the trouble of reading the app's privacy policy¹ and finding how incredibly invasive the data it harvests is --- by using the app, you accept that it can take your browsing history, precise location, microphone data, and "inferences about your predispositions and intelligence" every time you use the app.²

The app went on to say that they didn't sell user data, but they did give it away for free to whoever they felt like. I was so angry about all of this that I tried to start a petition at my school, but I only convinced one other person to rally to my cause. Gen Z, at least in America, is so used to not having rights in the digital sphere that none of them cared.

So yes, I think law fits in really well with my interests. I care very deeply about my rights not getting exploited, and watching the democratic structures of my home country crumble has really motivated me towards effective ways of fighting large-scale corporate evil rather than just going to protests. No entity should be able to buy out the government of a country and remold it in the image of its own interests. No entity, whether the world's richest man or private corporate donors, should be able to buy out a government, period. The only meaningful weapon against that is law.