Living Beyond the Formula

I came across an article today about some Asian kid who was crying because he didn’t get into any college for computer science. Suing for discrimination. His grades were exceptional, his test scores near-perfect. He had done everything right. And yet, it amounted to nothing but rejection. We’ve all went to school with these types. If you’ve met one of them, you’ve met them all. He was unable to process how a life of robotic compliance had failed to yield its expected reward. But what had he actually done? Who was he beyond his numbers? The world doesn’t need more equations solved by soulless hands. Like seriously, how many Asian software developers does the world need?

What you really need is something that sets you apart. A little edge. Or a lot. But something. Otherwise, what are you? You’re interchangeable, dispensable, forgettable. Another robot fine-tuning his resume, waiting to be slotted into a predetermined role. You will turn into a walking LinkedIn profile.

These people believe life is lived in formulas. That if you just do x, y, and z, success is inevitable. And then one day, it is not. Their minds can’t comprehend this. They spiral and retreat into bitterness. They then recalibrate their approach, seeking new inputs to feed the system. But it never occurs to them that the system is indifferent to them altogether. That they were never meant to be anything more than background noise.

You see these “career” types everywhere. They count their steps, track their calories, measure their sleep cycles, get good grades, a good job. They regulate every aspect of their existence until there is no existence left. Their conversations are lifeless, composed entirely of progress reports on their ongoing self-improvement projects. They abstain from everything that might disrupt their trajectory, no vices, no risks, no spontaneity. Their fear is palpable. Fear of deviation, of waste, of anything unplanned. Fear that if they were to stop the routine, they would have to face the void beneath it all.

These are the people who complain the most about how hollow life feels. They followed the rules. They did everything they were told would lead to a “good life”. The degree, the job, the stable career. They participate in the appropriate social rituals, pursue respectable hobbies. They accumulate wealth and professional prestige. And where does it lead? To a gnawing absence at the core of it all. The creeping realization that they are merely sustaining themselves, but not truly living.

A junkie has more life in him than they do. At least he has surrendered himself to something. At least he has been somewhere, seen things, touched the outer edges of experience. His body has been marked by his choices and his mind has been fractured by the extremes of sensation and deprivation. There is no spreadsheet that can account for that. No resume that can map that kind varied experience. Contrast that to when you talk to the “career” guy, and there is nothing there. Just a collection of routines and carefully managed inputs and outputs. He is the human equivalent of a well-maintained machine. Functional, efficient, boring, empty.

The best stories, the only ones worth telling, do not come from those who have played it safe in every aspect of life. They come from those who have wandered too far, who have stepped outside the boundaries of the acceptable. The ones who have lost everything and found something unexpected in the wreckage. Who have pressed their faces against the edge of existence and felt it looking back at them.

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Sure, the software developer will never go broke, but he’ll also never know what it feels like to lose it all, then win it all back. He will never throw himself into the abyss just to see what is on the other side. He will always choose the safe option, always hedge his bets, always protect what he has. He will never know what it means to stand at the precipice, stripped of everything, and still be here.

The ones who live without structure, who say yes without knowing where it will lead, who throw themselves head-first into the unknown, are the ones who truly live. They drift into strange encounters, find themselves in places they never should have been, become entangled in the lives of people they never should have met. They collect stories like wounds, each one proof that they were there, that they felt, that they lived. A life like this cannot be fit into a schedule.

This type of conformity that you see nowadays is the slow death of individuality. It strips a person down, sands away the rough edges, polishes them until nothing remains. These people submit to it out of fear, the fear of standing apart, of making the wrong move, of being noticed for the wrong reasons. But what is left once you have removed every part of yourself that does not fit? What is left when you have become precisely what was expected? A life without variance, without contradiction, without the courage to be something other than what you were told to be, is hell on earth.

You need that edge. Without it, you are just another optimized system. And one day, when the system finally shuts off, the world will not even register the loss.

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