If You Travel The Road Less Travelled, It’s Gonna Piss People Off

By Jonathan Timar
8 Comments

That may sound like a really blunt statement to you, but I don’t care because  it’s true. Sometime it’s just not worth beating around the bush.

When you travel the road less travelled, everyone who is not on that road is going to consider you anything from a mild annoyance to a scourge on society. Of course they are more than a bit jealous that they aren’t on that road too, but unlike you they don’t think they have a choice in life, and so they resent you for not contributing.

To the vast majority of people, life is a very linear path, with predefined goals. It goes something like this:

First, you are born. You spend the first few months doing a lot of crying and pooping. This is understandable because anyone being fed a steady diet of mashed carrots would do a lot of crying and pooping. Over the years the amount of crying an pooping you do gradually declines, learning to talk is cutting into your crying time, and you don’t eat so many mashed carrots anymore so pooping is less of a priority too. You start to discover that life is a lot of fun. You get to play games, your family goes on trips, you get interested in sports or art or both, and you participate in those activities as much as possible.

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    But then something happens. School, which used to be fun, and used to teach you useful things like how to read and write and draw and be creative, starts training you for the “real world”. Now if your on the road less travelled you know that the so-called real world doesn’t exist, the world is whatever you make of it, but for most people they accept this new direction without really questioning it. A few will grow a little older and rebel, but most won’t. And so from about the age of ten onwards school teaches you a lot of boring crap, and if you don’t like that boring crap a nice doctor will diagnose you with attention deficit disorder and put you on Ritalin. Ritalin is basically a lobotomy in pill form, so now you are nice and docile and can me moulded into the good little worker bee society wants you to be.

    So you finish high school and now it’s time to either go to college or get a job, or possibly both at the same time. You’ll meet someone and get married and have a few kids, and you’ll set aside your dreams and do something sensible that will earn you a good living, and proceed directly down the path to bitterness. You’ll work hard every day at something you don’t really like, or worse, something that leaches joy from your soul. You’ll keep this up for thirty or forty years until you retire, and which time you’ll be too tired to do anything except sit in front of the TV watching Wheel of Fortune, and eating mashed carrot and doing almost as much pooping as you did in your early days.

    Now the curious thing about this life path, is that no matter how little you enjoy it on a day-to-day basis, you won’t wish you had done things differently, you’ll simply resent those who did.

    And that is why those who follow their dreams and go against the grain of society will find that they piss a lot of people off.