I was a corporate robot. I was making more than $500,000 a year. People were always telling me how smart and great I was. And I looked at less successful cubicle rats as schmucks who didn't get it, had low intellectual firepower, no ambition, just a bunch of losers willing to keep coming to a job they obviously didn't like much and were never going to be great at instead of going out and finding something they really wanted to do. That would be you, LW.

So - while you're busy sneering at the robots, the robots are sneering at you. Funny, huh?

But my real point - I wasn't happy. I was great at my job but it didn't have dick to do with who I 'really' was. Which was - a writer. I have always wanted to be a writer. And the kind of job I had simply didn't allow for developing my writing - I worked all the time. 6a until about 10p when I was home, which was 20% of the time, and 24x7 when I was travelling internationally, which was the rest of the time. I had time to be married - barely - and that was it.

So I quit. Now I'm writing. I don't make much money but I'm happy, and honestly feel that the money will come - I just have to keep at it. Funny though - I need SO much less now that I'm no longer rubbing elbows with all the really successful robots. I am so glad I made the decision I made - now Friday and Saturday and Monday all feel the same to me - I don't look forward to any particular day of the week, I just look forward to each day. Sounds trite but most simple things do.

BTW I've stayed in touch with some ex-robots. One raises horses now. Another sculpts with iron. Another opened a photography studio for child portraits. Another nursed her mom through a long illness and painful death and is now taking care of her 100-year-old grandmother full tiime. Another just up and moved to Santa Fe because she liked the landscape, and now she does a little of this and a little of that and likes to say 'oh not much' when you ask her what she does for a living. Still another adopted and is working for a nonprofit now. And here I thought they were just a bunch of robots, and unsuccessful ones at that. And all along they were - gasp - like me (only nicer). Kind of humbling.

LW wants to save innocent lives and build magnificent machines and start wonderful organizations and spread spiritual faith and fuck beautiful women and travel the world and befriend convicted murderers and rescue stray dogs and start overdue revolutions.

Hmm. David Koresh certainly spread spiritual faith, and so did Ted Haggard. But no one sees them as heroic. And wasn't there a higher up in British government that befriended a woman who was a convicted murderer? No one him as heroic, either. Magic Johnson fucked lots of beautiful women, and so did Kobe Bryant for that matter. Heroism isn't the first word that comes to mind.

It seems to me what the LW is really looking for is approbation from others for living what * looks * to be exciting and mysterious and exotic..that his travels and conquests and accomplihsments are the result of some indefinable quality that makes him deserve this wonderful life he's sort of riding like a sled. But if you look closely at the lives of those the LW has painted as heroic, you'll see two things: people with an belief and a willingness to engage in a sustained act of will to live it. But heroism is also risking that no one else agrees with your belief - and living it anyway. "I"m a good guy that people admire" is almost never an inherent quality of the hero, nor is it necessarily the resultant belief of the masses once the hero's actions has come to widespread attention. Just ask Magic.

Free will is a red herring here. LW, if you want to do something that pushes you above the mediocre masses, then figure out what you most strongly believe in. Get good at it. If that's fucking beautiful women, then fuck lots of beauftiful women. If that's starting a faith, then start a faith. If it's putting an end to religious faith, like Richard Dawkins - do that. And understand that, except in the case of firemen and soldiers, heroism is usually a title bestowed decades or even centuries after the accomplishment, when the full magnamity of the actions in their context are truly understood. So you probably won't be lauded a hero in your lifetime, no matter what you achieve. All the more reason to set about achieving it now, without the distraction of beautiful women watching, or the distant faint sound of hands clapping