Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock
Next Big Thing, on down the line
The next big thing: Is there some age where there is no Next Big Thing? In your 20s, to say nothing of college and before that the high school years, there’s always another brass ring for which to make a grab. From high school, you aspire to go to college. In college you aspire not just to finish college but hit that allegedly important first job.
Each of those early jobs in your 20s comprises each Next Big Thing. You see a year or two, tops in a spot where you refine skills, and evaluate and pare what you like, what you love, what you loathe, finally what you will put up with.
Comes down to: A year and a half here. Nine months there (counts as a year on a resume, no?), then three years. Whatever. Soon you see 30. The age 30 means nothing, you believe as 27 jolts into 29. You gave the number significance from arbitrariness. That’s because at some point, at 28 or 25 or 31, you hit a decent job. More than that, a company with which you’re proud to be associated or a good boss for a change or great colleagues for whom you make sure to make time after work. Any or all of those things.
You stay in that job, or succession of jobs in the same company but may involve stimulating travel or relocations, or similar jobs in different companies but in the same terrific city you lucked into. Then you turn 40. Forty somehow is real, not like the arbitrary 30. By 40 you’ve made some longterm lifestyle decisions, not all of them intentional.
Capriciousness has gone walkabout, because by now even the luckiest of us has had enough scrapes, near-hits and near-misses to know you make the best possible choice with limited facts. So you get c’est la vie or get Zen or get teed off.
Meanwhile, you look then seek for the Next Big Thing. Meantime, another day, another week, another weekend. Is that another gray hair?
I resolved four years ago to avoid putting much weight into the Next Big Thing. Not that I am getting too old for such nonsense — perish the thought! — but that it is a lousy use of energy. Too often the Next Big Thing goes to someone else, forcing a regrouping: Re-strategize, reorganize. Refine skills or get new skills and try all those doors of opportunity.
Yet over the summer I inadvertently got myself into a Next Big Thing. It’s very much like a boy’s romantic crush, hard to prevent, hard to control. Inevitable, doomed, even romantic? Not having a Next Big Thing must mean selling out, as we said at 22.
Getting the Next Big Thing, I now know, will not make me happy or make problems go away. After 40, you know happy is complicated, maybe obvious only in recollection. Second, 40-somethings know problems go away only to be replaced by other woes. While I can see the Next Big Thing after this particular Next Big Thing, I have no clue where the Next Big Thing will lie if this one vanishes.
Not getting the Next Big Thing must mean what Douglas Adams writes in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: It’s what the bowl of petunias thinks as it falls from the table to the floor: "Oh no, not again." -30-
