30岁退休：如果厌倦，就别再坚持了

Growing up, assuming you came from a decent home, you probably watched your parents haul off to work every day so they could put food on the table, clothes on your back and a roof over your head. Or some variation of that theme.
假设你来自这样一个小康家庭：你打小就看着父母每天辛勤工作，为的是能让这个家能够吃饱饭、有衣服穿、有地方住。其实，大部分家庭都是这样的。

But it probably never felt like your parents were stuck in an existential malaise, longing to run off so they could find themselves. They weren’t stricken with the “why me?” disease that it seems everyone under the age of 30 has now.
你可能鲜有感受到他们有想要去寻找真正的自己、被困在“存在究竟为何“的忧思之中。他们不会像现在 30 岁以下的人那样会经常问自己“为什么是我？”。

That’s because things were different then. Baby-boomers came of age at a time when the idea of having a job at all was a big deal. They stayed employed at their companies for long periods of time. By the late 90s, the economy was booming and companies took care of their employees. Having a career meant you were secure.
时代毕竟不同了。上一次婴儿潮的那一代，他们最大的想法就是找份稳定的工作。一旦找到，通常他们也会在供职的公司工作上很长一段时间。而到了 90 年代后期，经济形势一片大好，公司对员工也很关照，那时，有一份工作对人们来说就意味着安全感。

But in the past twenty years everything has changed. Kids now aren’t taught to find careers. They’re taught to find their ‘passions.’ Then they’re encouraged to pursue them.
20 多年后的今天，一切都变了。孩子们不在被教导说要去寻找一份职业，而是去寻找并追寻他们的“激情”。

Except the world doesn’t bend to everyone’s beckoning whim— it doesn’t really give a shit about your passion— because it needs people to do normal stuff like collect garbage, police streets, put out fires. Here you were, told that you were awesome and that you wouldn’t have to settle for a life of mediocrity, and that’s all you’ve got. That sucks.
过去没有人在乎你的激情，因为人们需要做的事情都是非常稀松平常的事情，比如清垃圾、做游警、扑灭火灾等等。而现在的小孩从小到大总是被“你很酷！”等各种赞誉之声包围，告诉你你没有必要过一个平庸的生活。

Years ago, when someone was a ‘creative,’ they were off in their own space. If they were successful, if they’d made it, you might have heard about them through word of mouth. Maybe you saw them on television or in a magazine.But they weren’t posting on their Facebook feed, or updating their Twitter timeline, constantly telling you about their really cool life. They weren’t digitally showing you whatever it is they were working on while you were sitting in your lowly cubicle, making you feel like a failure.
几年前，但凡是具有创新精神的人，他们都生活在自己的世界里。就算他们最终获得了成功，达成了梦想，你也只能通过电视、杂志等各种媒体或者口口相传知道他们。这群人不会更新 Facebook 状态，或者随时发 Twitter，告诉你他们真实的生活是怎样的。他们不会告诉正窝在小隔间的你他们手头正在做什么惊人的项目，让你觉得自己就是一个失败者。

Spectating has become a full-time job in and of itself— looking at other people’s LinkedIn pages, their Facebook page, their Wikipedia page— and now we judge ourselves too often by what we haven’t done, instead of what we have.
窥探他人的生活成了一项“永不下班”的工作——看其他人的 LinkedIn 主页、Facebook 或者 WiKipedia 页面——其结果就是，我们每天都会通过对比来甚至那些自己没有做过的事，而非我们究竟做了什么。