I graduated university in the middle of July, with dreams that blazed brighter than the afternoon sun. While my classmates found peace in finding the perfect jobs, and settling down for a life filled with monotonous actions, I stood in empty lots and saw castles. Every abandoned building was a canvas. I spent twilight hours sketching floor plans, imagining how I'd transform the city's forgotten spaces into something magnificent. The possibilities seemed endless then, and I couldn’t help but look down at the rest of the world with pity in my eyes, “Why settle?” I always wondered, why surrender yourself to a cycle that breaks you, when you know you could do so much more?.
My father, weathered by about thirty years behind the same desk, called it a fool's errand. "Dreams don't pay bills," he'd say, his voice heavy with the wisdom of surrender. But I saw the ghost of his own forgotten dreams and ambitions dancing in his eyes, and I swore I'd never let my fire dim like his, like his father before him. I watched him go out everyday before the day was bright, and get back just as the day got dark, watched as he settled into his favorite chair at the corner of the living room, and tuned in to his favorite channel and stayed there till it was late. I hated that he gave up, and what I hated more, was that he blamed us all for the loss of his ambition.
There was always just one major issue with pursuing my dreams, and it was that I didn’t have the financial stability that real estate required. So I concluded I needed a job first. "Just need to be smart about this," I whispered to myself, circling job listings and weighing the odds “Just to keep body and soul together” was what I said when my parents asked me what changed, it was what I told myself to keep me from giving up. "Six months at a desk job, a year at most. Build a war chest, then push myself into the real world." The logic was a sweet poison, smooth and convincing. After all, every great builder needs a foundation, right? Every empire starts with a single brick. I spent hours crafting the perfect resume, each bullet point a temporary step toward permanent freedom.
The company welcomed me with fluorescent lights and wonderful promises. My desk was clean, the type you’d see in wall street banks, just less cluttered and way less important. the coffee decent, the hours numbered. "This is just the building place," I'd remind myself during morning meetings, watching others who had been "temporary" here for twenty years. Their eyes held the dullness that came with routine and surrender, but I convinced myself I was different, that I alone had a higher purpose, that my dreams had a fire that was impossible to quench. I kept my goals alive in a leather notebook, its pages filled with property listings and calculations, architectural sketches and possibilities. During lunch breaks, I'd run my fingers over the pages like my mother always did to the bible whenever we were in financial need and we decided to pray, Only I whispered my prayers to a future self who had already broken free.
The first raise came like a lullaby, soft and seductive. "It would be foolish to leave now," the voice of reason pushed me on, gently too. "Just another year, then you'll have enough." I moved to a better apartment, trying to ignore how each upgraded amenity was another golden chain, tying me down, another bar in the cage of reality. I moved my notebook of goals from my desk to a drawer, then to a box, its pages growing stiff with disuse. Each weekend, I promised myself I'd update it, but weekends were for watching my favourite series on Netflix, and burning away the week’s exhaustion with good sleep.
My hands, once itching to build and create, now danced across keyboards instead of construction sites. Numbers flowed through my fingers – profit margins, quarterly reports, performance metrics – each digit another brick in the wall between me and my dreams. I learned the language of corporate success, speaking in acronyms and deliverables, while the vocabulary of creation and building gathered dust in some forgotten corner of my mind. Some corner I convinced myself I would visit once I was ready and had gathered enough.
Years melted like snow in spring time. Each promotion was another sweet sedative, another reason to say "soon, but not yet." The real estate courses I'd bookmarked gathered digital dust, their tabs closed one by one to make room for spreadsheet tutorials and other more “necessary” tabs. The property listings app on my phone sank beneath layers of email notifications and calendar alerts, a dream drowning in the digital deep before I finally deleted it to save space, I convinced myself it was for the greater good, it was just an app after-all, and I'd download it as soon as it became necessary.
I was good at my job – terrifyingly good. Each successful project felt like a step toward my real dream, even though I'd stopped speaking about it, even to myself, the ambitions that once burned like wild fire in my mind, was now like the faded memories of childhood, trying to remember my goals was like struggling to remember a dream after waking. The ambitious boy who once stood in empty lots and saw possibilities had been buried under spreadsheets and quarterly projections. My creativity, once focused on transforming spaces, now expressed itself in innovative cost-cutting measures.
Time became a blur of Monday mornings and Friday evenings, each week indistinguishable from the last. Sometimes, on the train back from work, I'd catch a glimpse of construction sites, and feel a phantom pain where my dreams used to live. Relationships came and went, each ending with the same unspoken truth – I had become boring. Safe. Predictable. The fire that once lit up my eyes when I talked about transforming skylines had been replaced by the dull glow of “financial security”. My passion for creation had become a passion for stability, and even I couldn't pretend it was the same thing.
One morning, waiting for my 8 AM train like a faithful worshiper at his shrine, I overheard two fresh graduates with fire in their eyes talking about their dreams and their plans to “Leave a mark”. Their voices carried the same passion that once fueled my midnight sketches and dawn aspirations. I wanted to warn them, to tell them about the sweet poison of "just for now" and the silent death of "maybe later." But my tongue was heavy with a decade of compromises, and all I could think about was my 9:30 meeting. And then the train came, and it skipped my mind all together.
The realization didn't come with thunder or lightning. It crept in on a Tuesday as ordinary as any other, as I mindlessly updated my calendar with the same meetings that had filled my weeks for years. As I had done on other Tuesdays in other weeks for years , I caught a glimpse of a stranger wearing my face in the black of my computer screen – not the architect I had hoped I would see, but another tired soul marking time until retirement. I stared for a while and I saw my father in my eyes, I saw the resignation I swore never to allow into my mind. The boy who once stood in empty lots and saw castles had become a man who saw only bottom lines.
And it was then that I realized... the hate that settled into my bones.. And it spread like a cancer throughout the entirety of my being. Living was exhausting, depressing even, and so I decided to be dead like the rest of the world... to take morning walks at 7:45 on Saturdays, and work a job that paid for my soul and wait for the train that left at 8:00 and die in a bed that would be hard, and dusty and musty and stale from sweat.. I decided to settle into the routine that killed the rest of the world, the routine I fought to avoid all my life.