Retrospective. This is NOT ANOTHER “LAST YEAR” SHITPOST

Yah, New Year’s Eve is coming up and everybody’s writing his personal summary of the last year, draws conclusions and makes decisions for their future based upon the recent experiences. Blah. “I’ll stop smoking.” “I’ll work out more” “2007′s been a great year for me”. This post, however, isn’t such a thing. I hate it to post this one right now, but odds are: It’s time to do. Not to “look back to 2007″, but to look back to the first part of my “grown-up life”, which has ended just minutes ago.

I finished my graphics design studies in summer 2006 and was lucky enough to already had a job arranged. So I moved in in Krems with Sifu Sturmi (very dangerous martial arts grandmaster, don’t you dare him!) a former classmate of mine. Life was all new and stuff, the first own flat, a regular paycheck, being a full-time, long-term employee, pretty much having what I’d refer to as “a grown-up life”. It soon turned out that Krems wasn’t the best choice to live in. The flat was almost perfect, right in the inner city, a few hundred meters from the office, big and not very expensive. But Krems is a schooltown. It’s lifeliness is drawn from the young people running around there, and most of them are really young I tell you.

Going out wasn’t a lot of fun and all my friends had moved to vienna or other university-equipped cities by the time, so within half a year I had people crashing by about maybe 6 or 7 times, which isn’t really a lot if you’re a social kind of a person. Hm, also isn’t much if you’re not the social kind of person. Additionally Sturmi had a girlfriend and I was the only employee (in our flat as well as in the office), with a boss always on the run. That said and doing the math you probably already recognized that my social environment was … uhm … non-existant may be a fitting term.

In february 2007 I suddenly felt the urgent need to go somewhere. No matter where, really, just go. So a shorthand decision was made and Philipp and I booked flights to Dublin to spend a week on whiskey island. To keep this trip low-budgety and because the idea exited me for quite a while we tried couchsurfing for the first time. And I tell you there’s not a big chance I’ll ever go on vacation in another way since that faithful week. When I came back I was on fire again, ready to kill and get things done. It was a total turn-on.

Things regressed to “regular life” sooner than I’d hoped. But life played nicely and since Julia and I wanted to move in together and Sturmi’s girlfriend was already living with us (both of them studied in Krems) I got another big change: Julia and I found ourselves a great appartement in vienna. This was the next turn-on, living together for the first time, buying furniture together, painting the walls, kind of like a new start. However, my job really started to depress me. Don’t get me wrong, my former boss is a great guy, I had a lot of freedom and could do pretty much everything, starting from newspaper ads and going all the spectrum to marketing-concepts, client meetings and corporate design decisions. But the agency is kind of rural and focused on small, local businesses, so the quality and budget of our projects didn’t really satisfy a professionalist’s imagination of good results.

I struggled with that, had the one and other chat with my boss about it and tried to find something to stick to, to cheer me up again, a point where I could bring in the full profession without screwing the budget. Turned out there’s no such thing by now. After thinking about it for quite a few months I decided to quit. Also that need to go arose again, so I did two things. First of all I booked a roundtrip-flight Jan 2nd VIE – SFO, LAX – VIE Jan 23rd. Second I quit with the end of december. Once again life played well for me and I got an additional 1.500,- euros from my former (far back in 2004) civil service “employer”, because they didn’t pay us enough back then and I went through a 3-year-letter-writing bullshit to get what I deserved.

That’s pretty much it. Thinking about what’s happened, the last 18 months feel like a few years and after all I’m quite satisfied that there’s something going on in my life. It feels good to look at the calendar and see “oh, I did this! And that!”, basically to see that I didn’t waste my time with boring, irrelevant stuff, but actually did something that pushes me further. Within the last two years I went from living in my room at home and never having travelled to living with my girlfriend in a terrace-equipped rooftop-apartment, met a hell lot of people from all over the world by being a couchsurfing-host, am looking forward to a 7-week-california roundtrip and back to my first one and half a year of experience in my profession, that is graphics design. Not that bad.

Thinking about all of this and my life since I got out of the “follow the cool guys” phase, in which I was stuck really long, I think what I need in life is change. I can’t do the same thing or be on the same spot for a long time. Significant changes and special experiences result in a steep upwards-curve on my mood, whereas stagnation and “everyday life” inevitable lead down to 0 again, and further into the really uncomfortable area of depression.

The upcoming trip has a target. I want to really get my head clean of everything that limits me in making decisions for my future. If I do the same things, spend time with the same people and visit the same places my view of life and the world gets smaller and less varying. I can’t step back to look at the bigger picture anymore from where I am by now, so I have to do something extreme that gives me the chance to develop new perspectives. Going to a foreign country, staying with strangers, being on the move constantly and driving from LA to Las Vegas in a red convertible sounds like a good opportunity for that.

We’ll see how it worked when I’m back.