In therapy lately I am learning to identify my feelings. Maybe you’re thinking this is elementary, but did you know that envy is about wanting something you don’t have, but jealousy is the fear of losing something you already have?

I am thinking about those two things. I am almost never envious, but I am often jealous. Most of my emotions, in fact, are rooted in fear.

I am thinking a lot lately about where my joy comes from, and one thing I love is writing well. When I have a blog post that people love I am happy for weeks. And the excitement of doing good creative work gives me energy to do more.

So I have been thinking about how to get better at writing, and I’ve been trying to notice stuff that I wish I had written. The process teaches me a lot about identifying my own emotions.

1. A New Yorker article.
There is not much in the New Yorker I wish I had written. Most of it I think is too long and could use a stronger editor. (Like this article about Ikea.) But there is a piece in the Nov. 28 issue that is just one page, and so funny that I carry it with me and make people read it just so I can watch them laugh.

It is We are the One Percent, by John Kenney. Will you click to read it? Go read it now.

I'll wait.

I am not funny. I mean, I am funny but in an unintentional way. When I try to make a joke it is usually a pun. I love puns but I have realized, late in life, that people do not think puns are funny.

When people read my writing and say that I am funny, I feel lonely, because I know better than to try to be funny on purpose. So honestly, I don’t feel that funny. It’s a lot like when people say that I write stuff just to get a lot of traffic. If I knew how to churn out a 300-comment post on demand, don’t you think I’d do it every day?

In fact, it’s like funny. I have no idea when it’s coming. Feeling: Lonely, because I’m always surprised.

2. An email from Melissa.
I wrote to Melissa that I messed up my PayPal account and I hit my limit on money I can transfer to my checking account and I wanted the money right then, while I was in Florida, with the kids. We were at the Waldorf in Boca, which I would have never chosen, but there was a wedding.

And actually, in the list of things I wish I had written should be the pricing plan for this resort. It reminds me of buying a printer. They seem so reasonably priced until you get killed on the ink. And that’s what happens here—when you have to pay five dollars for an apple juice, and $25 to get the hotel to remove the $5 juice from the fridge in the room so the kids don’t drink it.

Anyway, I asked Melissa if I could pay her through PayPal and use her credit card at the hotel. This is the sort of fucked up behavior that Melissa and I have done in the past, so it seemed like a reasonable request.

Melissa wrote back, “No. I’m not doing stuff like that anymore.”

And I thought, “She is really smart. Of course we should not do stuff like that anymore.” It is bad boundaries and I am working on having better boundaries with everyone, even Melissa.

I am hoping she will send me an email asking for something bad so I can write a response that blows her away with my ability to establish good boundaries. Feeling: Determination to change and excitement about what my life could be like with good boundaries.

3. The ad copy up there.
The girl. In the hot outfit, with all the guys around her. Do you see her? It’s an ad for work clothes, of course. But it’s an ad that gives women the freedom to use their sexuality to get everything they can get. I love that. Women are doing better than men are at work in their 20s. Women earn more and women are less likely to get hit in layoffs.

OK Cupid – one of my favorite blogs for the combination of amazing data and amazing analysis, and really, that should be on my list of stuff I’d like to write too, except that the guy who writes it – Chris Rudder – has his personality all over it which makes me just want to enjoy it and not be it. Like Joel Stein’s column in Time magazine. It’s too too too him for me to want it to be me. But I love reading it.

Anyway, OK Cupid concludes that women are in highest demand when they are in their late 20s. Which makes sense to me—they are high earning, stable, and still very hot.  So women should leverage their sexuality to get promotions, make sales, get high-earning husbands—great legs help with all that stuff.

I want to write advice like the advice in this ad. Be great. Reach high. Inspire people around you by being inspired yourself. And when you don’t feel that way, at least look that way and eventually that good look will get you back on track.

Feeling: Hopeful. The ad reminds me of all the positive psychology research – that you can create hope in yourself by giving it to other people.

If I focus on what I wish I'd written, I realize that what I'm scared of  has nothing to do with other writers. What I'm scared of is not growing. It's freeing to recognize that, really. Because I can't control what other people write. But I can control how much I push myself to grow. And I'm convinced that jealousy and envy — whichever is your sin of choice  - have very little power over us when we are growing fast enough to surprise ourselves with what we can accomplish.

When I sent her this photo, she said: “What is this?”

I only wanted her opinion about the color of the shirt, so I thought it was okay that it was blurry. But the more I look at the picture, the more I think that it’s how I feel about myself right now.

I am not quite sure who I am, right now. And given the current career climate, this is actually how most people see themselves, too—blurry from constant movement, settled on the basics, but unclear on the specifics.

And then I read an article in Fast Company this month titled Generation Flux. The article is about how careers are constantly moving and our identity is therefore moving as well.

So I am focused on how to make myself more clear about what I look like. At least right now. And here are things I think we each need to do to pin down our moving-target, career-jumping selves.

1. Get a plan for post-35.
This is a great post by Matt Heusser, from Google, that outlines why you only have fifteen years to put a plan together.  By the time you’re 35 you have to get out of any career space that is for young people and settle into an older person job.

Want to know what young people jobs are? Making sales (as opposed to managing), writing code (as opposed to managing), working across three time zones. These are jobs that middle-aged people do not get. Mostly because no one would respect a person who has worked for 15 years and still has to take a job like this. These are not good jobs for having a life. These are jobs for working long, hard hours with the intention of laying the groundwork for a better career.

Sara Horowitz, writing in the Atlantic, suggests that the new jobs will be independent, short-term and maybe even coffee-shop based. Others, like Cathy Benko at Deloitte, suggest there will be a series of lateral moves that will somehow become respectable. Anya Kamenetz, writing in Fast Company, says this will look like continuous, back-to-back career change, so that job hopping begins to look tame and totally normal.

At any rate, you can’t get through the second part of your career doing the work you did in the first part. So there is not time to rest in a safe spot for your career.

The other reason you only get 15 years is that your salary tops out in your late 30s. (Actually, age 35 for women and 40 for men.) Statistically speaking, you are extremely unlikely to earn more than you are earning at that age.

2. Get good at setting boundaries.
In the old workplace you could take one job, on an established path, and move forward in a predictable way. The average job today lasts four years. (And other research shows that people who are staying a lot longer than four years are probably getting themselves into trouble.)

If you are changing jobs every four years, you are going to have to manage lots of close relationships with co-workers and bosses. This requires being very good at setting boundaries, which, in turn, requires good self-knowledge.

I have a bookshelf full of boundary-building books right now, and I’m blown away by how relevant they are to careers. (Examples: I Hate You Don't Leave Me and Stop Walking on Eggshells).

Most of our career problems have, on some level, a boundary component. For example, many people in their 20s know what they’d like to do but they cannot separate the dreams of their parents from their own, and so they make bad choices for themselves that they spend a decade undoing.

In other cases, career choices are clear and good, but a spouse has dreams that are incompatible with this choice. For example, the spouse wants a income, or more attentive child care, or a relocation that is not possible. In this case there would need to be a family talk about boundaries and how one person’s dreams cannot depend on impossible career feats by the other person.

The better we are at managing boundaries in our personal relationships, the better we’ll be at managing our career decisions. And as careers become more dynamic, this equation becomes more true.

3.   Get tons of coaching.
I have always been a huge fan of coaching. It’s not only that I have hired people for help with what to wear. In fact, I think one of my biggest strengths is to get coaching from a wide range of people.

As a result of realizing this personal strength, last year I started doing a lot more coaching for other people, and I started reading more about coaching as well. For example, all high performers get a lot of coaching. And the need for coaching does not wane as you get better and better at your job.

So many people told me that the coaching session I did with them changed their life that I decided I wanted to get that. I wanted a coaching session that changed my life. So I asked Christine Carter to do a coaching session with me. She wrote the book Raising Happiness: 10 Simple Steps for More Joyful Kids and Happier Parents. She coaches families on how to create systems that promote family  happiness. She helps them restructure schedules and priorities, which are exactly the things I’ve been having trouble with since I moved to the farm and started homeschooling.

We dealt with fundamental decisions like when I will do my work each day and how the family can be more predictable. And you know what? She changed my life. Because she took questions that are difficult and complicated for me and she was able to find good answers quickly. Which, by the way, is exactly what I am able to do when I coach people about career decisions.

A coach works on the same problem with hundreds of people, so the coach is great at seeing how to solve that one problem for you. For anything. I’ve written about coaching for mental imaging, coaching for more optimism, coaching for gait. Each of those coaches have blown me away by teaching me something totally new about myself and helping me solve problems related to that area.

So I can’t stress enough how much I recommend that you get coaching this year. You cannot rely on your company to teach you what you need to know to manage your career. Because first of all, no one knows that answer except you. But also, a company cannot make that kind of investment in employees when the average tenure is four years.

And one more thing about coaching: It's very hard to know what question to ask. Which may make you think that this is a reason to not get coaching. But in fact, learning to ask good questions is something you can get coached for as well.

Somehow, last year, I got too big-picture. It’s not surprising since I’m an ENTJ. I understand my deficit, which is one reason I picked the Farmer, an ISTP-–extremely short-term thinking.

At the end of the day, the Farmer walks in the house and talks about his day’s accomplishments, and the weather. I used to tell him that the weather is such a stupid topic that it actually makes me uncomfortable to have him bring it up. But now I realize that the weather is a segue to talking about what is happening right now. And that’s something I need to get better at.

1. Pay attention to the short term.
So my first resolution is to be more excited with what's going on in my life in the near-term.

On January 1st the Farmer separated from his parents’ farm, and he has pigs are at our farm now. (I am saying our farm now. It shows us being a team more. It’s hard to write, but I guess this is a sub-resolution within the resolution: Think like a team.) He used to make the pigs have babies in crates, at his parent's farm. The birthing process was confinement—the moms couldn’t move so they couldn’t roll onto the babies. Now he is letting the pigs breed while they wallow in grassy mud, and he's letting the moms have babies wherever they choose in a barn full of soft hay bedding. The pig will roll on some of the babies probably, but probably that’s why pigs have big litters.

Anyway, the Farmer is excited and scared and curious and he comes into the house each day and says something fun about the new pig setup. I should have something fun to say each day about my work, too. I want to be excited that I’m trying new things.

2. Pay attention to moment-to-moment happiness.
Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, and my happiness research idol, is shifting his focus to the workplace. This is not surprising. As our education system grows more and more inadequate, companies are taking more responsibility for educating their employees. So there’s a lot of money in corporate America earmarked for education, and if you have a new idea, you’d best start selling it to those purse holders.

Anyway, Gilbert gives a great interview in the Harvard Business Review this month about what makes people happy. And, first of all, it’s really clear for the last two decades of research that events do not make us more happy or more sad. We overestimate how much a single event will change us – a huge raise, a lost limb – all of it has little long-term impact on our happiness because we bounce back on both ends of the spectrum to our happiness set point – that is, the one we’re born with. (If you’re interested in facing the reality of the fact that happiness is basically predetermined at birth, a good book on the happiness set point, check out The How of Happiness, by Sonja Lyubomirsky.)

So work is simply not going to change how happy you are. That’s not how work works. On the other hand, you do have to be at work for eight hours a day – well, most of us do, in one way or another, even Tim Ferriss – so we should get a good feeling from being there.

And here’s where we can affect our happiness: minute-to-minute. One of the lucky grad students in Daniel Gilbert’s research lab at Harvard is Matthew Killingsworth, who distributed an app (through this blog, actually) to track peoples’ happiness on a moment-to-moment basis. As we learn more about people reporting their own happiness we know that our ability to predict happiness stinks, and the way we remember our happiness levels is inaccurate, but we are pretty decent at knowing how we feel if someone asks us. (I know, this flies in the face of every marriage counseling session in the world, but still, I believe Gilbert knows what he’s talking about.)

This is where we get good information about work. People are happy, minute-to-minute at work if they are setting reasonable goals and meeting them.

3. Pay attention to paragraph breaks.
I want to try new things in my work and I want to set goals for myself. At my core, I think I’m a writer. And I need to always be improving. Some of that will come from forcing myself to make more money from this blog. I have to organize my ideas in different ways if I want to make more money from them, and so now seems like a good a time to tell you that I’ll have a new book coming out this spring. (More on that later.)

I’ve also been forcing myself to try different ways of writing blog posts on my homeschooling blog. (Here’s one that I like that is different than anything I would write here.)

I am obsessed with expertise. And people get better and better at something – anything – by being focused on what they are working on and pushing themselves in new directions to reach hard goals.

I think to myself: what am I doing with my writing to make myself get better? It scares me that I’m not getting better. Mostly, I just need to write more to get better – it’s what anyone needs to do to get better. But I want a goal, also, so this year I’m going to focus more on the paragraph break. I think that’s where the big potential is to elevate my writing.

Like there. Right? You stopped a beat to think, oh, here’s a break. Something big will happen. The break is an opportunity for an intimate moment with the reader. It’s the part of writing I like best, and I could do much more with it.

Do people give New Year’s presents? Here is mine to you. Or to me. It makes me happy just to have this poem here on my blog:

Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry

By Howard Nemerov

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle

That while you watched turned into pieces of snow

Riding a gradient invisible

From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.

And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

This is the big test. Right here. This is the test to see if you will stick with me even when you know everything. There is lameness about me. Not the lameness commenters point out. Not like, I don’t know anything about graduate school. Or I’m not fair to David Dellifield. No. It's more fundamental than that.

I want you to recall that when I was growing up, the police came to our house pretty frequently. (And, in fact, to our hotel rooms. And you might be interested to know that when rich people trash a hotel room they do not get thrown out of the hotel. But rather, the kids get their own hotel room.) Every time, my dad would tell them that I was fine, that it was only a spanking, that I was exaggerating. He would tell them I have a behavioral problem.

He wasn’t covering anything up as much as expressing how my parents were actually convinced that I was a psychopath. I was the one who went to a psychiatrist my whole childhood. They even had me tested at Northwestern’s neurology lab. But at the same time, my parents were doing things like getting angry enough to leave me as in Arlington Heights, alone on a street corner, while they drove back to Wilmette. (Google Map that: Not good parenting. Probably illegal today.)

Okay. So fast forward to my marriage now, to the Farmer. The odds are that I would be with a man who treats me like my dad did, right? So it should not surprise you that the Farmer pushed me so hard that I fell on the floor. In front of my six-year-old son.

The Farmer would tell you why it’s my fault, and how I deserve it, and that I made him do it. If there were a neurology lab in rural Wisconsin he’d probably send me there because he has told me numerous times, most recently right after he apologized for pushing me, again, that I am emotionally abusive to him.

Two nights ago, I got really scared. He had already pushed me and shoved me and grabbed me and crushed my foot in a door. He would say that I deserved it. That I say crazy things to him. That I never leave him alone. That I am an awful person to live with. For the record.

He had me in a corner, and I was crying and I was scared, and he was telling me how I am a terrible mom, he was saying my youngest son is going to grow up and hit me. So I dialed a number that I thought was a friend, but it was my stepmom, the woman married to my dad

She is totally cool. My dad has very good taste and I really like this stepmom. And she was great to talk to. I can’t complain about one thing she said.

She says, of course, that I am a good mom. And of course, I do not believe her. Someone raised by abusive parents never feels secure in their parenting because they don't understand what makes kids love parents. So that’s my weak spot. Even if I were a great parent, I’d never believe it.

And of course, she said I need to leave.

I was silent.

Then she suggests sending my dad to come see me. For support. I say okay. Because I can’t say no to support. And, you know what? I can’t say no to my dad. I just want to be loved. He tries really hard. I forgive every transgression, even as his transgressions are huge. Just go read that post. I can’t even bear to write about them again. I can’t because I want to have a dad who loves me in a real way.

I want to have a dad who comes and rescues me when I have a husband who is physically violent.

So my dad drives two hours to see me. He gets here for dinner. I told him not to come any earlier because it’s Sunday, the day my Ex comes to hang out at the house with my sons, and it’s the only day all week that I don’t have kids, so I have to work that day.

Our dinner features my act of childish passive-aggressiveness: I make sure there is no meat in the meal because the Farmer really wants meat in the meal every time.

Maybe that is what he means when he tells me I'm emotionally abusive.

I am alone in the kitchen getting dinner ready. I tell myself not to feel sorry for myself. I tell myself it gets me nowhere. I tell myself that I if I can fix this situation, I will be really good at helping other people to fix their lives.

My dad comes up to me in the kitchen. I am startled.

I tell him I really appreciate that he came, that it makes me feel less alone.

He tells me he wants to help. He tells me he researched women’s shelters in my area.

“Dad. Women’s shelter? Did you say women’s shelter?”

“Yes. I was thinking you could go to one.”

“I can’t go to a women’s shelter, Dad. It’s rural America. A women’s shelter, here?”

I am speechless. I am trying to figure out something to say to him about why I cannot show up to one of those, kids in tow.

“Dad. I’m famous. I've signed autographs in grocery stores.”

He said, “Oh. You are?”

I decide we are done. I fluff the bean salad and tell myself he is trying to be helpful.

The Farmer says grace. He needs to thank God before every meal. He wanted to say Jesus also, but we compromised with just God. So he says that. And as he thanks God for this meal, I put my head down and wonder if not allowing him to thank Jesus is emotionally abusive.

The kids eat and run.

And there I am, alone. With the three men in my life.

My dad talks about his stamp collection. There was an auction in Iowa. He was thinking of going, but all the stamps he wanted were too expensive.

The Ex says he had a stamp collection, too. His parents just sent it to him. They are cleaning out their closets.

The Farmer says he had a stamp collection too.

We talk about plate blocks, post card values, and pros and cons of hinges. The hinges are difficult. You never know if it’s better to attach the stamps for security, or if the attachment is so damaging that you risk losing the stamp.

I've been reading a lot about willpower to find out how to get more. It turns out that we only have a very little bit, and we cannot be demanding it of ourselves all day long because that would exhaust our supply and make us nuts. Which is, of course, what I do.

But I have watched the farmer for a few years now, and I see that he substitutes three things for willpower which allows him to seem to have willpower beyond his actual willpower reserve.

Here they are:

1. Rigid schedule
It came to me when I started to understand the ebb and flow of the pigs.

There are about 500 pigs on the farm at any given time. Someone who does not do routine well—someone like me—would say, I'll feed the pigs later. But the Farmer gets up every morning, at 6am, eats breakfast with us, and then feeds the pigs. And he's blown away by the fact that every single morning I think we need to make a fresh decision about what we are going to do that morning.

He is like, what? Are you kidding? We're eating breakfast and doing chores.

So then I pretend to have a schedule but really just sort of hope for willpower and watch it flutter away while I do things like let the kids play videos instead of music practice. Or I schedule a conference call when I'm supposed to be writing. And really, I never write at the same time every day anyway. If I did, then surely I'd have more regular posts on this blog. Which I have never been able to do. Despite wanting and promising myself and my editor that I will.

2. If… then thinking
The Farmer exhibits another skill that all how-to-have-willpower gurus say you must have: If.. then.. thinking. You know that expression, when the sun shines, make hay? He does that. Literally.

He cuts hay when he thinks the sun will shine, and he bales the hay — that's what he's doing in this picture — the minute the hay is dry, and there is no complicated decision-making process about whether he should read the new issue of New York magazine instead.

On the other hand, I am tortured by the problem of what I am supposed to be reading vs what I am actually reading. He is rarely tortured because there is no room for tortured thoughts in his schedule.

He has so many if-then statements that are an internalized guide to his life. The New York Times explains this as using behavior modification rather than willpower. And after being with him for a few years, I find that I internalize those behaviors as well. I know, for example, when he takes cattle to market (farm euphemism for killing them) we all wake up earlier and eat breakfast earlier. I don't lay in bed considering my options.

So I am trying to implement more if-then statements in my life. Like, if I'm having an emotional breakdown then I stay away from bagels. That would be a good one for me.

3. Accurate personal assessments
The problem with coming up with how I want to structure my life is that I have to see where things really are falling apart. The farmer thinks I have a fantasy life of how much structure I have in my life, but really, I know I'm all over the place.

We always like to read about what we know a lot about. Like, I like to read about career management. Of course, I've read enough to last a lifetime, but I'm still fascinated. Like Chris Anderson points out that Malcolm Gladwell says you need 10,000 hours of doing something to become an expert. And after three years at a job, you've put in your 10,000 hours. So you've mastered it. It's time to move on. What a great argument for job hopping.

The Farmer likes to read about willpower. Because he has so much. Or he looks like he has so much. So he also read that people have obfuscated views of what their life is really like. (To be clear, the Farmer is not the type of guy who would use the word obfuscate in a sentence, but he is the type who would ask what it means, so we are a good pair.) Anyway, people who do not have good self-discipline, which I think is the cause of not having willpower, are people who have an obfuscated sense of their days.

The Farmer told me, for example, that maybe I should write down every day that I run the hill outside our house. I wanted to tell him to shut the [   ] up, but I have internalized the rule if the Farmer is in the conversation, then that word is off limits.  So I ignore him.

But I confess that when Tempur-Pedic sent me the Fitbit I was enthralled. It tracks sleep patterns and exercise patterns, both of which are always cited as  key elements to a self-disciplined life. So I started checking things out. I can see why people say that when you keep track of what you are doing toward your goal, you reach your goal faster.

I can see that, because to get the full benefit of the Fitbit, I would need to enter a lot of data, which I would only do if I were really really committed to improving all those metrics in my life. Sadly, I think I am more oriented to buying a quick fix. So, for example, I can tell you that when I had a bunch of disposable income, I bought a Tempur-Pedic mattress and absolutely loved it and it's a lot more fun to spend money to get a good night's sleep than to collect data about getting a good night's sleep.

So, maybe you think I sound hopeless. But I don't think I am. Because reviewing all the data points at the Fitbit web site made me think I'm going to keep track, really keep track, of how often I run the hill. Because it feels really safe to have an if-then rule in life rather than searching for willpower.

And also, I want to tell you something: When the Farmer is gone, (which is almost never, but still, sometimes he has to see a friend or something,) I am in charge of the farm. And sometimes I find myself looking forward to that moment, just so I can feel what self-discipline without willpower feels like: If the sun goes down then the chickens go back to the coop.

But it’s hard to hate people you hang out with all the time, and the truth is, I’ve spent the last ten years being a Gen Xer surrounded by Gen Yers. The pinnacle, I thought, was me spending my days fighting with Ryan Healy about work. But in fact, it turns out the pinnacle of my education on Gen Y is my arguments with Melissa about her peers that end in snippy impasse.

Sometimes, I think Gen Y is lame and she won’t admit to it.

But, I find, as I think about all the things I hate about Gen Y, that it’s hard to hate something you know so much about. And in fact, I have become a way better person myself from studying Gen Y. I have noticed that my worst traits are the aspects of myself I least understand. And that is true of Gen Y, too.

1. Gen Y mistakes the speed of the Internet for their own speed.
Gen Y are not risk takers, they are not conflict-seekers, and they are generally respectful of institutions and organizations. When Gen Y doesn’t like something, you probably won’t hear about it. They just won’t show up. I have written before about the conservative nature of Gen Y.

But what I’ve noticed lately is that this nature results in Gen Y having a difficult time making decisions. They have had their parents making decisions for them for most of their childhood, and they crowdsource decisions as adults, so when they must make a decision that no one can really help them with, Gen Y often gets stuck. (This is a huge difference from Gen X, who thrive on counter-culture, I-did-this-myself diatribes, and from Baby Boomers, who make all decisions based on how can they look like they are winning against everyone else.)

2. Gen Y wants to look like a winner more than they want to be a winner.
Gen Y is the most team-oriented generation ever. The American experience has been largely about individualism since the Declaration of Independence. So it’s a big change for such a huge generation to be more oriented to the group rather than the individual.

The result of this way of seeing the world is that Gen Y is very, very non-competitive. They were in soccer leagues where everyone gets a trophy. They enter the workplace and they have little interest in leading in a hierarchical way. And they love to use the collaborative software that serves, unintentionally, to flatten the workplace hierarchy.

But Gen Y is consumed with their image. Online, they manage themselves like they are celebrities. They revolutionized the art of the self-portrait because they take so many. And Gen Y women are renowned for dressing up at work in great clothes regardless of how much money they make or what the rest of the office is wearing.

But I think what might be the best illustration of this trend is that they don’t make enough money for a huge, lavish wedding, but they still want their wedding pictures to be gorgeous, fun and exotic. So they elope, with a photographer, and post all the photos of a great wedding on Facebook.

3. Gen Y misunderstands entrepreneurship.
Gen Y is scared of being screwed-over by corporate America because they saw their parents give up everything for corporate life and then get let down. Gen Y does not want to repeat this in their own lives. So for Gen Y, entrepreneurship is the ultimate expression of their conservatism.

Gen Y thinks the safest route in employment is entrepreneurship, so in poll after poll, the vast majority of Gen Y-ers says they want to own their own business. But what they really mean is they want to have a safety net. They want to feel like if they get laid off they will not be left high and dry like their parents were.

In general, though, Gen Y likes working for someone else. Gen Y likes assignments, they like feedback, they like meetings, group efforts, and after-work happy-hours. These are all the trappings of people who work for someone else. Entrepreneurs are mostly lonely, anxious people, living on the edge of what's normal. And when Gen Y gets an inkling of those feelings, they run back to corporate life.

4. Gen Y thinks they don’t believe in God.
For the most part, Gen Y has the same religious attitudes as Gen X. It’s just that Gen X frames this as an obsessive drive toward creating inclusive family and inclusive work and communities, and Gen Y frames it as not believing in God.

The reason for the discrepancy is that Gen Y frames their religious views in relation to their parents, and since Gen X had a childhood that will go down in history as negligent parenting, Gen X frames their views in relation to their own values (which, of course, have to do with their backlash against the demise of the family).

So, Gen Y actually does believe in God. Gen Y thinks there is something out there that created matter. I mean, what was there before the Big Bang? Who knows? We can call that God. Gen Y doesn’t argue with that. But Gen Y thinks God must mean the Christian God. And if they don’t believe in that, they say they don’t believe in God.

So, in fact, Gen Y is pretty accepting of all religions, and willing to participate if you put it in front of them. There are no public displays of religious protest as a way to instigate change—that is Baby Boomer territory. And there is no taking a risk and taking a stand to create a solid religious life for their kids like Gen X. Gen Y goes with the flow, supports any religion as long as it supports gay marriage, and hedges against any conflict by saying they are not really religious.

5. Gen Y mistakes their own practical behavior for revolutionary behavior.
In general, Gen Y tries to go through life by ruffling the least feathers. So, for example, Gen Y might appear to be creating a revolution at work by demanding flex-time, fair-wage salaries, and good mentoring. But really, Gen X wanted all this stuff when they were twentysomething as well, but they couldn’t get it. So when Gen X took over, they gave it to Gen Y. Gen X is the revolutionary generation.

Gen Y is simply demanding what their parents told them they should expect from the world: Work that matters and work that complements a life that matters. Those revolutionary expectations come from the Boomer parents. Gen Y is just doing what they are told.

I couldn’t help thinking this same thing when I read this New York Times article about the trend that as teenage girls Gen Y gave more blow jobs than any generation before. When Baby Boomer women had more sex than any generation in the past, it was a feminist revolution, changing the whole fabric of society. But when Gen Y teens talk about why they give more blow jobs, it’s different, but simple: they do it because while their parents told them not to have sex until it really really mattered to them, the boys are, of course, dying to have sex. So one way to keep everyone happy is with blow jobs. It’s the ultimate expression of Gen Y practicality masquerading as revolution.

I watched gunslinger movies with him when he was groggy and I made sure to talk only about innocuous topics like the state of world politics, something that we’d never fight about.

I can’t tell you everything went smoothly. I forgot to let the chickens out a few days. I lost the new bag of Cat Chow and served ground beef for two days of heaven on earth for the cats. And, there were a few times the goats got into the house. But we figured out how to handle everything.

Until the Farmer felt better: His back didn’t hurt so he wanted to work. So, he just stopped taking the Percocet. Cold turkey. And because we live in the country, the doctor gave the Farmer sixty Percocet pills with no instructions for how to go off narcotics.

For those of you who know nothing about Percocet, first of all, if you ever get that many pills prescribed, sell them on the streets of New York City to fund your child’s education. That’s how hard they are to come by.

And there’s a reason: They are highly addictive. I’m linking to some stuff about getting off high dosages of Percocet, but I’m summarizing: You can’t go cold turkey. You have to go slowly or you make yourself crazy.

So the Farmer was crazy and I had to have a drug intervention to tell him he was a total jerk and having withdrawal and he couldn’t tell and he needed to do it more systematically.

I convinced him. But he is not a guy who lays in bed all day. And he had already done it for five days. He wanted to work. On Percocet. I told him we agreed no machinery on Percocet. He told me how it’s not fair that I want him to taper and I want him to not work.

Then we have a screaming match about how life is not fair. That is the first topic. Which slides into:

Me: Don’t scream at me—

The Farmer: No you’re screaming at me—

No. Fuck you.

I told you I don’t like swearing.

I told you I don’t like you being mean.

This did not happen. I mean it did. It has happened so many times that it’s like the bass beat in the background of our everyday life.

So we did that and then he told me he had to work. It was a work emergency.

Here’s what he said: “I have to check cows.”

You might think I know nothing about farming, but I have actually learned a lot precisely for figuring out if the Farmer is BSing me or not.

Me: Your dad can check them.

The Farmer: I don’t want to call him. It’s a masculinity thing.

I swear to God. He said this.

Then he told me he had to be off Percocet on Monday because he’s shipping hogs and cattle.

This is farmer-speak for putting them in a truck and sending them to the butcher to be killed.

I tell him he can taper off the Percocet like he is supposed to, and his parents can ship pigs and cows.

Then we have a huge fight. About what really needs to happen: how his parents don’t need him to ship the cows and pigs.

He says he wants to be in charge of it.

I tell him he’s 40 and he’s too old to show up at work just to make sure people know he’s in charge.

So he has to tell me that I make his life hell.

Now that I’ve been with him three years, I know this is his way of telling me he doesn’t want to talk.

When I tell you what I did next, you will think I’m a bitch. But so what? I’m going to tell you anyway. I told him he had to talk to me all day. I told him I was going to follow him around the farm nonstop, how I would even drive off-road to check the cows in the forest.

So he says, “Don’t threaten me.”

I say, “I am telling you what I need. I need you to talk with me.”

"All day?"

"Yes. All day."

"It’s past my comfort zone."

"Talking to me for one second is past your comfort zone."

He laughs. He says, "Fine."

We are talking. He wants to wander… past the corn…past the hay…through the vegetable garden…

We talk about nothing. I bitch to him about how he’s dishonest to himself about the farm, and he says things like, “Okay, you win. I'm not as honest as you.” Or, “You’re right, I’m never going to be able to make you happy.”

These are ways to avoid having to have a conversation with me, so I don’t relent. I know he’s exhausted from talking, but look, you have to trust me on this that he has to talk for two hours before he actually says anything besides how he would rather be single than have a hard conversation.

I tell him that the real reason he’s trying to kick the Percocet so fast is because he’s scared his parents don’t need him. He wants to be needed.

Then I tell him, "Look, your parents just wrote you out of their will. They obviously don’t think they need you."

This hits hard. Though not as hard as it’s hitting you now, when you read it, because I’ve said this to the Farmer a lot of times. Ever since the parents wrote him out of the will.

The next part of the conversation is deleted. I had to—the Farmer was too upset. But here is some background material so you can follow along.

As you know, from my Thanksgiving Drama post, the Farmer has three sisters, all of whom have kids. I am not allowed to tell you who the Farmer's parents are giving the farm to. We have to keep that a secret. You might know from the post about why I do not do family secrets that keeping another family secret is eventually going to make me physically ill. I am positive that keeping family secrets only serves to protect people who treat family members like shit.

(That is the end of the deleted, secret part. The good news about me having to write about the deletion is that I got to link to two of the most popular posts on the blog. Maybe you missed them. They are good to read.)

So, suffice it to say that the farmer asked his parents why they aren't leaving any of the land to his children, and his parents said that they are not his real children.

I think the farmer is devastated and he needs to stop farming with them because he’s devastated.

He tells me he is not devastated and he is happy farming with them.

I tell him he’s lying to himself and he’s taking it out on me, like when he tells me I am unreasonable about Percocet and he has to ship hogs. It’s really not that I’m reasonable but that he’s scared to miss a day of shipping hogs and won’t admit it.

I don't care specifically about the farm. I mean, I didn’t grow up expecting I’d have farm land. But I do care about feeling like the Farmer is losing his self-respect over this and taking it out on me.

Okay. So I refuse to let the Farmer stop talking.

He says he’ll talk if we can go somewhere comfortable.

We can’t go in the house. My ex is there with the kids. We do our best fighting when my ex is distracting the kids.

The Farmer wants to go to the pig building.

The pig building: I tried to get him to throw out his gross furniture that he had had since college and he couldn’t do it, so he put it in the pig building.

Now he wants to sit on his sofa. There are two. I sit across from him.

He has nothing to say, of course. This is how a Farmer talks to his wife. By saying nothing. So I look around. My son’s 4H pig project pigs are in the building, so by pig farm standards, the place is clean.

Where we are sitting looks kind of like an island in the middle of pig blood, but the Farmer told me it’s really just muddy water.

The Farmer says, “What do you think of the pigs?”

I tell him that does not count as conversation.

I tell him I’m going to last a lot longer on the sofa than he is because I can sit still and he can’t. I take off my boots and sort of make myself comfortable, like it’s the living room.

Finally he tells me he wants to transition to a smaller farm operation, on just the 125 acres he owns outright. But he’s scared. He doesn’t know for sure how to do it. He’s making a plan.

Then we are talking. I tell him I’d be scared, too. I tell him I know he’s built up a great business and it’s hard to walk away.

I am not one with extra empathy, but I have plenty for career changes. And I think that’s what he’s really going through. He’s worked on the same farm for 40 years, and now he has to switch. He has to make operations work on his own farm, he has to figure out all new animal and crop logistics and all new cash flow planning, and it is scary.

I think about the article in Fortune magazine this week titled, "Reinvent Your Career." about who can succeed in changing careers. Fortune reports that the people who can do it "are all people who love learning by doing. They are not victims. At a time when many people react passively to career bumps, reinventors took control."

I know the Farmer can succeed. He can be like the reinventors profiled in Fortune magazine. But I know that after two hours of pressing him, the most he can possibly say is that he’s really disappointed by his parents' choices and he’s scared about farming on his own. It’s huge for him to say that.

I tell him he doesn’t have to talk anymore. I thank him for talking for so long. And I thank him for sharing his feelings.

We leave. But not before we have make-up sex in the pig barn.

Because the acorn falls close to the tree, my son decided he wanted to sell rhubarb at our local farmers market. To be clear, a farmers market looks very different in a community of farmers. It's very unregulated, and people sell stuff off their trucks. Also, two farms sell heirloom rhubarb, ours and one owned by an Amish family. If you haven't noticed, the Amish are very good at what they do. They know their customers, and they always have something fun to sell, no matter what's in season.

My relationship with my customers centers on my ability to always piss off someone, no matter if it's on my blog or in person. To make up for that, I tied ribbons around the rhubarb. I think the only thing I accomplished was a nice picture.

My son is enterprising, though. And he realized that what people really want is our eggs. (Farm eggs are way better than supermarket eggs — even organic ones.) So he sold those at the market, and we took the rhubarb home.

The farmers market exhausts me. You might think I'd be fun to talk to, but I'm not. I get anxious with unstructured conversation, and also, I feel that I should be friendly to the Amish but I feel awkward and really just want to ask them if they can take my kids in and teach them to speak only when spoken to for a few weeks.

I have other ideas. Like, maybe I want to be a CSA. But by the time I put a box together, and put it in the car for my little brother to drive to New Jersey for my not-as-little brother, I think, I would never want to do this for someone who is not my family.

So, to be honest, the only thing that I have figured out to do with my excess vegetables is have Melissa take photos of them. Here is Swiss chard and radishes.

I told Melissa that we should use Photoshop to insert some goat cheese and then this can be an ad for my new company. Which hopefully I will launch before the turn of the next century.

Then I told Melissa that I need her camera. I want to be good at photographs and I have learned enough about photography to know that my $100 camera is fine for taking photos it knows how to take. But my imagination is wider than that lens. Is that a cliche? I have not read enough about photography to know if I am writing in photography cliches.

This is a rule: If you want to be good at something you need to read a lot about it. (Maybe this is an Asperger-only rule, since Asperger people learn visually.) So if you don't like reading, think of your own rule. But also, if you don't like reading, how are you even going to get through this post? Because I'm about to start meandering off topic.

Here is the key to getting unlost when you are in your twenties: Get married or make a lot of money. Don't tell me I'm shallow. I don't care. Life is shallow, really, since we have no idea why we're here.

In your twenties you feel like you need to get settled, and find your place. Some people need to have a special person in their life that they are connected to and making a home with. These people are caretakers and fusers. Other people need to make a lot of money, not because they want a BMW (although many do) but because it's a way to measure how valuable you are as an adult, to the other adults in the world.

I tell this to Melissa and I tell her she doesn't need a traditional job because she wants to get married. And when it comes to getting married, men do not value women with careers. Here is the blog post about this with very good research. Also, do not tell me you're the exception to the rule. I don't care because no one is the exception to that rule. And anyway, just because you want to have sex with a banker from Goldman Sachs doesn't mean you want to marry her.

So I tell Melissa she should look for a husband. I keep telling her that the blog was a great dating tool for me. Eventually that will happen for her. (Note to potential city suitors: I think she will be happier in the country.)

By the way, I did not want to be married when I was in my 20s. I wanted to make money. That is fine, too. You need to know yourself.

When you are in your 30s, the thing you need to do to feel not lost is to figure out what you want from kids. You don't need to want kids. In fact, your life will be happier and more stable if you do not have kids. Fortunately, for the human race, having kids is not a rational decision. So we keep having them and then we spend the next ten years trying to figure out how to be a parent and how not to feel like an imposter. And how to get some semblance of our own life back after the kids take over everything. (Incidentally, here is one of my favorite examples of me in the middle of this absurd struggle. During a live, video interview at BNET, my kids invaded, just seven minutes in.)

Certainly there are people who choose to not have kids. (Note to men: This will hurt your earning power. One of the most notable statistics of corporate life is that men who have kids get more promotions than men with no kids.) If you choose to have no kids you will spend your 30s getting comfortable with the fact that the rest of society will accuse you of being an uncaring, Peter-Pan-syndrome mutant who is too narcissistic to have kids. You will get over this. All women I know who did not have kids have come through their 30s just fine, but they have war stories to tell of the verbal bombs people tossed.

In your 40s, you get used to being lost, and it even starts to look interesting. I find that now, more than ever, I trust myself to get unlost, so I don't mind as much having to tell people I am lost.

But in your 40s you start to worry that you're finding your way through the wrong maze. Like, you only have a few more decades of life, right? You don't want to waste them on what other people think is important. I spend most of my worry time making sure I'm worrying about the stuff that I want to worry about.

I think I like worrying about if I need to buy a different camera. The camera Melissa uses is a $4000 one. The oven I want is $9,000. (Black and gold, if you want to buy it for me as a present.) I think, at this point in my life, I spend more time cooking than I do taking pictures. But I think I want it to be the opposite. So maybe I should buy the camera and not the stove. And maybe you can figure out where to spend your worry about being lost by where you choose to spend your money.

Or maybe I should earn enough money to buy both things. And that is why I have such a large readership of people in their 20s. Because I have yet to stop being like them.

This photo is from when Cullen was excited to be in lots of photos on my blog.

It was the day that a TV writer emailed me about adapting my blog for the big screen. Or semi-big screen. Or whatever we are calling TV now, but I have to say, as an aside, that TV is the new hipster medium because episodes allow for more character development than a single movie. I heard this from the Farmer, and he’s not a guy who could make this stuff up. And we are watching Breaking Bad and I want to be absurd and funny like those writers.

This is what happened with Cullen. He agreed to redesign my blog in exchange for free room and board. And then he realized he didn’t have time to do that, because he has a full time job.

Meanwhile, we were having big Facebook drama on the farm because Melissa does not feel like she has a boyfriend unless the guy puts in on his Facebook status. So Cullen did that.

And then, the day after the status changed I told them that I think they need to live together as boyfriend and girlfriend somewhere else because it’s not working for us here on the farm.

So Cullen went back to Austin. He told Melissa that she can come back with him, but he doesn’t want to live with her.

Melissa said, “How come you want to live with me on the farm but you don’t want to live with me in Austin?”

Cullen said, “I don’t know. That’s a good question.”

Melissa decided to stay on the farm. Cullen decided to go. But they decided that neither of them will change their Facebook status. Cullen said, “I’ll be back.” And maybe to show that, or maybe because they were so cheap, he left his green rubber boots behind.

We said goodbye to Cullen at 6am when he left to catch an 8:30 am plane. Melissa drove him to the airport.

But not really. Because five minutes after Cullen says to me, “Okay. See you soon. I’ll be back,” he said to Melissa in the car, “I actually don’t have a plane ticket. I have a train ticket. I just didn’t want to tell Penelope.”

I’m not sure why. I do not have anything against trains.

Three days pass. Cullen writes an email to Melissa explaining why he had to leave. We read it at lunch even though I told Melissa she is not allowed to bring her iPhone to lunch.

The Farmer reads the email and says, “Guys should never send stuff to girls in writing. They just show it to all their friends.”

Melissa tells me she is going to die if I don’t write on my blog that Cullen and Melissa are not together. “I need closure,” she says.

I tell her I have to write about careers.

Melissa says, “Why? You never write about careers. Anyway, look at James Altucher.  He's a finance blogger who doesn't force himself to focus on finance. And we love reading his blog."

“When I am independently wealthy like James Altucher then I’ll write about your love life.”

The Farmer says, “Penelope’s career advice chapters are like the whaling chapters in Moby Dick. You like the storyline about psychotic behavior, but you need the whaling chapters to keep things based in reality.”

I wish there were something on Facebook for me to quantify how much I am in love with the Farmer. I give him a ten for his combination of intellect and strength to hold my goat down so I can milk her. I think maybe I can make a plan for my blog that is a little scary because I feel secure with the Farmer. You need to feel secure in one place to create instability in another.

Melissa gives me more blogging instructions: “I want to make sure you write that I’m sad.”

The Farmer shakes his head. “No. You can’t do that.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Do you two know anything about playing hard to get?”

I laugh. The Farmer broke up with me about 50 times. Twenty-five of those times were because he thought he should be the one doing the chasing.  “Guys do the chasing,” he would tell me. And then I’d kiss him.

"No," I say. "Melissa and I have no idea how to play hard to get."

The Farmer says, “You cannot email Cullen to tell him you miss him. That gives him an opening. He left, and he has to make his own opening to come back. People care more about their plans if they make the plan themselves.”

This seems true. It seems true for all plans. For all departures. For all entrances. And you can tell if it’s your own plan by how lost you feel. People who do their own plans feel lost most of the time. People who do other peoples’ plans feel on track most of the time.

Melissa says, “Fine. Is that going to be your post? Fine. But I want to take a picture for the blog post about being sad."

First, Bill Zeller. I am not going to reprint the suicide letter here. He killed himself,  and he left a 4000 –line note.  He asked that people do not reprint excerpts, but he would like a wide range of people to read the letter. So, here is a link to the letter in full. I really recommend reading it.

Zeller wrote a lucid account of what happens to one’s insides after sexual abuse. It’s the best account I’ve ever read, actually. And, having my own history of sexual abuse , I can say that his feelings are very familiar to me.

Though I  know the feelings are not normal, what I’m telling you is that there are a lot of people walking around with feelings like Zeller. I’m sure of it. One reason I know is that I just read research that the more children a woman has, the less likely she is to kill herself. Which means that people who kill themselves think they are not worthwhile and are not doing anything good for the world. And I completely understand that.

This is why I want to write. Because I’ve been in therapy for 35 years. Some days suicide seems so obviously the right choice that it’s amazing to me that more people don’t do it. I don’t really understand why more people don’t do it.

I read Zeller's note and I think it’s incredibly sad that he couldn’t turn to someone for help. There is someone reading this post, right now, who feels hopeless. It’s so hard to see our own lives clearly. Resumes are like that—each line is distorted because we distort our vision of ourselves. And just as professional can help us see our work history more clearly, a professional can help us see our personal history more clearly as well.

When things are going terribly, and you haven’t been able to fix things, you need help. Everyone who cannot get a job should get career counseling. Because if you haven’t gotten a job in a year, you probably need someone to help you change how you see yourself. And everyone who has been sad—depressed and can’t fix it—should get help.

It is not reasonable to think that if you have been sad for more than a year that you can fix it yourself. It is not a shortcoming of yours. It’s a part of being human that we are complicated and sometimes we get stuck.

People need help. Look at yourself. Ask yourself if you need help. Believe me. You are not a uniquely, an unsolvable problem. Most of us are not complicated to a therapist in the same way that most of us are not complicated to a professional resume writer. We are complicated only to ourselves. The more impossible your problems feel, the more you need someone to talk with about them.

Something I love about this blog is that you reflect me back to me in a more clear way. You call me names, you tell me when I’m too hard on myself, you tell me the obvious solution, and then you echo the obvious solution in the comments until I give in.

I am lucky. And I still need to go to therapy.

Andrew Sullivan is live-blogging the unfolding of the Arizona shooting and he notes, at one point, that psychologists who are watching videos of the gunman are fairly certain that he was having a psychotic episode.   (Which means, of course, that this was not political. And, while I’m writing in parenthesis, Sullivan also notes that the intern who saved Congresswoman Giffords was Hispanic and gay and, until a week ago, could have been stopped randomly in Arizona and asked to prove his citizenship.)

The mental health system is broken. Few people have enough money to get good mental health care. And few dollars are spent to encourage people to use those expensive benefits. But we can help change that by spreading the word that going to therapy is a hard first-step, but it’s life-saving.

So, I was thinking that in honor of Bill Zeller, and the killings in Arizona, everyone today could each post some encouragement to the person who feels stuck but is hesitant to get help.

The world gets darker and darker if you don’t ask for help. Can you write, in the comments section, how you forced yourself to ask for help? Can you help someone else today?