Finding Plan B

A lot of my hesitance to initially start a blog came from a stigma I held about blogging from when it first started - at least as far as my experience with it is concerned. The first blogs I knew were live journals. These were essentially a chance for people to post their diaries - complete with indulgent soul searching and melodramatic overshares - with, um, everyone. The voyeur in me would occasionally read these 'live journal blogs,' but not without a lot of tsking and judging. Blogging has clearly morphed and developed and grown up a lot. But it still easily becomes a platform to (over)share Feelings. Capital F. Which is, admittedly, where today's post comes in.

I was listening to This American Life on my train to work yesterday in a particular mood of frustration with my professional life. The episode that happened to come on my podcast was about life's change in direction and how, more often then not, we don't end up where we originally thought. Our lives don't turn out how we imagined them at 18 or 21 or 25, even. Ira Glass starts off:

There's a short story by the fiction writer Ron Carlson in which a guy loses his job after ten years. His boss tells him 'OK, go to Plan B,' and the guy says 'This was Plan B.'

Which is, I think, how it goes for most of us. We head off cheerfully to Plan A and Plan A turns out to be completely different than we thought it was going to be. And so we switch to a backup - and then the backup plan becomes our life.

Glass continued by telling about a speech he gave to a group of around 100 people. He asked them how many of their lives had turned out how they'd expected. How many of them were still on Plan A. "Out of 100, only one person raised her hand," Glass said. "Everyone else was like, Plan B? what about Plan C and D and F?"

I don't really think there's a lot of narration I need to add to this - especially with my desire to resist complete livejournaliness. With the current state of our economy there's a lot of uncertainty in the future holds. A lot of people that were pursuing jobs that seemed like safe bets are now forced to completely change direction. Journalism never seemed like the "safe bet" job, but right now its future seems particularly shaky. So the question is, at what point do you start to really think about Plan B...