It’s not easy to prioritize the lessons a parent imparts to his children. The lesson I’ve thought about most in recent weeks is related to work and time. What to do with our time might be the most important question we ask ourselves. How we spend our time has big consequences on how we perceive ourselves. What should we do, and why do we do it? This question has been especially poignant for me in the past couple of years because the things we choose to do are profoundly connected to the idea of joy, or happiness. And then you get another question: how do you define happiness? Can I define it for my kids?
I know how I define happiness, and maybe this is an exercise in articulating that definition. So, I’ll begin with two teenage girls who are currently doing things they love to do: singing, performing in plays, and even learning how to play the guitar. It’s the oldest who’s playing guitar, and this week she informed me that she’s writing a song with her friend James. I don’t know James, but I like the idea of effort put toward a thing simply because the effort (and maybe the outcome) feels good. That effort is wrapped up in happiness, I think.
Society tells us that teenagers should be thinking about college and what job they’ll do when they grow up. This is heady stuff, telling a fifteen-year-old kid that she ought to decide how she’s going to spend her life because, dammit, you’ll grow up soon and it’s necessary to live life like an adult. Think about some job you might be good at, we say, and then choose a college that will prepare you for that job. To be entirely forthright, I was the high school kid who couldn’t make that decision. In some ways, I was dragged along by circumstance because I was unwilling to make that decision. “Go to college,” the guidance counselor at Northern Cambria High School told me. I opted out of higher education.
And then I eked my way into a job at a local radio station, just before I graduated from Northern Cambria. Really, I got that job because my dad asked the station’s owner if he’d hire me. My dad was probably thinking, Geez, what’s this kid gonna do? He decided for me, and, as luck would have it, I liked being on the radio. It was a cool job for a few years. It took another few years for me to see myself more clearly—that whole perception thing—and I realized, sometime in 1984, that I wanted to play music for a living. I didn’t think about profound questions like purpose. Was I born to play music? I doubt that I considered that in ’84.
But as the mid-80s rumbled along, I found myself playing in in the bars of Pennsylvania on most nights. My old mates can verify that we played about twenty-five nights every month. Sometimes it was twenty-seven or twenty-eight nights. I wouldn’t believe that schedule if I hadn’t lived it for five years. On most of those nights, we played ‘til 2AM, which meant we’d get home at 4 or 5. There was no great plan to any of it. I was simply doing what I wanted to do, and I happened to get paid for it. The entire enterprise was akin to deciding to write a song when you’re fifteen: no one has said you shouldn’t write the song, so you go ahead and write it. Conversely, I was happy and confident and fulfilled in my twenties.
No one had told me that my job—playing songs in bars—was going against the norm.
A big sea change took place when I was thirty-five. For lots of complicated reasons, I decided to reverse the decision that allowed me to play music all over America. I literally told myself that I shouldn’t play the guitar for a living anymore. Or that I couldn’t. I was broke and tired and a little heartbroken. I was probably throwing myself a pity party: the music business is hard and mean. As you might expect, in the fall of 1998 I got a real job as a telemarketer and left music behind. In the year that followed I became the head-honcho telemarketer; I was literally running the place. I still have no idea why they chose me, but I had a real job and more money than I’d ever earned before. There was a time in 1999 when I could toss paychecks on my dresser because I didn’t need to cash them.
I was a late bloomer, but I was suddenly doing things the normal way. Instead of tooling around the country in a van, I had a regular schedule and responsibilities. I was a big boy now, an adult doing the things adults do. Every Monday I got a paycheck. I was swimming in money. And still, as the turn of the millennium approached, I was very depressed. I hated that job, I thought. Or maybe I hated myself for surrendering to life’s complications. Pity party? Well, maybe, but the real answer isn’t that complicated. At least it’s not as complicated as I made it twenty-two years ago.
That fifteen-year-old kid who wants to write songs, or sing them, or perform in the play—remember that person? The problems I had with depression as Y2K approached were directly related to telling my inner fifteen-year-old that he ought to shut up. Self-talk is the most important thing in our lives, and in my late thirties I decided that I really couldn’t be me. It would take an entire book to explain how and why I rationalized the ongoing conversation in my head, so I won’t bother. But stifling the creative impulse left me feeling empty and unhappy. I won’t waste a lot of words on the consequences of that decision. And not all the consequences are horrible.
A part of me enjoyed driving a tractor-trailer for eight years—but just a small part of me. I was proud of my ability to back an articulating trailer into tight spaces at Penn State University. Something about taking a truckload of Aquafina to Beaver Stadium was cool. Consequences. My children, who are the ultimate reason I’m writing this today, are a direct consequence of my decision to leave music behind. Had I done things differently—if I didn’t quit music at the age of thirty-five—Mikayla, Macey, and Alice wouldn’t exist. Consequences.
My purpose here goes to their joy, my daughters’ joy, and I need that to be clear. I desperately need them to understand that they should never stop being what they are right now. The decision about what to do with your life should be easy, not hard. In the end, the Gerry Stanek of 2022 is very much the same as the Gerry Stanek of 1985. He understands the work and activities that bring easy joy, satisfaction, and fulfillment: write, sing, create. Why did I lock that Gerry away in a compartment for twenty years? Why did I ever think that he wasn’t necessary? It's him that makes me happy.
Happiness never comes from the outside. It can only come from a childlike perspective that urges you on to the activities that make you the best you you can be. Maybe the most important lesson I can teach my kids is that they should always approach life as they do right now: sing, play, write, draw, create. Growing up isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. An adult who’s miserable is still miserable if he has lots of money.
There’s nothing my kids have to be, at least not to satisfy me. There is no university or college on earth that can teach them more than they already know. The important stuff is already in them. If they’re smart enough to use what they have every day, to innocently explore the things that interest them the most, then they can call themselves educated; no diploma will place them above that idea. My daughters have the secret to life and happiness in their very young hands. My highest hope is that they don’t let it slip through their fingers.