You can do whatever you want.
You really can. This isn’t a phony self-help fishhook, or an empty metaphysical proclamation: it’s self-evident. What prevents people from realizing this is their social conditioning—their inherited implicit assumptions about human beings, life, and reality itself. We are limited by our forms and the circumstances we’re born into, but the boundaries of what is physically possible are often conflated with the limits of what is socially acceptable, or even simply expected. You can’t fly, of course, no more than could you quit your fast food job and become a painter: the laws of nature forbid both, goes the common rationale.
Suffering and death are often cited as hard limits to your behavior: if you quit your job you may go hungry, become homeless, and die on the street. Starvation and premature death must be avoided at all costs, so therefore you must keep flipping burgers until your health gives out, suffering all the while like a caged animal. This is considered normal, and that this conclusion solely benefits the owners and masters of our civilization is rarely addressed. A long life, filled with suffering and misery and ending with an agonizing death is considered superior to a short life filled with joy that terminates in the same fashion.
That this argument has been so often invoked by young people to justify selfish, “irresponsible” behavior, has no doubt poisoned the well for most. It smacks of naivete, feels ad-hoc, and has become associated with hedonism, drug-culture, self-sabotage, and ultimately, self-destruction. Yet, those are choices available to us. We can choose to treat our bodies like carnival rides or temples, and in either case, the ramifications will mostly be social. The people who will choose to associate with us always depend on the choices we make, because while the presence of social norms is universal to the human experience and likely has been for our species’ ~300,000 year career, the norms of any individual group are an arbitrary mix of pro-social and anti-social behaviors.
Is this an argument that you should quit your job and go out in a blaze of hedonic glory? Of course not; my point is that no one is making you flip burgers. You are choosing to, because you are (perhaps unconsciously) optimizing your life for a particular set of goals that feel inevitable but are actually entirely contingent. Maybe once you realize this you can learn to enjoy whatever you spend your time doing. We all experience stress when we feel forced into action, pressured, cornered, robbed of agency, and stress directly impacts how any situation we find ourselves in, or any activity we engage in, feels. If we know we’re engaging in pointless repetitive tasks because we choose to, much of that stress vanishes, and work can start to feel like play.
You absolutely shouldn’t take my word for any of this, though. I’m sheltered, privileged, young, and healthy, and while I am no means well-off (by the absurd standards set by the wealthy in the US in the 21st century), I enjoy a wide degree of economic leeway that is the envy of tens of millions in this country alone: in short, it’s easy for me to say “we’re free”. So instead, let’s take a step back and expand our scope. What should we be doing as a species? Interestingly enough, the answer to this question seems to depend on your income bracket: the very poor will likely shrug, but the extravagantly wealthy have loads of opinions. Effective altruism, while based in the logic of liberal free-market capitalism (that is, the position that charity somehow makes up for all the poverty capitalism causes), at least is dedicated to reducing human suffering in the world. Its bastard stepchild longtermism, however, is pure billionaire apologia; it takes for granted that:
Humanity will somehow not go extinct in the near-term, dodging climate change, nuclear war, rogue bioweapons, pollution, biodiversity collapse, topsoil loss, mineral depletion, Carrington events, asteroid impacts, super volcanoes, etc.
There are no limits to the technologies we can invent, nor the amount of energy available to power them.
Then they make the extraordinary logical leap, like an anti-abortionist on methamphetamines, that hypothetical future human lives are worth as much as current human lives, and since there will be trillions of those (on Mars, or the moon, or on thousands of yet-to-be-discovered Earth-like planets far off in the Milky Way, I guess), any action taken today that will make those lives better or more numerous is justifiable, up to and including genocide. I’m not making this up. This is what billionaires actually believe.
Longtermism is a great example of how twisted up in knots we can get when we try to justify action or inaction, and I’ve been leaning in a somewhat different direction lately: that it really doesn’t matter what we do. We could blow up the whole planet, and it would be a hell of a show, or we could overthrow our rulers and instantiate a permanent utopia where everyone can live freely and openly without deprivation of any kind. The latter is more appealing to my own sensibilities, but I don’t feel a compulsion to devote my life to figuring out how to make it happen. Some people do, just as some people seem determined to cause near-term human extinction, and both are options available to us.
We get to choose, and it’s possible that if everyone was able to take a step back and acknowledge that fact, the nicer future scenarios become more likely. Fear of annihilation causes nuclear war. The profit motive causes climate change. The harder we cling to life, the more likely we are to lose it. There’s nobody in charge; the lunatics are running the asylum. There are no laws, there are no ethics—don’t be scared, we did fine without that stuff for 290,000 years. Human beings are cool creatures, we’ve just gotten a little mixed up lately. Do what you want, and don’t let others tell you what that is. And if you’re afraid to take a big leap, well, maybe you’re already where you want to be and you just don’t know it yet.