They looked pretty happy though, in their flimsy pink pants layered over sweats and long underwear and athletic shoes (New Balance and Converse low-tops, no less!) They approached my favorite tree and circled around it, gently swaying and singing. None of the folks sitting in the park were paying much attention, except for some Latino men, their shiny mountain bikes leaning nearby on a fence, who were clapping along and singing, because, let’s face it, that “Hare Hare” song is catchy.

Then an older gentleman, who wore a suit and reminded me of one of my high school teachers, announced on a microphone that the Hare Krishna movement had commenced in New York 30 years ago at that very tree. In fact, I was sitting in front of a religious landmark! So that’s why I loved this tree so much. Maybe I had a little “Hare, Hare” in me?

I sat there, giggling and thinking: Well, all right, this is what I’ve been doing wrong all this time. I just need a cult, see, a cult to solve all my problems. Of course, it’s not particularly clever to make fun of Hare Krishnas. It’s not their fault that they’re bald, favor pastels and can’t think for themselves. After all, this is America and people can sing and dance wherever they want (except for certain towns in Texas).

And then I realized that this whole moment would make a great entry for my online journal, except it’s gone. I had to take my journal down this week; it’s dead, gone and over. But I’ll get to that later.

The best thing about the Web is the sound of all the individual voices rising. I hear voices from independent zines and Web logs (“bloggers”), but for me, it’s always been about the Web journals. I hear those voices loud and clear. They’re not necessarily always interesting, or angry, or worth your time, but if you talk loud enough (in this instance, update regularly, send a flattering e-mail with your URL to a more popular journal writer who may then link back to you, and make yourself known on message boards), someone is going to listen. Unfortunately, all that talk can get you into trouble sometimes.

Diarist.net, which claims to be the “largest and most definitive resource for finding online journals and diaries,” counts more than 2,000 sites in its registry. That’s 2,000 exhibitionists clamoring to be heard; people seeking community, seeking an audience. And they’re just the people who choose to index their sites. There are probably thousands more, all over the world, who detail the minutiae of their life for publication on the Web. And with the advent of do-it-yourself sites like Diaryland, you don’t have to be Web-savvy to put your life online.

It’s an interesting idea, creating a private space in a public arena. Some journal writers choose to password-protect their site, which is either an incredibly responsible act or a paranoid one. But the majority of writers display their emotional wares freely, even if they seek to maintain anonymity by inventing an alternate name or identity.

When some of the first journals appeared on the Web five years ago, not enough people were online for it to make an impact. But, as we all know, the Internet has exploded in the past few years, and if you don’t have a computer at home, you at least have one at work. Many online journals get the most hits of the day during the lunch hour.

And now people are being held accountable for their words. Initially journals could get you in trouble with your friends, families and lovers. Now journals get you in trouble with your employers and, in some instances, incite legal action.

Take the case of Gus, who writes the Web journal Randomly Ever After, which gets about 400 visitors a day. Gus has been writing online for more than four years and has had three separate journals in that time. Among descriptions of his life with his girlfriend, his dog and his art lies a notoriously critical analysis of his job as a Web developer for an online portal (which he elected never to name specifically.)

In February, on his 32nd birthday, he was fired from his job. He claims on his home page, “They decided that the wild and crazy things said in this site are at odds with their corporate goal of global conquest.”

Gus’ documentation of his corporate existence rings true not only for those working in the world of technology, but for anyone who feels like a victim of a bait-and-switch by their employer: You signed on for one thing, and you got something completely different. Whether or not he was actually fired entirely because of his journal is unclear.

According to Gus, his employers cited three separate reasons for his “de-hiring,” the third of which was his Web site. But it was cited in his exit interview; even if it wasn’t the main reason, the fact that it was raised at all indicates that it was a contributing factor.

In an e-mail interview, Gus revealed the name of his former employer, CollegeClub.com, and commented on why he thought he was fired.

“I was fired for speaking my mind about the cult of superficial money-obsessed Barbies & Kens managing the place. I never used any names, but they could tell I was writing about them. Actually, though, this was a good thing, since I was sick of working for a well-funded Heaven’s Gate. When they fired me, it was their loss, not mine.”

That might seem a wee bit bitter, but his online description of the actual meeting where he was fired is a solid, measured piece of writing. It’s hard to tell what the real truth is, but then again, it’s important to take any journal entry with a grain of salt. We are hearing one side, one voice in the many that are out there.

John Halcyon Styn, himself a proprietor of two personal Web sites Prehensile Tales and Cocky Bastard, is a senior editor at collegeclub.com. “Everyone knew about it (the journal). It wasn’t a big surprise,” Styn said. “I don’t know why he was fired, but it wasn’t about that. We hired him because he was a free thinker, and he was not fired because he was a free thinker.” Adds Styn, “Gus is great. I gave him a reference for his next job.”

Reading Gus’ writing, one definitely gets the sense that he wanted to push it as far as he could, that he never had any intention of developing boundaries in his journal beyond not naming names. Was he responsible to his employer in his journal? Perhaps not. Does he have any obligation to be responsible? Well, I haven’t seen the contract he signed with Collegeclub.com.

Even if you make every effort to act responsibly with your journal, it can still be held against you. Terri Polen maintains *Footnotes*, a journal that dates back in its current form to 1998. (Polen has also included personal entries from as far back as 1981.) She documents her life as a recovering alcoholic, her relationship with her partner, David, whom she met online and her experiences with non-custodial motherhood. Her site receives about 50 visitors a day.

In the past year, the estranged wife of Polen’s partner, David, has attempted to maintain sole custody of their children, using Polen’s entries as a basis. According to Polen, the bias was, ” … based mostly on things I had written about my drinking, and a half-hearted suicide attempt 20 years earlier.” The children were kept entirely from David and Polen for three months, though he now has partial custody. It wasn’t until her journal entries were brought up yet again, in January, during a settlement hearing, that Polen actually began to document the struggle. Until that time, she had focused her writing on the rest of her life.

Polen has no regrets, as she comments, via e-mail, ” … The bottom line is that I’m extremely proud of *Footnotes* and of the work I’m doing there, and I have David’s 100 percent support in this project, and I would unhesitatingly drag printed copies of any entry into any court of law. The Web site documents all of the ways I’ve fucked up, yes … but it also documents all of the ways I’ve tried to atone for those fuck-ups. And I think that’s the important thing.”

So, there’s a sense that many people are using these journals to heal, as well as to vent. At the recent South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, I attended the panel on Web journals: “Life Online and Confessional Web Sites.” There was almost a group therapy feel to the discussion, as participants went around the room and introduced themselves, adding their experiences with their online journals. Some said they did it as a way to communicate with friends who lived far away. Others did it to get to know themselves better.

Sarah Bruner, of syrup.org, spoke eloquently about her struggle to test her boundaries and learn lessons about “the definition of truth, the definition of honesty.” Several people mentioned in introductions whether or not their mothers read their sites. (It always comes back to the mother, doesn’t it?) When one attendee introduced himself as a psychologist who was fascinated with journals, there was a collective palpable discomfort, followed by nervous laughter

Later, I spoke with the psychologist, John Grohol, and asked him about his interest in online journals. “Therapists have been using journals for years to encourage clients to write out their feelings. A journal allows you to keep an ongoing commentary about your life and reflect upon it … We tell the story in a different way when we write it down.” He’s been following them for years, and, in fact has written open-source software to encourage people to post their thoughts online.

Another nervous moment during the panel came from Mark, a 15-year-old who bore a strong resemblance to a young Tobey McGuire. He announced he had a private, password-protected journal that had spun off from his Web log. “I can’t let my family read it. I can’t let my friends read it. I can’t let my girlfriend read it,” he said. “I’m scared.”

I ran into him later that night and asked him what he was writing about in his private Web space, and why he felt like he couldn’t share it with anyone.

He mentioned that his father was a conservative Christian and added, “I’m discussing my issues with my sexuality. I’m not sure if I’m gay, but I just want to be able to talk about it somewhere. My father isn’t into me putting myself on the Internet. If he read it, I wouldn’t be here (at SXSW) right now.”

There was no one in Mark’s personal community he felt he could go to, so he placed his thoughts in a controlled space where he could get feedback. He created his own community, in a simultaneously public and private manner. It’s a fitting tribute to the many possibilities of the Web, though a precarious situation, particularly for an adolescent: substituting interaction with strangers for real communication with friends and family. But Mark is one of thousands — there are a lot of isolated people out there posting their stories in hopes of anyone, anyone at all, listening.

As for me: How isolated was I to post my thoughts online? It initially began as an experiment, a step toward developing an online writing voice vs. my existing print voice. It eventually helped me to create a career as a multimedia producer, and I made some friends in the process.

My journal was never fancy, nor did it garner a lot of attention. (Lately I’ve been receiving 150 hits a day.) I never used my last name, and I certainly never used the name of my employers. I didn’t want to piss anyone off; I just wanted to document my experiences in New York, get some feedback on my writing style and, in general, just keep myself writing on a regular basis. I wanted to maintain it as long as my identity remained a secret.

I recently published my first article on Salon, and damn if smart, curious readers didn’t suss me out. I thought I had erased any connection of my first and last name to my journal, only to discover that former band mates had used my name in the meta tags of their site, as well as indexed me on certain search engines. A persistent investigator would find a link to my journal on the band’s site. My journal was suddenly flooded by people who knew exactly who I was. Worlds collided. I shut down the site.

My private life became public, and the worst part was, I did it to myself. I’m not too upset about it, to be honest, because I haven’t lost my ability to write, just my ability to self-publish temporarily. I’ll get over it. It’s just a little difficult on those bright, sunny days in New York when Hare Krishnas dance wildly around trees.

I want to raise my voice up high with them.

Note, for example, how the show’s star Joel McHale spent the spring diplomatically – and wittily — handling the talk-show circuit after Chase’s meltdown, joking that the voice mail had to be fake because “there’s no way Chevy could figure out voice mail.” See, it’s glib and funny and sounds magically off-the-cuff! Get it? The cast of “Community” — which includes the incredibly on-the-ball Danny Pudi, Alison Brie and Donald Glover – knows how to handle itself.

So here’s what you don’t do. You don’t send an email saying you “wanted to forward some messaging we hope our cast will find helpful as they navigate questions that will undoubtedly come up.” Oh God, “forward some messaging.” This won’t be good. And sure enough, in a memo obtained Wednesday by the Hollywood Reporter, the talking points sent from Sony to the cast reads like a ransom note. A poorly written one. My friend Jay at the Takeaway suggests reading it in the dean’s voice, but in my head, I can’t hear anyone but Chang.

“We’re hoping that the news will lose some steam over the next day, especially if we’re not perpetuating the topic in any way,” it reads. Then it goes on to suggest the cast just tell the press, “We’re also excited that we’ll be back on NBC’s schedule in the fall and are looking forward to working on those episodes,” “I am looking forward to starting our next 13 episodes of ‘Community,’” “We’re looking forward to working with David Guarascio & Moses Port on a new season of ‘Community.’” Also, guess what? “We’re looking forward to the stories our characters will find themselves in come Sept.” I’m not sure I even understand that last sentence, but you get the gist. Coming this fall! “Community”! REMAIN CALM AND STOP PERPETUATING THE TOPIC.

As one Hollywood Reporter commenter brilliantly opined, maybe now “the cast will all recite the entire memo, verbatim, in interviews. Like hostages reading off cue cards.” It’s just like when Avery Jessup had to do the news in North Korea! Wait, what well-regarded yet low-rated NBC sitcom are we talking about here?

This kind of thing is insulting on so many levels. Primarily, it’s a dis to the cast and team of “Community,” who this weekend managed to tweet gracefully their gratitude to Dan Harmon and his “dementedly awesome brain” without coming off like network-destroying loose cannons. And don’t even get me started on how idiotic Sony must assume the press is to send out something like this. Guys, it’s not all one big Mario Lopez-fueled parade of butt-kissing out there. Worst of all, it’s a shameless slap to fans, who expect that the people who give us a weird treasure like “Community” know how to be funny and sarcastic and sad and real when there is a major shakeup in their ranks — oh, and who also know enough about social media to know you can’t stop a dumb email from getting around. It’s not about sticking to some rote company line. It’s about cultivating the very authenticity that makes “Community” so friggin’ special, and respecting the fans who watch it. And it’s about getting that the title of the show isn’t just about a mythical college. It’s about us.

The dearth of enjoyably over-the-top finales both is, and is not, a coincidence. Some of the shows that went big in the past opted to take a more low-key approach this May. Last year “The Good Wife” ended with Alicia and Will finally smooching outside a hotel room; this year it ended with Kalinda sitting in her apartment, gun in hand, waiting for her front door to open. Last year, “Community” wrapped up with its balls-to-the-wall, two-part spaghetti-western paintball extravaganza; this year it ended with a relatively understated episode about Evil Abed, leaving everyone to talk about Dan Harmon’s firing instead.

What isn’t a coincidence, is that there are very few good, tentpole network dramas, and it’s those dramas that usually provide the crazy come finale time. The two long-running series that ended this year, “Desperate Housewives”  and “House,” both ended quietly, which is to say in exactly the mediocre fashion they’ve been plodding along in for years. For either of these shows to have had must-see finales, they would have had to wrap up seasons ago, before they got creatively stale. Meanwhile, many of the new shows that started the season with the sort of mythologies that tend to make for the most memorable finales flamed out in one way or another:  The mediocre “Alcatraz” and “Terra Nova” were canceled, “Person of Interest” exists in the CBS procedural ghetto, and very few people watch “Awake.” The only show left that could plausibly deliver a juicy season-ending event is ABC’s super-soap “Revenge,” which finishes tonight. Its creator has promised someone “important” will die. My fingers and toes are all crossed.

Even the shows that have heeded the command of finale time — go big — have felt flat. On “Castle,” the show’s longtime will-they-won’t-they couple finally fornicated, following a very by-the-numbers “here I am on your doorstep all wet from the rain, at long last ready to have sex with you” moment. Last year had an equivalent event, when “Bones’s” longtime will-they-won’t-they couple Dr. Brennan and Booth paired off, but in a stranger and therefore more interesting way. Without so much as an on-screen kiss, Brennan told Booth she was pregnant with his baby. As far as twists go, surprise baby trumps emo sex against a wall.

One show that did bring its A-schlock game to its finale was “Grey’s Anatomy,” which stranded six major characters and a pilot in the woods after a serious plane crash, and crushed one to death underneath the fuselage. (At the time the episode was written, the cast members had yet to re-sign their contracts. Presumably, had they failed to sign, there would have been more fatalities.) This amount of carnage would have been a lot more stupendous if extreme violence wasn’t a staple of “Grey’s,” which had a grieved and crazed gunman shoot up the hospital and its staff two finales ago. The characters have long since taken to calling their workplace “Seattle Grace Mercy Death,” a joke about the number of horrible coincidences that have befallen them there (car accidents, fatal bus crashes, shootings, suicide attempts, exploding bombs, etc.). At this point, I wouldn’t bet against a dirty bomb showing up in next year’s finale. Which, come to think of it, sounds just insane enough to be spectacular.

As I was watching this episode, “Curriculum Unavailable,” I remember calmly thinking something like, “Huh. That would really explain Leonard.” The possibility that “Community” might be about to “St. Elsewhere” its audience (“St. Elsewhere” ended on the reveal that everything that had happened in the series had all taken place inside the mind of an autistic boy) was not particularly alarming to me. Group psychosis explained a lot about the show’s extremely dark psychology, and, anyway, on “Community,” stranger things had happened.

As of late Friday evening, when “Community’s” creator and showrunner Dan Harmon was abruptly fired by Sony from the show he obsessively oversaw, I’ve realized that the real reason I was unphased by “Curriculum Unavailable” was because I was already very comfortable with thinking about “Community” as the figment of someone’s feverish imagination. That someone was just Dan Harmon.

Writing about “2 Broke Girls” recently, I noted that there is a fault line running through television where art rubs up against commerce. I should have saved that metaphor, because this “Community” situation is like an 8.0 on the art-commerce Richter scale. Consider the aftershocks: The perpetually low-rated, but fanatically beloved “Community” was just renewed by NBC for a fourth, 13-episode season. Why renew it just to fire the guy responsible for it? To escape the bad press of canceling a critically acclaimed series? Or is it the opposite impulse — to make enough episodes to get the show into syndication?

Harmon is an infamously — and self-proclaimed — difficult guy to work for and with. Earlier this year, he got into a public fight with “Community’s” Chevy Chase after Harmon played an incensed voice mail from Chase at a public event. Harmon apologized, though not to Chase, and a few weeks later was back to calling him a jerk on Twitter. If Harmon’s behavior was bad enough to get him fired, it was also the same crazy mentality that made “Community” one of the strangest shows to ever air on network television. How badly behaved does a great artist have to be to get kicked off his own creation without so much as a phone call?

Speaking about “Community” last week, before the news about Harmon was public, Bob Greenblatt, the head of NBC, said “Shows lose showrunners all the time and do well.” This is and isn’t true. Workaday TV shows, procedurals, sitcoms, long-running dramas, change showrunners all the time. But for the growing number of auteurist series driven largely by one personality — everything from “The Sopranos” and ‘The Wire” to “Louie” and, yes, “Community” — a showrunner change is not common, and is usually about as imaginable or advisable as Matt Weiner getting fired from “Mad Men” and that show soldiering on without him. It happens — Aaron Sorkin left “The West Wing” after four years, for example — but the shows are never the same.

“Community” seems to me particularly poorly designed to continue without Harmon. If “Community” were a more standard comedy, the new showrunners — two writers from “Happy Endings” — would just have to take the seven characters and make them funny. But causing belly laughs seems secondary to “Community’s” précis, which emphasizes being exhilaratingly clever, formalistically inventive and impressively bonkers over being laugh-out-loud hilarious. Harmon’s approach to television has always been almost athletic: With each episode, he sets out to break his previous record for genre bending, to outdo what everyone else has done before. To make “Community” “Community” then, the new writers don’t just have to tell jokes, they have to maintain its outdo spirit. They have to outrun or at least keep pace with Dan Harmon’s brain.

And because of his “let’s boldly go where no TV show has ever gone before!” ethos, Harmon has long since made his brain a major, off-screen character on “Community.” More than most other showrunners, even the great ones, one can feel Harmon in each episode, egging the show on to new heights, exposing the mechanics of the genre. I could watch Troy and Abed do their secret handshake 1,000 times a day, but I don’t watch “Community” for Troy and Abed, adorable besties that they are. I watch for the episodes with multiple timelines, for Dungeons & Dragons games come to life, for claymation Christmas specials, and for “My Dinner With Andre” and “Die Hard” spoofs. I watch for Dan Harmon’s unmatched and, now it seems, unsustainable ambition. Oh, damn it. I guess I mean watched.

“Community” is a wonderful, unique television show, ambitious and rare beyond measure, astonishing for the ways that it has bent and busted the limits of the genre and for the unflagging, unending energy with which it has done so. But the passion in certain parts— the parts where a TV critic spends her time— has reached such a pitch that just liking ”Community” feels inadequate. I imagine it’s a little bit like attending an N’ Sync concert in the late ’90s if you only sort of enjoyed “Bye Bye Bye.” Everyone around you would be screaming, fainting, eager to explain why this was the best boy band ever, and ready to get in a fist-fight if you had a bad word to say about Chris Kirkpatrick’s hair or how he seems a little fundamentally unlikable. (Please understand, I don’t mean to insult “Community” or its fans by comparing either to the boy band of yore. Have you seen what teenage girls are capable of, passion-wise? If “Community” had that kind of support, we’d be talking 20 seasons and eight movies.)

All this zeal is exhausting. And it makes me feel like a Grinch for saying that last night’s low-energy episode, “Urban Matrimony and the Sandwich Arts,” wouldn’t even make it onto the third volume of “Community’s” greatest hits. (But Britta’s hair did look very nice!)

In an interview “Community”-creator Dan Harmon did with the AV Club about last season, he confessed that in making 22 episodes of TV a year, some of the episodes just get crammed through to meet the schedule’s insane deadlines. (Keeping up with this frenetic pace is something all shows deal with.) Because last night’s was the first after such a long hiatus, and so carefully riffed on the show’s reputation for weirdness, it’s unlikely that this was one of those episodes, and yet … it played like one. Not every episode of “Community“ has to be a send-up of all action movies, created entirely in claymation, contain multiple different realities, or be a gonzo riff on “My Dinner With Andre,” but they are all supposed to be funny. I chuckled out loud twice (and actually clapped when Theo Huxtable danced to “Motown Philly”).

In many ways the episode was a very savvy, good faith, if probably not very successful, attempt to appeal to new viewers. The plot was as unalienating and classic as a comedy plot can be: It ended in a marriage. Shirley and her ex-husband Andre decide to get hitched again, just as Shirley and Pierce decide to start a sandwich business together. Britta ends up planning the wedding and realizes she’s very good at it; Jeff has to give the toast and realizes he’s very bad at it; Annie runs around trying to help people; and Abed and Troy decide to be “normal.” It is this last subplot — Troy and Abed’s attempt to “de-whimsify” themselves — that provides this episode with “Community’s” standard dose of meta-narrative. Troy and Abed are standing in for the show as it tries to behave in a “normal” way.

But just as Shirley’s husband, Andre (“The Cosby Show’s” Warner), doesn’t buy Troy and Abed’s attempts at normalcy — “Hey, man, you don’t have to be sarcastic,” he says to Abed — I’m not sure a newer viewer would either. By the end of this episode Britta is sobbing about how she’s destined to get married because it’s in her DNA (“This may shock you, Annie, but I come from a long line of wives and mothers”); Jeff is sobbing about how marriage is a lie; Pierce, in the Gordon Gekko outfit he’s been wearing all episode, is cackling drunkenly on his father’s grave; and Troy and Abed are talking like characters from “Inspektor Spacetime.”

“Community” is not normal, and being not normal is what it does best. However well executed the more muted episodes are, the big, insane spectacles are what make “Community” so special. At this point, it should play to its base, the people who know and love it for being so unconventional. Thankfully, at the end of the episode Troy admonished Abed, “We need to be weird!” So, presumably “Community“ will be back to full-weird and whimsy next week. I’ll rest up for it.

So as my wife and I turned onto Geary Boulevard on our way to the movies, I thought about what it must be like to be living in a small town and watch the destruction of factories and stores that have been there your whole life. I realized how lucky I was to be employed and going to the movies. It occurred to me that my ideas about how an unemployed professor might cope with joblessness and “social death”  may sound hollow to somebody who’s out of a job and has watched his whole town fall apart.

It’s fine to help an individual cope, but where is the solution? Are all America’s jobless supposed to just sit and meditate and read sociology until things change?

It is not enough to just survive joblessness. We must work for collective political solutions.

My role at Salon is to write about how individuals face crises. But individual crises have roots in political conditions. I don’t share the belief that we can alter our fate simply by visualization, or chanting, or that it’s enough to get into therapy to cope with our misfortune. Bad things happen to good people for political reasons. Good people get screwed over by indifferent strangers thousands of miles away because laws and regulations allow it.

The capitalist world is full of peril. Government’s proper role is to regulate capitalism so its most savage effects are managed and its worst excesses prevented.

That’s what politics is for.

I am employed. I live in a house. One day soon it may be time to crawl into a tent and spend some time with my spiritual brothers and sisters on the front lines of a new and just movement for human dignity and reform. That’s how I feel about it.

Now on to today’s letter.

Cary, please help me.

I loved your latest column because I face a similar issue, but I am at a different phase in my life. I’m 26, married and unemployed. I’m not depressed; I enjoy life and my hobbies, but I don’t know what to do with my life. I have two degrees, some decent experience and no idea what I want to do. I don’t know exactly what I’m good at, so I go by what my husband and some people that I’ve worked with have said.  They say I’m good with people — a relationship builder. I’m a good communicator as well. I am articulate with a great vocabulary, and have worked a lot on my verbal presentation skills. I’ve also been told I’m a decent writer. I’m good at figuring things out and getting them done — a quick learner.

Well, what are my passions? Aside from reading a lot of advice columns, I want to become enlightened, I want to help people, and I want to help the creatures and plants on this earth. Being drawn to sunlight and plants, I worked at a greenhouse in high school, and later as a community garden coordinator (my first “real job”). I learned a lot in the two years as a garden coordinator because I was the only employee. I did fundraising, grant writing, community building, press stuff, and the basic work of the organization. It was a great experience, but I became cynical and soured quickly.

I have a BFA and an MBA, but I don’t have a passion for art anymore, and the business degree I got in order to help with the nonprofit administration, which I clearly didn’t continue with. I’ve done a lot of thinking about the things that I value in a job. I liked the readings that you linked to, especially the whole “work for meaning vs. work for money” dichotomy in “So what’s work?”

I have thought a lot about that, because I’ve never made enough money to survive in my entire life. (My social conditioning says that is pathetic, a comment I try very hard to ignore.) My husband makes enough money that we live comfortably and I’m extremely grateful for that. He thinks it’s safer not to be completely dependent on one income, and I agree.

It is for this reason that I want to work, but also because I want to contribute. I want to participate in life. I know above all, I want to work with nice people … but I need direction. I thought about getting a degree in horticulture, because that is the only thread I can follow in my very short “career.” But what in the hell am I going to do with that degree?

I’ve thought a lot about economics, which perplexes me, and I’ve thought about trying to change the entire field from the ground up. I have only taken one very basic course in this subject, mind you, so I’ve considered auditing some classes in the subject. I want to start a municipal compost program in my city, but I don’t work for the city, and I am a bit daunted by the task that I don’t know anything about, and the fact that there is no one lined up to pay me for it. So I’ve come up with some grandiose ideas about things I want to do, but “practically speaking” it just seems like a crazy fantasy that has nothing to do with an income. Cary, what should I do with my life?

In a Morass

Dear In a Morass,

You like gardens. You like helping people. You like working with money.

Gardens. People. Money. I suggest you follow a path back into the garden, where there are people and also money. There may also be education there. What if you could combine gardening, money, people and education? What if you could teach people about money using the garden as a foundation? What if you could create a nonprofit organization that teaches people how to manage their money by using the garden as a metaphor or experiential teaching ground? That would be interesting.

That’s one idea. There are lots of ideas. But you are in a prime place to do something extraordinary. You don’t have to limit yourself to dull, salary-making activities. Now is the time to dream up something unique and wonderful.

It’s not always going to be like this. Anything could happen. You could have a kid. Your husband could lose his job. One of you could become ill. This is a golden opportunity. So get with somebody who can help you plan and do the paperwork, and come up with something original and wonderful.

Now, ideas are cheap. Advice is cheap. This advice, in matter of fact, is free. And there’s a lot of advice on the Web. One thing I do that others don’t is I try to bring your attention to small events and decisions that may have long-lasting consequences. I look for the little swerves in life that we don’t realize we’re making.

For instance, your disheartening experience with community gardens. You may think that you simply came to some conclusions — that the nonprofit world sucks, that people are insane, etc. — but you may also have unconsciously plotted a path away from the very thing that makes you happy. So  it is crucial to look at this two-year community garden thing you did. First, appreciate it for how great it was. Really. It’s one of the coolest things imaginable. You may have understated just what an accomplishment it was.

Next, ask yourself exactly what happened. Were there conflicts with others? Did you get in a power struggle? Were you blindsided or betrayed in some way? Did the project fail, and did you experience feelings of grief and hopelessness at its failure? Did you see other people behaving in ways that are dishonorable, and did that sour you on working with others? Tease it out. It might help to write it out, maybe in the form of a 12-step inventory.

I really think you will benefit from examining in detail what happened, rather than closing it off as simply an experience that soured you and made you cynical.

Besides, if we look at the origins of cynicism, we see it taught that “the purpose of life was to live a life of Virtue in agreement with Nature.” So when you became “cynical,” it may be that you are seeing into the true nature of people — that they can be duplicitous, shallow, manipulative, mean-spirited, self-destructive, conniving, etc. True enough. Welcome to humanity. People are like that. That doesn’t need to make you bitter or dispirited.

The question is, How, therefore, shall I live?

You have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity right now to create something new, fun and wonderful, and to be in charge of it. I’ll bet there are foundations that would willingly fund an innovative program for helping people learn how to manage their money, meet their neighbors and grow vegetables at the same time.

Like I say, it’s just one of many ideas. The main thing is, follow what you  love. It will lead you to what you need. And you’ll end up helping others along the way. As you work, you will experience setbacks. At times, nothing will make sense. At times, you will wonder if you’ve done the right thing. No one job or path is going to eliminate worry or uncertainty or random misfortune. But your best bet is to seize the opportunity right now and follow what you love.