If you have to "go along to get along", you're in the wrong place

There's an old New York proverb: "first you go along, then you get along." First you prove you belong, then the good things start to come your way. The price is that you have to ignore the bad stuff that your benefactors do, pretend to believe things you think are not true, and behave and speak in ways that strike you as wrong, pretentious or undesirable.

Does it seem that everyone else does it all naturally? They don't wince when they use the latest pretentious catch-phrase? (My current bete noir is "a call to action" when they mean "something we should do"). They believe that people who earn £10 / hour should be loaned upwards of £5,000? Or whatever it is? You begin to think they must be faking it, and maybe if they can, then so can you.

You can't. They aren't faking it. They believe everything you think is nonsense. They believe what they are doing is worth losing family time for. This is their life: it's who they really are. It may be hard to believe, but it's true. They are where they fit in.

If they went where you feel natural, they wouldn't fit in. They'd feel like they were faking it.

There is no guarantee that there is anywhere you will feel natural, nor, having found it, that it won't go bust after a couple of years. But you have to keep looking.

Going along to get along is corrupting and it's a trick that can only be worked for about ten years before you go off the rails in whatever manner you choose: drink, drugs, women, fast cars, gambling, divorce, heart attack. If you don't, you wind up withdrawing from everything and everyone around you at the weekends so you can recover for another week in spiritual hell. Personally, I think that's worse than booze and heart attacks.

The really irritating thing is that there are people who can live with exactly what it takes to win the beautiful wife, the daughters at Godolfin and Latymer, the six-bedroom house and the senior partnership in a top four law firm. It would kill you, but they do it as naturally as breathing. Hey, no-one said the right place for you was somewhere you would get rich.

If you feel like you're "going along to get along", you're in the wrong place.