Ocean Vuong

And then there's the other thing

There's the other part.

There's an alternative count, which is your obligation to yourself and your life and your community, regardless of what that means in the CV, in the social standards and what have you.

And I think what I learned working in fast food and the tobacco farms growing up and what I wrote about

is that in those spaces, there's something really, really humbling and powerful, is that if you walk into NYU, where I now work, if you walk into a doctor's office, a dentist's office, a law office, everybody who's there worked and wanted to be there.

They might not like their job, fine, but they all deliberately worked to get there.

But the folks in the fast food restaurant, they never want to be there.

That's not their final goal.

They are deferring something else.

Right.

What's so humbling and powerful about that is that everybody you know, you see, you realize there's another dream.

And when you work enough hours, it becomes really, it looms large.

And you start to really want to find ways to find out that dream.

You know, you have these kind of probing conversations.

What do you do before this?

What do you do after this?

Do you do a night class?

All of a sudden, these spaces open up in these restaurants and corporations that were not meant to be there.

They're kind of subversive utterances.

And so to me, I think what I mean by the hardest thing in the world is to live only once, is to live according to your values.