254. Song No. 3,781: “Ghost of Corporate Future,” Regina Spektor
Soviet Kitsch, 2003

It took me awhile to dig into the catalogue of a then-rising-star Regina Spektor but when I finally did, this was exactly the kind of cautionary tale I needed as college ushered me closer and closer to the horrifying prospect of life after the protective cocoon of academia’s built-in milestones and timelines and safety nets came to its wholly unwelcome end.

The seemingly unrelated influences of reading On the Road, a brief but revelatory escape to Florida’s verdant warmth and actually listening to this song all kind of converged at a time when the internship I hated at least made me feel like I belonged in the city I loved as I dreamed of working for the NYT, showing me how miserable I’d actually be if I chased a life where the only green around is too time-consuming or cost-prohibitive to seek out, to say nothing of being both too incongruous with its surroundings to offer beneficial immersion and not exactly safe for a 20something woman to make a habit of seeking out alone. It suuuuucked abandoning the only future I’d ever really wanted enough to work toward so close to graduation, but you’re gottdamn right a lifetime of lovingly cultivated procrastination is an asset more often than not: Not having the luxury of time to start all over again forced me to seriously consider what parts I could salvage from the misguided aspirations that really were more indicative of every middle-class millennial white girl’s deep-down, unshakable belief that the universe truly is rearranging itself to make her its main character than, like, reality, which is how I realized that I at least do love print journalism as much as I told myself I did while gleefully embracing College Newspaper Editor as a core tenet of my personality.

In its own way, “Ghost of Corporate Future” was an early milestone in my leftward radicalization, though I certainly didn’t have the vocabulary or self-awareness to consciously process it as such at the time. Being confronted by that bleak Dickensian portent of a life lived with a tunnel-visioned focus on work had the exact impact it needed to, tangibly laying bare not only the sacrifices and consequences waiting down that path but also some pretty thorough directions for a better approach to life.

Because it’s not just the warning that makes this song so effective: It’s the lyrically earnest pleas to “just drink a lot less coffee / And never ever watch the 10-o’clock news / Maybe you should kiss someone nice / Or lick a rock, or both / Maybe you should cut your own hair / Because that can be so funny / It doesn’t cost any money / And it always grows back” that demonstrate exactly how to greet the world for maximum return on your existence: Laugh at yourself but also tend to your physical and emotional well-being, embrace spontaneity, keep your perspective in check and remember that “people are just people / They shouldn’t make you nervous … People are just people like you.”

There’s so much in this song that, almost 20 years and a whole lot of hard-won personal growth later, makes so much more sense to me now, which feels like one of those built-in yardsticks that justify listening to the same music for decades. “The world is everlasting / It’s coming and it’s going” is the kind of parting observation I take comfort in these days: The Earth is a constant—it’s humanity that’s always in some ebb and flow state, so make peace with your place in the pattern and make that pathway inarguably, authentically yours before the world reclaims and reabsorbs you and you relinquish any say in what happens to the elemental reduction that was once you and is now a part of everything.