Jodie Mack: Yard Work is Hard Work

It’s hard to know what you want out of life. We are continuously swayed by our culture and the opinion of those around us but even if we tried to block them out it is hard to know how much of our own opinions are truly our own? The influence of others permeates just enough that we need to be questioning our motives in an attempt to figure out what is truly right for us. Jodie Mack’s Yard Work is Hard Work was a short animation film about two people who get married quickly and try to throw themselves into the American dream. Soon mortgages and other money problems mount up causing them to be miserable. They attempt to get out of their predicament by throwing more money at other things but in then end find that they are continuously in debt and unhappy.

We desire to not only have all of these material objects but we also contain this desire to be loved. To me marriage is a union between two people who agree to love each other no matter what. While it is pleasant to think that you’ll have someone forever it is a very selfish thing. It is hard to deny ourselves the benefits of an eternal love but sometimes it isn’t for the best and the commitment is only made because someone is scared. In these cases the comfort can end up causing us misery. We are told to grow up and get into college where we can find a nice educated boyfriend or girlfriend to marry. I know very few people in this college life that have any semblance of being ready for marriage. Yet too many of my peers are starting to freak out about not being in a serious relationship because they’re finally in their twenties. We push ourselves too quickly into situations that we think will make us happy only to find that they are not actually what we wanted. This is extremely frustrating because we actually work and fret to get to this point which ends up merely being a point of unhappiness.

One possibility of why we get to this point is because we are in such a rush to grow up. When we are under 13 we desire to be a teenager, when we are under 16 we wish to have a driver’s license, when we are under 21 we wish to be able to order alcohol, and so on. It is an exhausting process where we are never really happy with where we are. We spend too much time thinking that we’ll be happy in the future instead of being happy in the present. Rushing into buying a house directly after paying for a marriage ceremony just because you want one and it is the next step to make is never a good idea because you’re going to have absolutely no money and be in debt forever. By pushing things before we are ready for them we get into trouble.