The meaning of life...

Tony despised the people he saw on shows like Australian Idol, and even worse, Big Brother. People who wanted to "be famous" disgusted him. "Notoriety and fame is something you have to earn," he would say. "Being famous for nothing is fleeting, illusory, and shallow." Despite this vehement dislike of people he referred to as "Fifteen-Minute F---wits", Tony's life's ambition was to be famous. Staggeringly famous. Neil Armstrong famous. Tony secretly hoped than in 40 years he would be so famous that even though the paparazzi no longer followed him around, and magazines no longer printed his photograph, people who met him by chance would forever remember the experience as the defining moment of their lives. But Tony was not impatient. He had already been working for two years to fulfil his dream, and was content to wait another two before people started noticing what he was doing.

- "I hope this new job will take me where I want to go, I think it's a good opportunity to get a foothold in a big firm. It'll also give me a good idea if I'm doing the right course at uni. I'm pretty sure I want to be an accountant." Tony's best friend Josh said.

"How can you be an accountant?", Tony answered, slurring a little from the 13 beers he had consumed that evening. It was 3am.

"What do you mean?" Josh asked.

"It seems to me that people who plan their lives around being something are planning to make themselves extraordinarily unhappy," he said. "Wouldn't it be much better to plan your future around doing something? If you say 'I want to be an accountant', and then become an accountant, what happens if you don't like it? At the end of the day, work is boring. That's why you get paid to do it. Even if it's work you like, when it comes down to it you'll still have to sit at a desk 40 hours a week for 50 years. It doesn't matter what you do, that is going to be boring. So if you've planned your life around being an accountant, at some stage you're going to wake up and hate yourself because you are one."

"It's an interesting idea," Josh said, wrapping his fuzzy, drunken head around Tony's philosophy. Both Josh and Tony were private school boys, the sons of successful people, who had been groomed for successful careers since they were old enough to earn pen licences and leave their blazers on the train. Thus Josh had always believed that "career success" and "happiness" shared the same entry in Roget's Thesaurus.

"You know what I think when I look at the future?" Tony continued. "I see myself happy. Not in a job, not necessarily with a family, but rather as a person I can be happy with and proud of."

"But how are you gonna do that," Josh asked, sensing he'd discovered the crucial hole in Tony's thinking.

"I guess we'll just have to wait and see..."

-That had been three years ago. Josh scarcely remembered the conversation at all, rather he remembered the unfortunate incident at a high-class strip joint that had resulted in the two of them drinking alone in a deserted bar at 3am. He had repeatedly mentioned the incident in his speech at Tony's 21st. For Tony however, it had been an epiphany. He had spent the year following that night dreaming up his strategy to become the person in his visions of the future. The first stages of his plan were complete, and now it was more a matter of waiting...

-Suddenly I realised that to finish the story would require the answer to the question "what is the secret to happiness?". I sat back, stunned at my own stupidity for beginning a story that I had no idea how to end. It was all too deep, too heavy, too pretentious to tag on a joke ending like "soon everyone would receive his anthrax-laced letters, and he would be a celebrity", or "he had been standing behind Tim Bailey now for two years, waving in the background of the weather reports. Soon everyone would know his face. He just had to keep on top of Bailey's schedule." Pissed off with my own arrogance, I went to dinner, had a few beers, and did this instead. I like "Fifteen-Minute F---wits" though...