If I Was 18 Again
There are many things I wish I knew when I was younger. Once I'm 60, I'm sure there will be many things I wish I could know right now. I remember those times, when I was convinced the world operated within very specific and static parameters, when my beliefs of certain ideas seemed unshakable. That's no longer the case. So nowadays, I force myself to at least listen, if not to follow the advice of friends and family that are older. Even if I do not think they are necessarily wiser.
For a lot of us, the decision of what course or specialty to follow usually got made when we were still teens. However well calculated or arbitrary they might have been, they often set us on a somewhat deterministic path in life. With time, we discover more of who we are, what we like, and what our strengths and weaknesses are. Those later stage discoveries either reinforce the choices we had made earlier, or come into conflict with whom we had grown to become.
Much of the existential angst for young adults centre around the issue of what to do with one’s life. But it always strike me as somewhat counterintuitive, how we have been brought up, and parsed through a system that seem to facilitate, if not actively promote, a somewhat backward way of assessing and arriving at that vital decision. The issue on hand is really the conflict and compromises illustrated by this graph, courtesy of Bud Caddell.
I will not generalize, although I believe this is a common rite of passage for many of us. While still in high school, we choose, or at least look forward to learning more about a field, based on our own social upbringing, family influences, our own interests. But more importantly, we looked at fields of specialty, extrapolated them into careers, and measured them up against prestige, salary, and employment statistics. It was no coincidence that while I was in high school in the late 90s and early 2000s, half of my graduating class went on to study engineering of some kind – the most popular sub-discipline being that of computer engineering. Even though a few years later, the same group could have easily chosen another hot field, finance anyone?
So as a first step in our tentative journey to find our calling, we were guided to look for careers that pay well.
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You think I’m advocating sexual abstinence. No. Let me explain.
When I was 18, I wanted to be older so desperately. For some of the reasons that everyone can relate to, and others that were unique to me (or not, as I found out later). I wanted independence. For me, that involved getting my parents out of my hair, and gaining freedom. There was no doubt in my mind that becoming older was the panacea to all my problems. Ha Ha. And Ha.
The word “freedom” is probably the second most misconstrued word in history, shortly trailing “love”. Just like there are many varieties of love indulged in by people both balanced and unhinged, there are just as many different editions of “freedom”, subject to use and abuse, interpretation and misinterpretation. The triumph of leaving home at 18 (albeit for school) lasted only for so long, as I soon found out that 1) freedom means nobody will tell you anything anymore, and 2) freedom sure ain’t free.
First of all, freedom can turn into a burden when you are old enough to supposedly make tough choices for yourself. Decisions like choosing a major, picking a summer internship, or whether to go long-distance with your significant other. Your parents, siblings and friends now recoil from giving you any sort of concrete advice, but resort to lame catch-all phrases such as “only you can make this decision”, or worse yet, “just follow your heart”. Highly impractical and definitely not actionable. Soon enough, the only times that you can get yourself some decent advice is by sitting next to a complete stranger on a cross-Atlantic flight, munching over peanuts and wine in a plastic cup. Or more expensively, lying on the couch in your therapist’s office. Read more...
Nobody’s watching you!
At least not all the time.
I wish I knew this when I was 18, because life would’ve been so much more chill. In fact, there are lots of things I wish I knew when I was 18, but nobody told me, or I just didn’t listen. So a while ago, I wrote about what I wish I knew if I was 18 again, the first being that smartness isn’t really envy-worthy. It generated a bit of discussion. Easily encouraged, I decided to follow up with this.
I’m told that kids grow up hell of a lot faster these days, so hopefully they have this figured out by now. But when I was 18, I had all the symptoms of a paranoid schizophrenic without the benefit of medication or therapy. I felt as though everyone was watching me all the time, and was only just waiting till I stumbled on something (literally and figuratively) and made a fool of myself, so they could erupt in collective laughter with the satisfying knowledge that I, was a complete idiot, and they, were superior in every aspect. I felt self-conscious walking down the street, eating out in restaurants, talking in class. So pretty much every activity that required some, or any level of self-expression. Parents were of course, a major source of attention magnet, and I refused to be seen in public with them. Life kinda sucked back then.
It wasn’t until I turned the ripe old age of 23 that I was forced to grow some thick skin. I prefer to think of it as calloused, as a result of repeated rubbing. A series of changes began to take place, culminating in the liberating (or humiliating) final act where I allowed myself to fall asleep on the bus. That’s right, the bus on my way to and from work. Because I was too tired. I was too tired to care that I probably had drool spilling out from one side of my mouth, with a bus full of people “watching”. It was around that time that I finally figured out (without truly inhabiting the full implications of such realization, that took another couple of years) that people are generally 1) self-absorbed and has too much going on in their own lives to care about anyone but themselves, 2) most people, friends or frenemies, are not permanent fixtures in life (nothing is), and therefore, are not worth the worries. Read more...
I am across-the-board average by all accounts, so I used to seriously envy the smart kids. Why smartness? Because I became convinced early on that having great body parts doesn’t translate into long-lasting success in the real world. Adding to the delusion, I was TV-schooled during the Dawson’s Creek, Popular and Felicity era. The general take-away was that looks were only worth celebrating when it played supplement to a brooding yet brilliant mind.
So you can imagine my seizure when I discovered in the real world, intelligence held only a fleeting chance at success when challenged by obstacles such as luck, to-die-for connections, good looks (gasp!), passion, and most importantly, a great personality. Needless to say, this was hugely disappointing, since half of my brilliant high school graduating year had gone on to study computer engineering, and most of them possessed little, if any of the above. It was also hugely disappointing for me, since it robbed me one of the only things that I could consistently blame Mother Nature for: shortage of brain power.
The thing was, stepping into university, and subsequently the real world, put Relativity Theory to test, for real. Once the bubble wraps burst, what was deemed brilliant when I was eighteen was not much when placed against the myriad of talents out there. People had all kinds of stuff going on for them, and very few of those could be quantified by an entrance average or a percentile ranking. It began to make sense after a while, since we do not robotically assign people scores we meet based on their understanding of quantum mechanics or their ability to recite and analyze Paradise Lost in iambic pentameter. What seemed to get brownie points were one’s ability to tell or take (preferably) a self-deprecating joke, to have some kind of special talent that was driven by passion versus competitiveness (bragging about piano grades and Taekwondo belt level were not cool), and if they have ever tasted the humbleness pie. Read more...
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