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.

Then, picturing myself sitting through a mandatory guidance counseling session back in high school, our counselors would glance at our report cards and promptly informed us of the areas that we could potentially excel in university.  This happened in university too.  One of my friends was repeatedly told by our career guidance office that with terrible accounting and finance marks like hers, she could forget about going into banking, and should try for human resources instead.  Disgusted with the dismissive attitude, and even more horrified at the prospect of getting slotted into a field she had no interest in, she transferred to another school immediately. She was very brave.  And it paid off. She proceeded to complete summer internships at numerous top I-banks, and now thriving as an associate in a well-known wealth management firm.

So, during the second round, we often dwelled and obsessed over things that we did well, and tried to make ourselves even better in them. More often than not, at this stage, our search for that personally and financially fulfilling career has come to a brief end.

Then, quarterlife, or mid-life crisis hit: we wake up one morning and realize we don’t actually like what we do for a living, despite the status, the financial security, and the glossy exterior of a life.  Trying desperately to find some wiggle room, we see the lives we had set ourselves up for required financial commitments that do not allow for sudden and unplanned exits, so perhaps it’s not really that secure after all! With aging parents, dependent children, and possibly equally high-strung spouses, where to turn?  We seek solace on therapist couches, or more economically, at our local Borders’ self-help section.  Crammed with personality, parachute, career aptitude books, they are all there to help you answer that million dollar question: what do I actually want to do?

To me, the order of this exercise is all wrong.  It would’ve made much more sense to start from this very last, but terribly vital question of what we actually want to do, layer on the things we do well, find a plausible interaction of the first two, and match it against things the world can pay us for.

Of course, the difficulty of not knowing what one wants to do at an early age is a sizable obstacle, which is why many settle, and may even prefer the solution offered by the order described earlier.  But it should not stop us from striving to address this well meaning, highly prevalent, but nevertheless faulty compromise many had come to accept as the way things are.  The longer we leave this question unanswered, the more monstrous the scope of the problem will become, and the most costly it will be to resolve.

picture source: sheriktek

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.

Secondly, if you weren’t born with a trust fund, freedom means paying the bills.  Paying the bills means picking up a good job, and picking up a good job means that you are only free to do fun things once the sun sets.  In other words, you’re paid to sell the best time of your day for money, so strict time and geographical limitations are placed on the practice of freedom.  During those paid hours, you are expected to do as told (probably by someone a lot dumber than you), dress in unfortunate slacks and shirts, and sit in on pointless meetings and feign enthusiasm.  It’s probably too early for you to truly appreciate the sadistic ironies of Office Space.  That’s ok, you will get your strain of the Muuundays soon enough.

When I was 18, I used to roll my eyes when people spewed out stuff that complimented my age.  I always took the praise as backhanded and gratuitous.  How was a disadvantage youth with hands tied behind her back supposed to feel next to an adult who was free to go everywhere and do everything?  Now crossing over to the latter part of my 20s, a lot of us murmur that we would not want to be 18 again.  But why are we so nostalgic about those years past?  Now looking back, the world was indisputably simpler (despite what you may think now) and lighter.  Many of us marvel at how time could fly so fast and retaliate against it in our own ways – against the shackles of those so-called freedoms of the grown-ups.

If I was 18 again, as futile as my words would be, I’d tell myself to slow down just a bit.  Because life will not always be as it is now, for better or worse.  For every bit of freedom you gain, there’s something else that gives.

picture source: `gilad

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.

The series of events that led up to that climatic commute ride started as soon as I got to university.  When I stepped into my first class in a huge auditorium of a few hundred people, it became evident that getting called on or singled out for attention was probably the last thing that could happen. Whoo-hooo! I was lost in a sea of student numbers!  After enjoying this exhilarating anonymity for a while, I realized that there were certain downsides to this invisibility.  For starters, I couldn’t for the life of me get the attention of the lecturer, or even the lowly TAs for that matter.  They simply did not know who I was, nor did they care.  All that Dead Poet Society, Half Nelson, Good Will Hunting, Finding Forrester crap lost whatever iota of truth it might have had back in high school.  It soon dawned on me that all that concerted efforts in high school trying to deflect attention away from myself became a liability in university.

While I sulked in insolence, scores of other people were bathing in their new-found notoriety for their ability to return clever retorts to authority figures three times their age, or their impressively loud debacles at parties that resulted in favourable attention from members of the opposite sex.  For once, nobody was paying any attention to me, but I still couldn’t enjoy the benefits that I thought it would yield me. I knew I was in trouble when our communications lecturer in business school told us that it was absolutely imperative that we had to distinguish ourselves from one another.  It took the next half decade to correct the ensuing fallout from this declaration.

So, when you’re 18, it might not be a bad thing to be seen from time to time.  You won’t stay the centre of attention for long.  Real life will emancipate you from that situation eventually.

picture source: =beaucoupzero

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.

Now in the latter leg of my 20s, I am not envious of anyone anymore, least of all the smarty pants from high school.  From what I’ve seen, God (or whoever it is up there), is pretty fair.  What we are not endowed in one area, is most likely made up by something else.  To be wildly talented in one part of your life may very well cripple the many other areas that scream for attention.  Maybe somebody’s going to create the next Google or design the next Mac, but so what, if he cannot carry on a conversation with the opposite gender or someone outside of his zip code?  By the way, if you are one of those guys, it’s ok – Bill Gates got through it, so will you.  If you’ve got the personality of Leno but little skills to back it up, there are plenty of jobs out there that will pay you to schmooze and get other people to like you.  If you are all-around average like me, it’s ok too.  It just means that you won’t require date coaching, or regular AA attendance to dial your life back to sanity.

In short, each one of us is unique, and everything is the way it is for a good reason. So save the envy, there’s no need.

More discussion on this post can be found here.

picture source: =BaltazarArt