I encountered a lot of people this Thanksgiving break who said that I was young and that I had a lot of opportunity and that I had the luxury of screwing around for a few years before I really had to figure out what I wanted to do—that what I do for a job now doesn’t have to be the only thing I ever do.
I told those people, “You have no idea.” Because they didn’t. They were adults.
As a rule, we look back on our younger years with nostalgia. “Remember all those days on the playground with yo-yos, when we were carefree, tossing a football and talking about what was on Nickelodeon last night?” we ask each other now. I remember. All we really did was stand around trying to figure out who was the coolest, who was the most physically dominant and who could impress those people when they weren’t either of those things. Being a kid sucked. That’s what I remember.
Same applies here. Adults think back with the lens of how locked in they feel now, how little opportunity there is to change, how they’ve gotten lost in their work and forgotten to do what they always wanted to do, and they remember that the opposite of all those things was true back in college. But, alas, they can’t do those things now. A pity.
This article is for those adults. Adults: remember harder.
Do you remember the pressure you felt to find a way of life that was really meaningful and worthwhile because of all the opportunities you had been given and all the resources—love, money and time—that had been put toward you doing just that?
Do you remember realizing that your very first move out of college would probably dictate all the other things that happen after that? Do you remember the feeling that this is make-or-break right now and that if you don’t make the right move you’ll end up upside-down in the wrong city, in the wrong job, with the wrong people, miserable for the rest of your life?
Do you remember doing an internship over the summer and coming to understand that, with an eight-hour workday and about an hour of transportation and transition time on the front end and back end of that, you only have about two hours a day when you’re not working, sleeping or eating? Do you remember fearing—knowing—that your life would be unbearable if you didn’t find something you loved to do with those eight hours a day?
Do you remember understanding the stakes? The gravity of your situation? Do you remember the burden that it is to want to be passionate about something but not to have found it yet?
Do you remember what it’s like to have no idea what the hell you’re doing but to know that every decision you make from now on is the real deal, irrevocable, so full with implications you can hardly move?
I didn’t think so.
