Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Questions and Rants

Any kid growing up in America hears it constantly…”The sky’s the limit…Reach for your dreams…Nothing is impossible…You can do anything you set your mind to…You can be anything you want to be…”
BUT what if you grow up, get good grades, follow the rules, go through college, and one day realize that you don’t want to BE any “thing” in particular. What if instead of BEING an occupation, you want to BE a person? What if your dream breaks the traditional rules of American adulthood? What if your dream is not to follow any one set path but to keep wandering off in different directions until you’ve explored the whole forest? Then “NO NO NO!!!! That is not okay, that is not what your elementary school teachers meant!!!! Get back on the path!!!!!” Thus the whole idea is proven hypocritical. It’s okay to dream of being a doctor but not a waitress. It’s okay to want to go to law school but not to cosmetology school.
Our whole system is training us for a career. Intelligent, well-adjusted American adults are given 18-22 years of schooling to choose a career, and then spend the next 40-50 years stuck in a Monday-Friday 9-5 box while they desperately scramble “up the ladder.” The average person gets excited about two vacation weeks a year and spends the other fifty weeks working to pay off their new Corvette and save for “retirement.” How do they even know they’re going to make it that far? If you were going to die tomorrow do you think you would be happy about all that money you put towards your chance for a cushy slide into senility? Or would you wish you had spent those countless working hours watching the sun set over the French Riviera, climbing Machu Pichu, or driving across America with the love of your life?
Many of us do have boundless opportunities in America. We can travel anywhere, learn anything, see and do so many things. Where is the logic in rushing into one job and staying there forever? What a waste of the options we have! Why don’t we question this concept of “the ladder to success” more? Why don’t we think more about “living like there’s no tomorrow”? If we really believed all the talk about “Carpe Diem” we wouldn’t be dutifully clocking in and out for 50 years. We’d get on a plane to anywhere, play some music loud, go swimming in the sea, fall in love. Explore this world and do everything we want to do NOW! We never KNOW that there will be a tomorrow. The idea that we could die at any time is confirmed in every major religion. Yet so many religious people seem to have so little life in them!
I’ve yet to hear a good argument for why life has to be boring. No person in history worth emulating has ever gotten there by following the rules. If living life the way I believe will cause me to be seen as a failure by society’s standards than so be it. I’ll have much more fun as a happy drifter then as a stressed-out runner of the rat race. So I’m a “f***-up.” And I’m embracing it.

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