Tag: work

nestofstraightlines:

okcupidescapades:

okcupidescapades:

i feel like the most important piece of wisdom i can impart on teenagers is that no one–no one–knows what the fuck they’re doing

my brother is 26 years old, makes $200k a year, and just bought a house with his fiance. he’s the success story you hear about but never actually meet in person, but it all happened by accident. he wanted to go to college for clarinet performance, but he got rejected from all the top schools. so he decided to major in physics instead, and then went on to get a doctorate to put off being an adult for a few more years. but then he ended up dropping out halfway through the program and accepting a job with google as a software engineer. so to reiterate: my brother majored in something he was not interested in, and then he got a job that had nothing to do with his degree. 

he isn’t successful because he had some master plan he followed, he just stumbled around blindly until something worked out. and that’s what we’re all doing–i majored in political science and now i do customer service for a company that makes industrial-sized gas detection monitors. the marketing director at my company has a degree in biology, and my mom has an MBA and works at a middle school.  no one knows what they’re doing, we’re all just trying different things until something works out.

so if you don’t have a plan, that’s fine. most of us don’t. and even those of us who do, don’t usually end up doing the thing they thought they would. it’s okay to relax and let life carry you wherever it’s gonna carry you. because even though a lot of us don’t end up doing the thing we wanted, most of us end up happy anyway.

I’ve been thinking about this post since I made it a few hours ago, and I realized that I literally don’t know anyone who’s doing what they thought they’d be doing at this point in their life.
I know a girl that has a degree in neuroscience and works in a restaurant (and makes quite a bit more money than I do, might I add), and a guy who wanted to be a parole officer but is now a security guard. I know people who wanted to be lawyers but ended up not having the grades for law school. I have a friend who’s 24 and just finished her bachelor’s, and two friends who decided to go to grad school because the idea of joining the adult world terrified them.

When I was seventeen, I was 100% sure that I was going to get a job as a bureaucrat and save the world. When I was a 21-year-old recent college grad, I found out that it’s impossible to get a government job unless you know someone. So I gave up and found something else. I know my teenage self would be disappointed if she could see where I’m at, but you know what? I don’t care. Because teenage me was an idiot. She didn’t know anything about the world or how it worked, and she couldn’t have possibly predicted the curveballs that life would throw at her. And because I don’t know a single person who’s doing the thing they wanted to do when they were teenagers.

I know a thousand people who aren’t where they thought they’d be, and zero people who are following the path they set out for themselves. All of us are confused and all of us are scared, and it’s okay if you are too.

I’m doing a job I love for a good wage, I love my flat and my friends
and London. I spent most of my twenties what felt like going nowhere, not even sure how
to make a start. It’s only in retrospect things I realise I had made a start and done lots of stuff, it just felt like nothing because I couldn’t see where it was going at the time. I
realise now everything I did before this has led to this. In turn, what
I’m doing now is a step towards a future path I don’t know about yet,
but wil understand looking back.

My friend started out studying Creative Writing but dropped out. She went on to studying nursing and became a midwife. She kept on wriitng, and eventually went on a prestigeous writing course in Bath. she’s just had her first book published (it’s Waterstone’s Children’s Book of the Month!). I’d call her a success story, she’s certainly happy and enjoying her life, but she (like all of us) spent her early twenties making what seemed like odd choices and false starts.

What froze me was the idea that I had to choose, had to make the right decision, and I realise now, it doesn’t matter. All you have to do is do stuff. And commit to the stuff. And then when it’s not working for you any more, move on. Not everything will be a vocation, a lot of the stuff you’ll do will be to make rent, but that doesn’t remotely mean it won’t be useful to you down the line. Life offers endless possibililities but you have to be out doing SOMETHING to encounter them.

Your twenties are scary though. If you’ve been to university, you might have found it tough, but post-graduate life is a whole different kind of tough. You at least know what you’re meant to be doing at university. When you graduate you’re expected to suddenly be self-motivating, aged 22-24 (usually) and with zero experience so far in life of setting an independant agenda. It’s super common to be depressed and daunted.

So don’t take it as failure. You’re far too freshly minted an adult to gauge anything yet.

(I’m saying this from the perspective of 33. I’d hope someone ten years ahead of me would have similarly comforting things to say to my age, because uncertainty and fear don’t go away with ‘growing up’ and ‘success’ but I don’t know yet!)