Another class done. Another year done.
Looking out on everything, I guess I'm a little surprised I got to where I was. Two years ago, I couldn't imagine myself being where I am now. I've made a great many strides, along with missteps, and a lot of things in between. This class has facilitated quite a few of those, and I've learned a few things. I think here is one of the things that, if I didn't learn it from this class, the class certainly contributed.
What makes an adult?
College is, in many ways, a safety net. Another layer between childhood and adulthood, partway in between, but feeling a little too geared towards the former rather than the latter. Certainly, we're leaving home, and we have the ability to determine our fates somewhat with our choices of classes and careers, and through our grades. Yet at the same time, I live in an environment paid for ahead of time, no worries of bills or other things. I have teachers and other adults to guide me. And there's a persistent belief that College is just a gauntlet, and after coming out of the gauntlet I will have the rewards of a good job and a happy life.
But life isn't quite that simple is it?
After I get out of college, I have the job market to deal with, and in this economy that's not a comforting thought. After that, there are the numerous responsibilities I will have to face that in college I would take for granted. Little details, like washing my own dishes, not going out every night to get food or get it from a dining hall. Cleaning up my room rather than being content to leave it when the year is done for someone else to take care of. And so on. But all those things stack up.
Then there are the relationships. No more sitting in a cramped sardine full of people. Now it won't always be as simple as running into people I'm interested in. Now I'll have to go out, out of my comfort zone, into new places, and hope there are other people looking for the same things I am.
And then of course I die, eventually. Maybe not for a while, but in time that fact will become very real.
But at that point, who do I turn to? Who do I go to for advice? Who do I get to help me solve these problems? How do I even solve them?
I think adulthood is when you realize that everyone's as confused as you are.
When you realize that no one has all the answers, and that you know as much as the rest of them. When you realize that the advice is just that, advice, and that they can't take into account every outcome, every factor, that there is no certainty in the outcomes of your choices. You, like everyone else, are stepping into an uncertain future, and nothing is guaranteed.
Adulthood is when you realize that you're alone.
When you realize that there are some things where no one can help you. Questions of what to believe, of what will make you happy, and how to get there. People can give you advice, but they can't make you follow it, and they can't always make it easier. In the end, the steps towards the outcome can be made only by yourself. You will have no warm hand to hold onto leading you towards the goal. The only hands you have to hold are your own.
Adulthood is when you realize that you're not alone.
When you realize that you are not an island. There are people all around you, who care about you and want you to succeed, and whom you depend on in more ways than one. People who you can reach out to, if not for guidance than for support, something so simple yet so meaningful. When you realize that things such as love and compassion are real and existent in the world, and in ways that make the adolescent infatuations and flurry of young adult emotions pale in comparison. When you realize that you can make a meaningful difference in others lives, and that others have made a meaningful difference in your own.
Adulthood is a lot of things. Complicated things. Paradoxical things. Frightening things. And it's never an absolute. It's a process, and one I'll go back and forth on until the day I die.
But adulthood is also about knowing all that, looking at that great confusing, paradoxical, frightening mass in the eye, and saying "Yeah, I'll play along."
Saturday, May 10, 2014
Sunday, May 4, 2014
5/2/2014: "I Earned This"
"I earned this".
I heard that in class. Can't remember from whom, or exactly to what purpose. I believe they were trying to justify the work they'd done, to get the success which they had now. Perhaps they were justifying their spending habits. It's a point of pride, I suppose, to say that the rewards I got were from my own force of will, that nobody gave anything to me.
And it's a lie.
Not entirely. On a microlevel, on a level solely on what you could or could not have done, yeah you earned it. You performed the actions, you put forth the effort, and you reaped the consequences. But the world doesn't operate on a microlevel. It is a vast conglomeration of forces all interacting with one another, causing one another and being caused by one another. To say that you got to where you are solely because of what you did--and more starkly, to say you earned it--is to ignore the vastness of the world you stand on, the world of which you are a part of.
Let me give an example. I am in NYU. I got accepted to this university after the university accepted my application. They did this by looking over my essays, my grades, and my background, and depending on one's perspective, they judged either that I was worthy of going to the university, or they did a numbers calculation and decided I was likely to improve their stats. Regardless, by accepting me, they overlooked other persons who also applied. Perhaps if certain other people had applied, people with more impressive credentials or more likely to improve university stats, they would have chosen them instead of me. Perhaps if my ethnicity and class were different, they would have overlooked me for someone else.
And of course, to be accepted, I had to be in certain positions. I was dependent on my parents, both engineers, who earned money to raise me in our household, and put a substantial amount of money in my college fund, that I even come close to affording a college at NYU. I was dependent on my grandmother, and in a morbid way on my grandfather dying several years earlier, allowing my grandmother to spend money that would have been spent on him (or money that came from my Grandfather's will) to further pay for my education in high school and college.
And of course, I was dependent on my parents and how they raised me. They in turn were dependent on their parents and how they were raised, and so on. Further than that, I'm dependent on my father, who had to flee Romania after getting on the wrong side of the then-Dictator's wife, which allowed him to meet and eventually marry my mother.
But that's just on a family level. On a national level, I'm dependent on the continued economic stability of the nation, which is itself dependent on a myriad of factors: historical, social, political, spiritual, philosophical, and so on. I question, for example, if our economy would be so prosperous if we did not receive so many of our products cheaply from other countries, where the workers are paid substantially less than here, and live in far more unpleasant conditions. I question if my family would have the same house, same financial situation, if our society did not regularly discriminate against ethnic minorities, preventing them from reaching similar situations. I question similarly if the environment I grew up in were the same if there were less income inequality. Perhaps someone who is homeless right now might have, in another world, become an engineer that provided the same services my parents's company does, and my parents may have had to get a different, possibly less lucrative job.
Those are all hypotheticals, but they nonetheless service a point, which is that my current status in life is built upon all that came before me, and those factors which continue to this day. In terms of my personal successes, I feel I can comfortably say that it was through my agency that I was able to achieve them, but that is different from saying I earned anything. I don't feel I can be proud of my achievements when I know how much beyond myself went into them. Happy, sure. Satisfied, sure. But not proud. Not feel like I've earned them.
Because if I say that, I need to think about other people, people who might also have earned it, who might have worked harder than me to get what I got. But they couldn't, because their situations were such they were not given the opportunity to compete with me for my things. In that context, the swell of pride one gets from any achievement becomes a hollow feeling indeed.
I heard that in class. Can't remember from whom, or exactly to what purpose. I believe they were trying to justify the work they'd done, to get the success which they had now. Perhaps they were justifying their spending habits. It's a point of pride, I suppose, to say that the rewards I got were from my own force of will, that nobody gave anything to me.
And it's a lie.
Not entirely. On a microlevel, on a level solely on what you could or could not have done, yeah you earned it. You performed the actions, you put forth the effort, and you reaped the consequences. But the world doesn't operate on a microlevel. It is a vast conglomeration of forces all interacting with one another, causing one another and being caused by one another. To say that you got to where you are solely because of what you did--and more starkly, to say you earned it--is to ignore the vastness of the world you stand on, the world of which you are a part of.
Let me give an example. I am in NYU. I got accepted to this university after the university accepted my application. They did this by looking over my essays, my grades, and my background, and depending on one's perspective, they judged either that I was worthy of going to the university, or they did a numbers calculation and decided I was likely to improve their stats. Regardless, by accepting me, they overlooked other persons who also applied. Perhaps if certain other people had applied, people with more impressive credentials or more likely to improve university stats, they would have chosen them instead of me. Perhaps if my ethnicity and class were different, they would have overlooked me for someone else.
And of course, to be accepted, I had to be in certain positions. I was dependent on my parents, both engineers, who earned money to raise me in our household, and put a substantial amount of money in my college fund, that I even come close to affording a college at NYU. I was dependent on my grandmother, and in a morbid way on my grandfather dying several years earlier, allowing my grandmother to spend money that would have been spent on him (or money that came from my Grandfather's will) to further pay for my education in high school and college.
And of course, I was dependent on my parents and how they raised me. They in turn were dependent on their parents and how they were raised, and so on. Further than that, I'm dependent on my father, who had to flee Romania after getting on the wrong side of the then-Dictator's wife, which allowed him to meet and eventually marry my mother.
But that's just on a family level. On a national level, I'm dependent on the continued economic stability of the nation, which is itself dependent on a myriad of factors: historical, social, political, spiritual, philosophical, and so on. I question, for example, if our economy would be so prosperous if we did not receive so many of our products cheaply from other countries, where the workers are paid substantially less than here, and live in far more unpleasant conditions. I question if my family would have the same house, same financial situation, if our society did not regularly discriminate against ethnic minorities, preventing them from reaching similar situations. I question similarly if the environment I grew up in were the same if there were less income inequality. Perhaps someone who is homeless right now might have, in another world, become an engineer that provided the same services my parents's company does, and my parents may have had to get a different, possibly less lucrative job.
Those are all hypotheticals, but they nonetheless service a point, which is that my current status in life is built upon all that came before me, and those factors which continue to this day. In terms of my personal successes, I feel I can comfortably say that it was through my agency that I was able to achieve them, but that is different from saying I earned anything. I don't feel I can be proud of my achievements when I know how much beyond myself went into them. Happy, sure. Satisfied, sure. But not proud. Not feel like I've earned them.
Because if I say that, I need to think about other people, people who might also have earned it, who might have worked harder than me to get what I got. But they couldn't, because their situations were such they were not given the opportunity to compete with me for my things. In that context, the swell of pride one gets from any achievement becomes a hollow feeling indeed.
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