The Point Between Where I Was and Where I May Be

You don't look at the things you have. You only look at the stuff you don't have. Those guys are right about you, you're money.

- Rob (Ron Livingston) to Mike (Jon Favreau) in the movie "Swingers"

You know, there really should be a class that you take right before graduation that will give you a little preview of what life outside of academia consists of. Just like I don't believe that high school prepares you for college, I don't think college prepares you for the real world. Sure, it may prepare you for a job in the real world. But there's no direction at all when it comes to life outside of establishment.

Having 22 years (or so) of your life mapped out really can give you a false sense of security in the world. Just because you excelled in high school doesn't necessarily mean you'll excel in college and the same goes for college out into the real world. Just because you got a 4.0 in all of your business classes does not mean that you will be the best businessman when you enter the work force. But you're never told these things in college because it would discourage, I think, a great amount of people from going. Yes, the degree means a lot when it comes to getting a job outside of college -- but straight book learning really does not build much of a foundation for you to stand on, in my opinion.

For instance, I studied Literature and Creative Writing in my undergrad work. When I was sitting in my capstone class, the university's English counselor walked in and gave a presentation about "what to do with our English degrees". He handed us these little pamphlets that looked like he printed them off 5 minutes before coming to speak before our class and, with a straight face, told us that the only future we had was either Teach for America or the Peace Corps. I told him that I wanted to get an MFA and work on my writing further, but he stared right at me and told me that was a bad idea because no business people will be at my graduation waiting to hire me. "It doesn't work like that, in the real world," he said to me.

So you throw your cap in the air, hear Pomp and Circumstance while you march across the stage and shake some nameless faculty member's hand. You hug your friends and stand in the glaring sun outside of the arena and realize, "I made it. I did it." All through your childhood, it was drilled into your brain that you need to do well in school, go to college, and graduate. From there on out, life is easy because you have a degree. The whole world opens up for you. The sky is the limit.

Well, as most graduates find out within a first couple of weeks after the ceremony, that's a bunch of bull shit. When you enter the workforce as an entry level employee, you often find that there are several people -- colleagues, so to speak -- that are minus a college education. Or in the process of getting an online education. But don't worry about the fact that they're making more than you because they have more experience since they didn't take the time out of their lives to go to college.

Here's the moral of the story and what I'm really trying to hone in on: you have to be able to connect with the present state of your life. There is that cliche saying out there that the past is history, the future is unknown, so there's nothing to do but focus on the present. I think this may be one of the most overlooked and undervalued bits of advice given to young people. I should know, I never paid attention to it.

A lot is made these days about the value of money and what it can get you in life. Especially with the recession, student loans, credit cards, car payments, etc., it seems as if money is constantly the 400 pound gorilla standing in the middle of the room.

So thus, we are in the conundrum that we have transitioned from a life where all we had to do was study for tests, write papers, and make sure we went to class. Our free time was ours -- we could go running, go drinking, hang out with our friends. Our days were truly our days. But now, working all day in a cubicle staring at a computer screen can be such a drain that, when we get home, we no longer have the energy or wherewithal to go do anything. Can't go out drinking or stay up late because we have to be up at 5 A.M. every morning. Weather is just now finally getting nice, so we can go outside. But the fact of the matter is that we need to start realizing that this desire to go back to the old days and the yearn to be far enough along career-wise immediately in order to get out from under said 400 pound gorilla makes us lose the ability to focus on anything good happening in the present.

We'll take my current situation. I have a wonderful girl friend, I love my apartment, I love my dog, I love my books..I have all this stuff in my life right now that I can say that I love, so it makes me wonder why there are still those afternoons where I feel like I'm floating in nothing. The quote way back in the beginning of this post is dead on. We have a tendency to only see the things that we don't have because we take what we do have for granted. What we have is around us all the time -- thus, we inherently lose the abiliy to appreciate it the way we did when it first entered our lives. We may not have things other people have but it is not our judgment call to say that we should have those things as opposed to that person. To make statements like "Well, I deserve that more than she does". These sorts of attitudes turn our eyes away from what is good in our lives and become envious of what others have in theirs.

Please, please, please try to take a second everyday to just look out of the window, focus on the horizon, and take account of all the things in your life that you love. Not only does it make the day to day easier to bear, but it can also put things in perspective as to what your future goals are. Your goals should be your own -- not the goals of anyone else. You should strive to get where you want to be, not where other folks think you should be.