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Lifetime decisions for the modern teenager

Change or remain stagnant. Run towards something else or lie down on the train tracks and wait for what comes. Shit or get off the pot.

In school, for as long as you can remember, teachers and guidance counselors would remind you, “You must figure out what you want to do with the rest of your life.” Perhaps they took your elementary-school dreams of being firemen and teachers a little too seriously. Shouldn’t you figure out what kind of kid you want to be before you sign yourselves up for a lifetime in some field you don’t know anything about?

For years, it was their mantra. “You must figure out what you want to do with the rest of your life.” Standardized testing. Semester schedules. “You must figure out what you want to do with the rest of your life.” By the time Junior year rolls around, if you haven’t a clue what you want to do, they are concerned. They pull out the results of your career aptitude test and go down the list. “You have a high aptitude for…” something you never, ever considered before. You ponder your options. You’ll be late to work if you hang here much later, and you have a pile of homework to do on your path to figuring out what you want to do with the rest of your life.

You think of what you like to do as you scan groceries at the supermarket or flip burgers at the fast-food joint. You are no where near disciplined enough to be a concert flutist. You are good at debating. Perhaps you’ll be a lawyer. You are good at writing. Perhaps you’ll be a journalist. It doesn’t matter that you hate people, don’t talk to strangers, and could care less about the wrinkled state of your clothes or frizzy state of your hair. Remember, “You must figure out what you want to do with the rest of your life.”

You apply to all of the schools that are convenient, they being either as far away from home as possible, or so close that it feels like high school all over again. Senior year is a waste. You’re accepted early enough so that cutting your entire last semester wouldn’t make any difference. You tell your teachers and your guidance counselors and your parents that you’ve made this life-altering decision - that you are fated to be that which you will declare as your major in some strange school with three times as many buildings as your town.

You think that college will teach you what you need to know. Your professors don’t tell you what goes on in an office, or a law practice, or the trenches in the midst of war as you cover it for your publication. They talk a lot about theories. About the demise of media. About a case you’ve never heard of. And soon you are holding a degree and wondering what it is you paid for. The knowledge that you don’t ever want to be a journalist, or a teacher, or a political mastermind. If you’re lucky, you’ll be paying the loans back long after the ink on that degree dries.

Real life finally calls. You realize that you have a choice - live at home for another ten years and seek out the perfect job (for your adolescent choices), or find a job with a 401(k) that pays enough so you can get your own place. It’s only temporary, you think. Soon you’ll have a nest egg that will allow you to travel, to write The Great American Novel, to find out who you truly are and what you are truly meant to do. Five years later, after a few promotions, you still don’t have the nest egg, but you panic about what the future holds. This is not what you want to do with the rest of your life. But where else can you go? What else can you do? And will you make as much wherever that is?

You ponder, not for the first or last time in your life, why they don’t teach you useful things in primary or secondary education. Living on a budget. What you’ll need to retire. How to maintain a car. How to eat healthfully. You wish they had, because for all of the algebra and chemistry you sat through, you don’t remember much. Just that you had to figure out what you wanted to do with the rest of your life.

You are thirty and you still don’t know. You wonder how things got so messed up. If you’re lucky, you realize that you were simply conditioned to think this was wrong, this fear, this not knowing.

Maybe you are destined for greatness. Maybe you are not. But you may never know what you want to do with the rest of your life. And that is reality.

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