When a young person looks to an adult in a position of authority, they think, “They’re adults. So they must know something about their job.” Many young people think they know everything, but they still buy into the idea that adults have a system, that there’s a plan to the seeming absurdity of life.
Now stop and think for a second. How many adults do you know who are complete fools, totally lost, without any particular insight or direction, or sense of value that extends beyond their favorite TV show? Of course, these people are everywhere and many are in positions of power and respect.
I’m not going to be judgmental for once – shocking, I know. But really. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that these people are not the real problem. But think about this setup from a kid’s perspective.
Young people go to school, always answering to rules they barely understand. Then they go to college. More rules. If they’re extremely lucky, when they graduate they get a job, but deep down, they still feel like they’re just kids who don’t really know anything. They have no direction in life or a plan that gives them a sense of self-worth.
They say to themselves, “I’m an adult, but I don’t feel like one. I still don’t know anything yet.”
Then – and I’ve seen this happen – someone, usually someone far older, comes up to them and says, “No one does!”
You can actually see the wheels turning in their heads as they realize that everyone else is as lost as they are. Eventually, they learn all the rules and structure they’ve been indentured to over their lives is a gigantic fraud. Life is just one big shit-show. Cut. Quote. Print.
You see, the problem isn’t that nobody knows anything – that’s always been true. The problem is that we’ve constructed a system of meaningless rules constraining life to a series of predefined activities.
Get a job. Get married. Get a mortgage. Get cable TV. Get locked down to a physical location with responsibilities and debt making life as predictable and controlled as an elementary school. These are the societal pressures we face as a condition of being considered normal, good citizens.
This creates the illusion that life makes sense. And what is the point of these rules? To serve a false god we call progress, whose only miracle is new distractions and whose only promise for redemption is “more.”
This pressure to pursue material progress creates a kind of existential dread, a feeling that you’re not secure, you’re not moving in the right direction (or not fast enough), and that you need to get to that next step — the next degree, the next job, the next house — to be just OK.
Recognizing this fraud is the biggest challenge of being in your early 20s. Learning to deal with this fraud emotionally is the biggest challenge of your late 20s, and I suspect, many do not survive this stage of life wholly intact. And your 30s? Well I guess that’s when you spend most of your time blabbing about it on the internet.
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