Hot Topic: The Future

I read a quote by a very wise woman when I was on Tumblr, a quote by Daria Morgendorffer. If you don't understand that joke, Daria is a cartoon character from the animated TV series Daria. She spouted these pearls of wisdom, "My goal is not to wake up at forty with the bitter realization that I've wasted my life in a job I hate, because I was forced to decide on a career in my teens." And it made me realize that, yeah, man, I don't even want to be a film director but why the hell am I taking it for university? I wasn't sure what I wanted to do when I was 16 (which was when I had to decide what I wanted to take for university), and my dad thought it would be a good idea. Don't get me wrong, I'm pretty good at what I do, but it's not my passion. It's not something I get wet dreams about. I'm going to turn 19 soon and I still don't know what I really want to do with my life. When you reach a certain age (21 maybe?), people just automatically assume that you know what you want to do. But my sister, at 27, still doesn't. She has a good job and everything but even she said she wasn't sure yet. Well, now I'm scared. 

Let's get to it:

I think this whole graduate-high-school-go-to-college-get-a-job thing is preposterous. I mean, we've barely even lived during our high school days and they expect us to choose a career path at the tender age of 16, 17 or 18? We're barely even legal to drink alcohol or drive, and they want us to choose a path that we have to follow for the next 40 years. You can argue that we can change the course of our lives but who would want to hire someone who majored in, say, economics and applies for a job as a fashion designer? It's hard to change positions like that, especially when there are people who have devoted 4 years of their lives into making frills and skirts and lace. 

High school is a time of discovery; whether it be about science, math, language, friendship, sexuality, and personality. I didn't know who I was back then, and looking at me now and looking at 14 year-old me is like looking at two completely different people. So why do they think that when we're 30, we'll still stick to the career path chosen when we were in our teens? My father majored in Math and Computer Science and now he's in the Advertising industry. It just shows that we can't trust our teenage decisions.

After high school, give us a chance to live. Give us a chance to travel, to do this, to do that, meet this guy, meet that girl. Be heartbroken. See Machu Picchu. Climb a mountain. Discover the world and you'll discover yourself. You shouldn't rush from high school to college because if you're unsure about who you are as a person, how are you to choose what's best for your own future?

High school is supposedly a time to discover what you like and what you don't like. And they're right. I discovered my hatred and inability to count (cross out engineering and finance) and my love for language and arts. But that's the most basic discovery. It's like Copernicus saying, "hey... I think that the Earth revolves around the sun. I'm just saying. Just saying. Maybe." He forgot to mention that the Earth moved in elliptical orbits, or that other planets revolve around the sun as well. You need a long time to know what you want to do for the rest of your life, but the pressure to be successful and to make your parents proud is so great that kids just take the option that will give them a good financial status to pay the bills.

And I hate how life has become this...this...system of money and work and money and work and not about doing what you love.

Some of my friends scored an above-average grade in Economics and Business class in high school so they automatically think that their major will be Commerce, because again, it's the most financially smart option to choose. Never mind the fact that they scored an A in English and Arts and that they can paint a portrait of their own mother with their eyes closed and recite Act III Scene I of Hamlet whilst shitting on the toilet.

I don't really know where I'm going with this. Maybe the fact that we're so pressured into finishing school and getting a good-paying job that we discard the journey to find our undiscovered passion just to follow the system that has been set in place for us ever since our parents' post-coital conversation about their future child.

But I guess that's how the world works. Happiness doesn't ensure that you have a savings account and bacon to bring home to your family of 4. Money does. And that's what we need at the end of the day.