I've been saying and thinking this phrase for a long time, ever since my youth (haha), but only today did I realize who actually said it: the great Irish playwright and poet George Bernard Shaw, who said it for the exact reasons I thought he might say it: to lament that the best times of our times are wasted on children, who don't know what they have and how good they have it, waste it, and have nothing to show for it when it's over and they're old except to lament that they wasted their youth. I feel the same way about my youth! Bill Maher recently said something on his show that I'm sure everyone over like 30 or 35 could relate to: I wish I could go back to my early 20's, but only if I know what I know now, not if I still had the same brain and mindset as I did when I was that age. Everyone lacks maturity and clear thinking and sense of purpose back then, but especially me: College, which is supposed to be the best time of one's life, I spent as if it was a bridge to something else; just the fact that I voluntarily shorted myself 1 year of college in order to graduate early and go to law school shows how little I valued those years, as well as the fact I never went on a study abroad program, likely one of the few chances in one's life to live in a foreign country totally out of one's comfort zone but totally fresh and possibly life changing. And part of Shaw's lament, again perfectly relatable, is that there was time for those young people to take chances, make mistakes and start over again, but as an older person without youth, there's no more room to live like a youth and get bailed out; you have to be much less risk-averse and thus live in a cage of age-induced responsibilities.
There are some college students, though, that seem to have their acts together, as I re-watched NBC's College Bowl and wondered if I could get some of those questions right back in my college years... (what's a DEXA scan? Did I know what the first book of the New Testament Bible was? Deep knowledge about Poe works like The Fall of the House of Usher and Lenore? Probably not. One of the many missed opportunities of college (among learning a new language, studying abroad, signing up for scholastic bowl/trivia club) was getting really good at something, even if it was like becoming a music buff or dive into a whole new world of music, like many high school students/ college students do. Instead, I spent the first time away from living at home with my parents by doing the same things that I liked that were still in my comfort zone: play online poker, play basketball at the gym, read books. I do have some pleasing memories of those times, but they weren't life-changing, they were like making myself a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich every day when there are so many different ethnic cuisines to check out; the major US cities have pretty much the whole world's cuisines available to you, and that's probably what it feels like for a 20-year-old in college: you have the whole world in front of you and your whole life ahead of you, but you just want to do the thing that your 20-year-old self feels comfortable doing, and you just stagnate there. I took a week-long trip with my undergrad business program to Germany and Poland after my freshman year of college; I wasted it by not understanding the culture, the business areas of the region, and just wandering around. Oh and I had some bratwurst; that's what I remember ( I was also oddly repelled by alcohol in some sort of rebellion against my peers who were really into alcohol, so I missed out on all the fun, another thing I look back on and ask, "Why did I DO that?"
I also forget the technology factor: the world was different when I was young. I used to write papers by hand; use a cell phone only for calling people, meet people in person. The world of 2005 (when I was just entering college) is such a different world than 2023 (social media just started in 2005, and in some time-traveling fantasies I have a kill-baby Hitler role and stop Mark Zuckerberg (not kill him, he's not that bad of a guy) from creating Facebook and stop the social media revolution), and as I drag myself begrudgingly towards my 36th birthday in a couple weeks I realize that I've lived just as long as an adult (18 years old+) as I did the rest of my life. I've lived another "adult-life" cycle! Do I have anything to show for it? I guess just the awareness and knowledge not to act like I was 18.
Which leads to my conclusion: what if college was later? People mature at different ages, but some people like me don't "get it" until much later in life and would appreciate college in a much different way later on in life. A gap year makes a lot of sense, but few eighteen-year-olds have the audacity to tell their parents or their peers that they're not going to college but taking a gap year.....to do what? In fact, I think the opposite question should be asked: You are going to college....to do what? So many kids just do it because it's the natural thing to do and everyone else is doing it, to get a job (not a bad reason, but the number of people who change majors or directions leads me to believe those kids could have a better idea of that later). Imagine an adult 30-year-old "gap year" that one builds equity for earlier in life, like saving up credit card points to one year of freedom to live one final year of youth again, but without the insecurities and worries of needing to make it and the ignorance of what the real life is like. That would be a year well spent for a 30-year-old, unlike many beer-drinking frat party-attending years of a college students wasting one of the best years of their lives.
No comments:
Post a Comment