on Big Life Choices
College at its very best offers options: The option to go on to law school or business school and work for or run a high-powered business, or to meet the perfect man and get married right out of graduation. The option to receive grants to do crazy projects with no other purpose than to look for a purpose or meaning of life. The option to get high every day with roommates and hallmates and sit around and philosophize. The option to read every assignment and put heart and soul into learning. The option to get smashingly drunk and make a big to-do in the frats. To come away with memories, to come away with learning, and the very best: to come away with a sense of the options there are for life.
Of course, no four years can reveal all the options-spending thousands a year at a small school tends to introduce middle and upper class options for living, for even the hippy life tends to be based on middle-class wealth. But class divisions and wealth disparity is nothing to do with the point of this.
The reference to college as “the best years of your life” may just be because they are so varied even in their brevity. So much happens in four years-friends are made and the course of lives are decided on as well as a fledgling understanding of “the meaning of life.” None of these are guaranteed to last out even a decade. But these three things: friends, direction and meaning are three things that seem essential reasons given for going to college in the first place. The very fact that college is so short and so varied is the trouble. With so little time and so many options, choices must be made. And through it all there is no stability other than those three essential purposes (family and home, the old standbys are not necessarily forgotten, but are left behind in the forging of one’s own life).
The forming of a life is immensely important. Despite college counselors emphasis on pursuing what you like now and letting the future worry about itself, that future is looming ever closer-both pleasing and terrifying.
The future is appealing because it offers the lure of stability: a house, a job, a steady income, the little Chinese take-out on the corner that always knows what you want before you do. It is terrifying, though, because suddenly the markers of change we are used to (like summer vacation, moving up grades, from middle school to highschool and so one) disappear (though grad school does offer a continuation of the familiar progression): job changes are not on a fixed schedule, nor is marriage nor children. It is the very unchanging stability that is terrifying.
Though there are all these feelings about life after college, that future often seems a distant one. The real question is: what to do with the immediate future? What class to take, what classes to slack off in, what to major in, which internship or job to take during the summer and whether or not to go abroad.
One choice always excludes the other. Things would often be much easier if all decisions were Hobson’s choice. But, handing out ready made decisions is not the purpose of a college-it hands out options instead.
So how do we choose? This is a question right up there with “What is the meaning of life?” We all ask each other for the answers, but no one seems to know.
It seems to me that the first step is to give up the dream of stability for a little while. Give up the idea that what is done now will have a permanent effect. For really, we are young, and must operate on the principle that we have years ahead of us to fix any errors we might make. By choosing one major over another, the precluded one is not obscured forever as an option. It is just deferred. It is wrong to suggest that staying home means missing out on “great experiences” if only because the reverse is also true. With only 16 semesters, spending one semester abroad guarantees missing out on 12.5% of great domestic (as in “not-foreign”) experiences.
But if one can give up, for 4 short years, the instinctive need for stability, these options lose their magnitude, and become just that: options.
Of course, no four years can reveal all the options-spending thousands a year at a small school tends to introduce middle and upper class options for living, for even the hippy life tends to be based on middle-class wealth. But class divisions and wealth disparity is nothing to do with the point of this.
The reference to college as “the best years of your life” may just be because they are so varied even in their brevity. So much happens in four years-friends are made and the course of lives are decided on as well as a fledgling understanding of “the meaning of life.” None of these are guaranteed to last out even a decade. But these three things: friends, direction and meaning are three things that seem essential reasons given for going to college in the first place. The very fact that college is so short and so varied is the trouble. With so little time and so many options, choices must be made. And through it all there is no stability other than those three essential purposes (family and home, the old standbys are not necessarily forgotten, but are left behind in the forging of one’s own life).
The forming of a life is immensely important. Despite college counselors emphasis on pursuing what you like now and letting the future worry about itself, that future is looming ever closer-both pleasing and terrifying.
The future is appealing because it offers the lure of stability: a house, a job, a steady income, the little Chinese take-out on the corner that always knows what you want before you do. It is terrifying, though, because suddenly the markers of change we are used to (like summer vacation, moving up grades, from middle school to highschool and so one) disappear (though grad school does offer a continuation of the familiar progression): job changes are not on a fixed schedule, nor is marriage nor children. It is the very unchanging stability that is terrifying.
Though there are all these feelings about life after college, that future often seems a distant one. The real question is: what to do with the immediate future? What class to take, what classes to slack off in, what to major in, which internship or job to take during the summer and whether or not to go abroad.
One choice always excludes the other. Things would often be much easier if all decisions were Hobson’s choice. But, handing out ready made decisions is not the purpose of a college-it hands out options instead.
So how do we choose? This is a question right up there with “What is the meaning of life?” We all ask each other for the answers, but no one seems to know.
It seems to me that the first step is to give up the dream of stability for a little while. Give up the idea that what is done now will have a permanent effect. For really, we are young, and must operate on the principle that we have years ahead of us to fix any errors we might make. By choosing one major over another, the precluded one is not obscured forever as an option. It is just deferred. It is wrong to suggest that staying home means missing out on “great experiences” if only because the reverse is also true. With only 16 semesters, spending one semester abroad guarantees missing out on 12.5% of great domestic (as in “not-foreign”) experiences.
But if one can give up, for 4 short years, the instinctive need for stability, these options lose their magnitude, and become just that: options.