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Is life really all about getting great grades, getting into your dream college, working your ass off day and night to get the best grades and get the best job offers, then slave away at a job for 30 years or so going back and forth every day doing the same thing over and over and over again..getting married and having kids and making sure they do what you did. Then dying before even living your life?
Most people lead lives like the one I just described. Is that how they envisioned their lives would be when they were our age? or am I just ignoring reality? The reality that there is always something stopping you from doing something you've always wanted to, like having to work all day to pay bills, buy clothes, feed people,etc... that people lead the lives they do because they have no other choice
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<p>Stuck: Have you heard the concept of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs? The basic concept is simple: people need to survive above all and only when their situation allows rising above the basic need for survival do they begin to think about other issues of self-actualization. Look it up on the web. It's a very useful concept and one often used to frame discussions.</p>
<p>It sounds to me that you are living high up on the Hierarchy to even be able to ask this question. Therefore, I would guess you are solidly middle class or above. The difficulty of someone in your position is that, if you don't burn with a passion towards something, you are left with a sense of needing to survive in order to be motivated. In other words, you are not motivated intrinsically by a particular field like music or medicine or writing or law. If you were, you wouldn't be asking the questions; you would just be going for them with your head down.</p>
<p>Or maybe you are, but are still asking these questions because you are looking at the greater pattern and seeing that people don't really seem to act with a lot of choice ultimately in what they do. This seems to bother you because it seems so deterministic. So much of our education, in a liberal arts environment, is often seated in the notion that we are creatures of intention rising above our natures and above, well, fate. The pattern of actual life for so many seems so base, so obvious, so much a surrendering, if you look at it a certain way.</p>
<p>I don't know you at all, but I opine these things because I was this way. Maybe I have in fact misread your situation. So be it. I can still comment about mine and read into your situation things that I had thought. I am simply not motivated by money, moreso by status but not even that in the traditional senses of the word.</p>
<p>I asked some of the same questions you are asking. In other words, I had the luxury to do so as well, as you appear to have. This doesn't mean that they aren't important questions to ask. It just means that you may be putting the cart before the horse. Unless you are independently wealthy, what you are focusing on right now in your life ideally is setting up your future to survive first.....and secondly to thrive. </p>
<p>Because of the course of my life, I ended up high on the Hierarchy of Needs asking the questions you are asking at a time when it was appropriate to think about my survival, not my higher level of self-actualization. My parents worked hard in their lives and they succeeded in putting me in a place where I could ask these questions, but they weren't so successful that they relieved me of the basic fact: I have to do something -- work -- to survive.</p>
<p>You too I imagine have to do something to survive. But that is all. You don't have to live a life fitting a certain pattern beyond the pattern required by what enables you to survive. But you do have to work (I imagine).</p>
<p>So the questions: what do you want to do? what are my dreams? where am I going? All these have two components: 1) What will allow me optimally to survive? 2) What will allow me to thrive?</p>
<p>Because of my nature and where I came from (things happened in my life that made it difficult for me), I lived a life of relative indirection. I have spent my life wrapped up in these two questions of survival and thriving. Your goal, I think, is to marry the two, as I have done finally. You need to choose very carefully from a place of self-knowledge. Don't choose to be a doctor, for instance, only 'cause your father says so.</p>
<p>If you were thrown out on the street tonight and suddenly had no one close enough to you who you could live with or depend on, what would you do? Think about it, because in a sense that's where you are (assuming my assumptions are right). Of course, your needs would become much more basic. Where do I sleep? How do I eat?</p>
<p>You are not far from that, but you can't see it. You sound really smart and on the way to great things. But look around in your environment. There are people you know that very well might end up on the street. I grew up in a richer neighborhood. There were two people I knew who ended up on the street. Years after high school I saw one rummaging for food in a garbage can. Another was my best friend from high school who went crazy after college and lived on the streets for nearly 5 years; I spent some time getting him situated and feeding him, but it did no good. He had done well at a top 10 university and graduated with good grades. Okay, they had complicating factors, but they showed me that abjection is not so far away.</p>
<p>Don't be afraid of that, but recognize it is not far away. Look into your heart and into the world and try to understand what is you need to survive. You have to work. Start moving toward that. And recognize that you are really lucky; the throwing onto the street that you are about to experience is going to be lubricated, eased, if you will, by the generosity of your parents and the opportunity to prepare yourself through education.</p>
<p>Where the difficulty lies for you is what it means to thrive. Do not let anybody decide this for you. I spent a lot of time responding to the pressures of others in this regard. On one level, it pushed me to accomplish and that has turned out to be a good thing. On another level, it eventually led to a pretty severe depression where the world was very dark and I barely hung on to my life. </p>
<p>I emerged from that period with a resolve that my life was mine to live and I didn't care for anybody's view only my own. I realized that I had survived and would. Mission accomplished. Everything else, to use that horrible phrase, is gravy.</p>
<p>I embraced the gravy, if you will. I was happy, living a simple life, but as I wanted, dating many women, working hard enough to survive but not worried about status a normally defined etc. I found my status was my own happiness, that I was loving life in a way I never had. I decided that I wouldn't live the pattern that you described, that my life was my own and that so long as I didn't hurt others, I could do what I wanted.</p>
<p>Good luck. People will ask you what you want to do to survive. They are only partly right. You need to figure out what you need to thrive. And therefore you need to also figure out for you what thriving means. The pattern you described is a very narrow way of defining it. Open your mind.</p>