It's weird. All of the years since college have felt pretty much the same. If you asked me about something that happened in the past four years, I would find it difficult to discern which of the four years was the distinct one when it happened. 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017 have been host to the same process of self-improvement for me. During those years, I wanted to develop a sense of pragmatism and self-sufficiency, because, prior to those years, all I had ever learned was theoretical "book-smarts." The brand of knowledge propagated by schools really only serves adults in a professional setting, but the professional side of adult life is only one place of many in which an adult needs to succeed.
The last four years have been dedicated to making up for my lack of practical skills, with the object being self-sufficiency. It's the specific approach I had to take to reach the goal everybody has, of reaching health and happiness for oneself. I did a really good job of school, but life proved to be something where I don't have a lot of useful knowledge. Why is that?
The stark difference between your status as a child and your status as and adult is whether or not there is someone outside of yourself who claims responsibility for you and your welfare. The defining trait of an adult is self-sufficiency. If you are dependent on parents, guardians, family members, or other people, for anything other than your social well-being, you have yet to fully reach adulthood. In the modern world, where the diversity of people's resources are all conceptualized as a single monetary value, self-sufficiency in the practical realm translates to the single, simple goal of making money. This is contrasted with the pre-modern world, where self-sufficiency required the production of food, the extraction of water, the construction of shelter, the strength to provide security, a heat source to last through the winter, and various other provisions. Thankfully, we are privileged enough to live in a world where all we need is a marketable skill and an opportunity to receive compensation for its use.
The act of making money, and thus satisfying our thankfully single requirement for practical self-sufficiency, is usually enough for an adult to survive. However, as you know, there are other needs people have, aside from just money. Other than monetary well-being, humans have a social well-being, a mental well-being, an emotional well-being, and physical needs that are sometimes overlooked or even damaged by one's workplace. Therefore, a childhood like mine, where knowledge of the professional world is acquired as if it's the only priority, fails to prepare a young person for the totality of his or her future. Since I'm full of theoretical knowledge, I've been trying in my adulthood to counteract my lack of practical knowledge. The real world requires theoretical understanding and practical knowledge; in fact, it requires the latter more than the former. Of the four letters in the Myers-Briggs personality phenotype, the preference toward different types of knowledge is the second letter, meaning that the mother-daughter pair of psychologists saw this distinction as one of the four most impactful facets of one's personality. And analysis has shown that 25% of people tend to prefer abstract ideas, innovative dreams, and a theoretical understanding, where as 75% of people tend towards literal, practical interpretations of exactly what's happening. This makes sense, because humanity needs grounded people who keep the world running as it exists today, moreso than we need innovators who dream up new things with an abstract, extrapolating mind. I look at myself as someone who's received a lot of ability to dream and extrapolate, but hasn't received the tools necessary to physically keep himself alive or to acclimate to the concrete, actual world. Adjusting to this world is very difficult to someone who knows a whole lot of holistic shit but doesn't know how to balance a budget, handle household chores, or establish healthy habits. You can't make an impact on the world with your ideas if you don't have the skills to survive.
I don't really have anyone to blame for my lack of practical knowledge. I have a natural tendency toward taking in the world around me and learning all I can from it. I like to learn and dream about the world. But most of the useful knowledge in the world comes from trying to do things, and failing at first. In a classroom setting, an instructor relays to the students a bunch of knowledge which is assumed to have significance. The instructor is assumed to have more knowledge than you, the student, but furthermore, the instructor is assumed to have a better understanding than you of which knowledge has significance. You have to take the instructor at his or her word, that the information shared in the classroom will have a use or implementation later in life. In the practical world, though, as you're diving into a new task for the first time, your attempt to understand the knowledge needed for that task, will immediately have use. As you dive into something you're trying to actually do, you immediately get confirmation that the knowledge you're acquiring will be used; however, in the classroom, you never receive that guarantee that what you're learning will ever amount to anything. This is why some people have a real aversion to classroom learning, but they will pick up skills as they venture out into the real world and eventually thrive. Some people require that promise, that a thing they learn will have to use to them, or else they aren't going to waste their time listening to the knowledge someone tries to relay. As I went through the late stages of the educational system, I became more and more like that type of person. Now, when someone tells me anything, I demand an explanation of how the words I hear will be any kind of asset to my life, or else I'm just going to tune that person out. I have too much that I want to do with my time; now that I place so much value on the time I have, I refuse to waste it on listening to words that do nothing for anybody. I will even listen to a person who just needs to vent, because that has benefits for the speaker even if it has no direct benefit to me. But, if I'm not convinced that someone's words will result in anything positive for any party, I will regret that my time was wasted.
I've always had the reputation of "the smart kid," but I feel like I have profoundly lacked practical knowledge in my life. I have felt that I need to play catch-up with the rest of world when it comes to learning how practical knowledge works. I had no idea of my own sensitivities and how to get along in the world by myself, but by golly, I knew multi-variable calculus! The way we prioritize knowledge in our education system is so unbelievably stupid, and I feel victimized by it. We need to teach children how to take care of themselves, how to eat right, how to maintain their mental health, how to vote responsibly, and how to balance a checkbook. Particle-based thermodynamics and parochial categories of literature can fuck off.
I'm doing a better job at the whole adulthood thing, now. I can handle life without the assistance of my parents, and that's mostly because I forced myself to. It turns out that, in the practical world, the most effective way to learn how to do something is to force yourself to just start trying it. You learn best when you jump into just playing with stuff. You learn the most about music when you just sit down in front of a keyboard and start messing around. You learn math the best when you just sit down and start playing with countable objects. So I resolved to learn life by saying "fuck it" and jumping in. And once you've done enough stuff, you learn the benefits of taking the risk of venturing into something new.
Making any kind of foray feels like taking a risk, because, with anything that you foray into, there is always the chance of finding out that that thing sucks. You might find that either the new thing makes you feel bad, or that you really suck at the thing you're trying out. But if the worst that can happen is just an adverse feeling, and your health is strong enough, that adverse reaction isn't going to change your life significantly for the worse. If you're well enough in touch with those things that keep you going and keep you happy, it won't damage your psyche much to learn that this thing you're trying sucks. But making these forays is the only effective way to learn anything and become a richer person.
As of the last year or two, I have become confident in my ability to secure a stable level of happiness for myself. I'm doing okay; I can say that now. Without a doubt, I couldn't have said that truthfully in 2012 or 2013. But the phase of stable adulthood just all feels the same. A lack of tragedy is ideal and a great objective, but tragedies create defining moments that divide the story of my life into chapters. Tragedies have the greatest impact on my growth, and they change me in the most profound ways. I'm not really defined by discovering pleasure, like finding a girlfriend who makes me very happy, because getting rewarded for doing things correctly doesn't do anything to really change the nature of my being. So nothing defining has really happened to me, but I should not wish to change that. Sometimes I have to ask myself: which do I crave more-- change, or happiness? I think the best outlook is to change as much as you can while still maintaining happiness; this is to balance your time between your happy place and the adventurous world outside of it. My existence is dedicated to discovering this balance.
What have I done in these last 4 years? I've been working and living in the same place. Getting a new job, residence, family, and stuff would make my life feel like it's changed. But I don't know if I want those kinds of changes, more than I want my living situation to remain the same. The things I remember most about these last 4 years have been my travels, because those are the things that change me the most. People remember what makes an impact. In addition, I remember the people who motivated those travels, because those impact me profoundly as well. I also remember the meaningful restorative feeling of my new bed, which I acquired in April 2017. Sleep well! Invest in your sleepytime, because Christ, it's a third of your life. I think I'll do another post talking about specific things about the last four years. This post was more metacognition about deciding what I should even write in a reflection.
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