We like dividing the expanse of time into four-year segments for some reason. Each installment of the winter or summer Olympics occurs every four years. Presidential terms last for four years. Leap years occur usually every four years. The World Cup occurs every four years, and bachelor's degrees typically require four years at a university. So maybe it is a fitting strategy to divide your life into four-year chapters.
In 2013, I got a new job and a new place to live. Everything has pretty much been the same old shit since then.
I've established a bit more of a foothold with respect to my career, though. In April 2016, I took the professional engineering exam, so that I could receive my license the following March. Even with my license, though, my coworkers and I found ourselves pretty obnoxiously underpaid. One of my coworkers jumped ship, and many others were about to follow. My superiors figured out that there was a problem, and increased my pay, and that of the others, by a very significant margin, to result in a comfortable salary. I am very thankful for this, because I'd been accumulating credit card debt ever since I moved out of my parent's house.
Property sucks, though; who wants to hear about that? I could tell you more about my romantic life instead, but I really didn't pursue it, for fear of becoming nothing short of a burden to a prospective partner. I wanted to be sure I could handle my own self-sufficiency before I became a problem to someone else.
So what did I accomplish? I'll tell you what I did accomplish: I was okay. I did a better job at being okay. Being okay is hard! I learned how to survive adulthood. And perhaps that was enough to ask.
I knew I really became an adult when I learned that staying afloat mentally and physically is enough to ask. Perfection is never a reasonable goal, but it seems relatively more attainable when your parents are taking care of all the dirty work for you, keeping you alive and healthy because it's their responsibility. When you become an adult whose goal is self-sufficiency, you're limited to what you can accomplish on your own, with nobody else's energy, work, or time. The help is gone; it's just you, now. No one is cooking, cleaning, or feeding you while you try to make your dreams come true. Your goals as an adult are to stay fed, safe, and healthy, but they were never your goals before. The lofty dreams seem more distant, now-- those lofty dreams you had as a child, whose accomplishment would bring glory and self-worth to your future adult self, or so you thought. But as an adult, I have to ascertain that my self-worth and my definition of my own success can no longer hinge on the realization of starry-eyed dreams I held as a child. And it's not like I'm wasting my adulthood by neglecting to pursue these lofty, abstract dreams, because I'm spending plenty of time pursuing my own happiness. I continue to harbor self-worth and feelings that I've succeeded, because I'm spending my time clinching success and self-worth through more practical means of taking care of myself. The only thing that changed as I reached adulthood is that I now realize that my happiness depends far more on practical means than it does on reaching some childhood dream. Safety, health, exercise, nutrition, sleep, and love are far more rewarding to me than some dream I had to swim with dolphins or become a dinosaur paleontologist. And maybe that's what would lead a young person to label me a "lame-ass." But any young person who endeavors to do so will learn eventually what really generated happiness and success. Stability is hard enough to ask for in this world, and I'm incredibly lucky to have found it. This is true to my adult self, even though, twenty years ago, I would have complained that I'm bored about my life.
Twenty years ago, when I was ten years old, I looked at each upcoming year as a symbol of incremental change. I was in fourth grade, and what awaited me the following year? Fifth grade. Then sixth grade and a new school. But when you're done advancing through grades in the educational system, what's next? Employment awaits, the ultimate goal of one's educational career. Once you have a stable job like I have, though, what does a person have in front of them? What's next? Retirement? Seriously, you want me to be looking 35 years ahead to the next step? Of course, I'll have new advents in my personal life before then, including marriage, spawning offspring, and potentially divorce (which would be an advent, not that I'm anticipating it happening to me). But those would be the only things filling the space between graduation and retirement, and they don't even have anything to do with what my education was supposed to prepare me for: the working world. What fills the space between my youth and retirement? Just one line of work? One constant routine for 40 years? That doesn't sound exciting, but that's the reality brought upon us by the specialization of labor. Employers only ever want those with the most expertise in a given area, so I'm stuck trying to focus my expertise in one given area for years and years. We all are.
I'm looking back on my childhood and starting to realize that the portion of my education pertaining to my future employment was over-emphasized. I was taught to ignore learning household tasks and just focus on schoolwork. Through high school and college, my grades gradually began to fare worse because I started losing interest in school. I think highly of always committing oneself to continue learning all the way through life, but I started to become more aware that the topics I learned about would not relate to anything I did later in life. My educational experience didn't give me the learning I needed; it just seemed to throw all kinds of learning at me with no discretion. As I get older, the more awareness I get of the fact that knowledge that isn't used is eventually lost. If you don't access a part of your memory, it gets erased over time. Therefore, not only have I failed to use 97% of what I learned in high school and college, but I've actually forgotten 97% of what I learned during those times. This leads me to seriously question why I worked so insanely hard as a teenager and very young adult. But I did get a bachelor's degree that I used to get my current job, so does that mean I still have any remaining right to complain?
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