i feel like the most important piece of wisdom i can impart on teenagers is that no oneâno oneâknows what the fuck theyâre doing
my brother is 26 years old, makes $200k a year, and just bought a house with his fiance. heâs the success story you hear about but never actually meet in person, but it all happened by accident. he wanted to go to college for clarinet performance, but he got rejected from all the top schools. so he decided to major in physics instead, and then went on to get a doctorate to put off being an adult for a few more years. but then he ended up dropping out halfway through the program and accepting a job with google as a software engineer. so to reiterate: my brother majored in something he was not interested in, and then he got a job that had nothing to do with his degree.Â
he isnât successful because he had some master plan he followed, he just stumbled around blindly until something worked out. and thatâs what weâre all doingâi majored in political science and now i do customer service for a company that makes industrial-sized gas detection monitors. the marketing director at my company has a degree in biology, and my mom has an MBA and works at a middle school. Â no one knows what theyâre doing, weâre all just trying different things until something works out.
so if you donât have a plan, thatâs fine. most of us donât. and even those of us who do, donât usually end up doing the thing they thought they would. itâs okay to relax and let life carry you wherever itâs gonna carry you. because even though a lot of us donât end up doing the thing we wanted, most of us end up happy anyway.
Iâve been thinking about this post since I made it a few hours ago, and I realized that I literally donât know anyone whoâs doing what they thought theyâd be doing at this point in their life. I know a girl that has a degree in neuroscience and works in a restaurant (and makes quite a bit more money than I do, might I add), and a guy who wanted to be a parole officer but is now a security guard. I know people who wanted to be lawyers but ended up not having the grades for law school. I have a friend whoâs 24 and just finished her bachelorâs, and two friends who decided to go to grad school because the idea of joining the adult world terrified them.
When I was seventeen, I was 100% sure that I was going to get a job as a bureaucrat and save the world. When I was a 21-year-old recent college grad, I found out that itâs impossible to get a government job unless you know someone. So I gave up and found something else. I know my teenage self would be disappointed if she could see where Iâm at, but you know what? I donât care. Because teenage me was an idiot. She didnât know anything about the world or how it worked, and she couldnât have possibly predicted the curveballs that life would throw at her. And because I donât know a single person whoâs doing the thing they wanted to do when they were teenagers.
I know a thousand people who arenât where they thought theyâd be, and zero people who are following the path they set out for themselves. All of us are confused and all of us are scared, and itâs okay if you are too.
Honestly thank u, i needed to hear this again
