I am nearly twenty-two and a half years old, and I've realized two important things. One, there are certain benchmarks you're told throughout your life are important. Two, most of them don't matter at all. They are merely artificial barometers of your life, considered important not because they actually matter but because they're experienced by everybody. Also experienced by everybody--breathing. Since I've yet to marry or have children, I won't claim these are the five most overrated days of any life, but here's my list to date of days that don't matter.
5. First Job--To people who experience their first job, usually while in high school, it's considered a big landmark because, well, you make money. Which is nice, even though the average high schooler doesn't really need to spend a ton of money. But the reason it's overrated is because it's actually the first steps to you becoming a boring and jaded person like everybody else. In fact, the worst thing that could happen at your first part-time job isn't that you suck at it so bad that you get fired, but rather that you're so damn good at it that you make the brilliant decision "I'm going to focus more on this than I will on school." The fact is the most lucrative of jobs to a high schooler is paltry to almost all adults. Work experience is good, but it's actually quite dangerous for your life if your first job sets the foundation for your future.
4. First Day of High School--I was convinced in middle school by teachers and by parents and by others of this sort that the first day of high school matters. Why? Because high school matters, of course! High school is, after all, the best time of your life. While this may have seemed true when this expression was founded (in an era when the only real alternative to education was going to war), how many people really consider high school the best time of their life? Everybody is awkward; people are pretentious assholes about how much money they (their parents) have; you are literally told when you can go to the bathroom and when you can go from room to room. Barring a prison sentence, high school shouldn't be the highlight of your life.
3. Graduation Ceremonies--They get more overrated as they go along because they're equally useless. This isn't to say that the act of graduating is useless--it isn't--but to hear people give cliche-loaded speeches about following your dreams and working hard and being the future isn't going to change anyone's life. For instance, when I graduated from high school, my commencement speaker (I won't say who it was, but it was either a notable alumni who created a strong remedy for malaria which is used today in sub-Saharan Africa, or it was my superintendent) told us we were the future. Okay. Does anyone think anyone heard that and all of a sudden felt compelled to turn their life around? "You know, I was gonna take my diploma and then go shoot heroin in the woods for the rest of my life, but I think I'm going to go to law school now."
2. 21st Birthday--There are essentially three types of people when it comes to drinking alcohol. Type One drank well before they were twenty-one, so turning 21 wasn't really a new thing, other than you can now buy alcohol in a bar and pay way too much for it. These people had no problem finding a highly responsible adult to purchase alcohol for them. Type Two didn't drink and still doesn't drink once they turned 21--turning 21 is even more irrelevant for them. Type Three only started drinking upon turning twenty-one, in which case the odds are fairly good you don't care enough about drinking that your 21st birthday was a legitimately significant life milestone.
1. Prom--Here are the differences between going to prom and just hanging out with friends of yours. If you go to prom, you will have rules enforced by the same people who make you do pointless BS all day for four years. If you don't, you can pretty much do as you wish. If you go to prom, you must dress up. If you don't go, you can dress up if you want, but there is no mandate. If you go to prom, you get a solid dinner. If you don't go to prom, you can go to get a far better dinner and for far less money than the fifty bucks or so you dropped for a prom ticket. Prom exists as a money gouger because it's "tradition", just as owning human beings as property was once considered tradition in the American South. I'm not saying people should necessarily skip it--just don't expect it to be the peak of your life. Because a majority of the people you see there you will never see again in three weeks.
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