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Originally Posted by jonn3
A lot of that is the "I'm ok - your ok" attitude of "find what makes you happy and don't worry - every thing else will just happen". Well it doesn't in today's world. Tons of kids are graduating from college with degrees they will never be able to use - they may be very knowledgeable on a subject - but they don't know how to survive or earn a living on their own.
Yes - finding something that you will enjoy in life is very important - but it also needs to be tempered with some reality - and it is the lack of understanding of what it takes to get by in life that I find missing in so many young people.
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This is the subject I wanted to discuss here.
Yup. Opportunities and chances do show up. There are openings in life; many of them made by ourselves. Once a young dude stands before choosing what option/choice he wants to take, he appears to be fully disoriented. Actually, the dude is completely clueless, putting it down bluntly. His usual responses are: 'I do not know. I cannot make that decision.'
Being taught a specific worldview, probably outdated to a degree, and certainly wrong in some of its postulates, used to be of great importance to me in my 20's.
Just like everyone else I was clueless. But I knew only too well what my 'ole folks' would want me to do under such circumstances. (Yeah, do the 'manly, right thing.) By no means did I embrace this, but I had a very important starting point, and a general point of reference.
If I were to do what they would have wanted me to do, I reckoned, I was going these upsides, and those downsides. So, the thinking process set in, and it was only for me to decide what mattered to me personally, and which way I really wanted to go.
With the notion of gender neutrality, much of the referential structure of the decision-making process is gone. The dude shrugs with his shoulders, and says, he is clueless, and goes to the sidelines to see what happens next. (Usually, not much. He has just sidelined himself...)
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Bob tells a similar story, too.
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With all that and with my father being away so much and our living in so many places, I was exposed to many different ideas, ways of thinking, and ways of living that by the time I was a teen in the 70s I realized that I had to work things out for myself, in my own mind, regardless of social norms. It took a few years to figure out who I and what I wanted but once I did I proceeded openly, though generally tempered by good manners and respect for others.
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Complex and possibly confusing or even contradictory at times, Bob, too, stated his interior debate on how he wanted to handle his life with a clear reference to an existing system.
If you start from a scratch you are really starting a very much of a life-long uphill struggle.
KD