The other day I overheard a conversation in which one of my friends said that life is just downhill from here.
She said once we graduate from college, we will spend the rest of our lives looking back at this fleeting time and remembering what the freedom of opportunity felt like.
Given, she made several good points.
Once we graduate, we have to worry about taxes, retirement and many other innumerable responsibilities that come with aging.
However, it appears to be rather nihilistic to believe life will not be as good as it is now or even that this time represents some grand pinnacle moment that won’t ever be achieved again.
This is not the first time I’ve heard this opinion. I have heard it from my friends and even family members, so it’s certainly not an uncommon notion.
However, when judging the quality of our lives, both past and future, I believe we focus on the wrong things.
It seems too easy to judge our lives based on the number of responsibilities we have without considering they are responsibilities for a reason.
For many, it’s a responsibility because it is something we care about.
Of course, we will have responsibilities when we have a family, but we have those responsibilities because we presumably wanted a family and, hopefully, the love and joy we experience from them outweighs the stress of responsibility.
Anyway, it seems that if we were to judge that having a family would make life worse than it is now, we would never have a family.
Or, consider our careers. We gain far more stress actually launching into our careers than we currently have in college.
But this stress should be a trade-off for something much greater, namely, our love for our jobs.
Hopefully, we enter careers we actually enjoy so it doesn’t become a burden to work.
It will be stressful, sure, and assuredly unhappy at times, but not so much so that it would have been better not to enter a career at all.
It just seems sad to consider I will never be happier or more fulfilled than I am now.
We are just at the beginning of our lives. There is no reason to assume, or even expect, there aren’t better things down the road.
I hope that after some consideration, people who have made that journey would agree and say that everything, good and bad, was worth the effort.
allenjo@indiana.edu
