And that’s your life.

After going out to dinner yesterday I got a call that STANFORD BEAT USC holy crap how did the (formerly) top college football team lose to such a bad team and now we’re second which is the highest we’ve ever been for a long time whoo.

Yeah, we were about that breathless.

The food wasn’t bad, either.

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Music midterm is coming up on Tuesday, and it’s the most studying I’ve done yet for a midterm: listening and taking notes on 24 different songs, reviewing the cultural context of folk and blues music, and going over notes for 11 reading assignments. Something good’s got to come out of all this work, right?

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So, how do people get nowhere in life? I’ll go first.

When you were back in kindergarten, what did you want to be? Chances are if it wasn’t policeman or firefighter, it was following the footsteps of your hero figure (cultural indoctrination of doctor and lawyer be damned because when you’re 5 years old, doctors were big scary people with sharp things and you didn’t know what lawyers did anyways because the extent of punishment for your actions was being yelled at by your parents).

When you got into high school, you’ve trimmed your expectations closer to life (hopefully), but you still have grandiose ambitions to be famous or to change the world and you think that if you can just get into that college of your dreams, you can do whatever it is you want to.

You get into college, and you realize that it isn’t a magical formula leading to money / world-changing discovery / true happiness / secret of the universe but you think, hey, maybe, just maybe, if you can go through the right major and meet the right people and get the right job you’ll be set.

Be set for what?

I mean, how many people come out of college and apparently their goal in life is to have a nice, white-collar office job where the ultimate goal is to be the employee of the month and snag that promotion, to buy a two-story house in a suburban neighborhood, to have 2 and a half kids (That’s the statistical norm! Gotta follow the norm!) who take the yellow school bus, an to have enough money before retirement to get a house on the beach and maybe go on a few cruises. And that’s your life.

Geez, aren’t those people just original.

I mean, nobody needs to be the one to change the world. (Well, some have to, but not everyone.) Be the guy who tunes guitars for a living, be the person who wins the Pulitzer Prize for taking a picture of a dying kid, be the fiddler who stopped playing for 60 years and picked it back up professionally, be the guy who dedicates the song “Stop Playing Games With My Heart” to a girl, be the woman who sees a mentally-handicapped kid eating lead on Youtube and stops him, heck, be the guy who decides he can’t live a lie with his girlfriend and ends up getting arrested, but don’t be those people.

Not the people who settle for mediocrity. That’s what I mean by going nowhere – not doing anything interesting with your life. (A bit of a tangent, but hey, I was ambiguous in my question anyway, so run with it.) We’re not even talking about make your life FULFILLING by changing other people’s lives or anything altruistic like that, we’re talking about valuing your own life enough to lead an interesting one. You owe that much, if not to anyone else, then at least to yourself. (By the way, all the examples I listed are REAL PEOPLE and all that.)

Man, not to sound preachy or anything, but it’s annoying to see people whose PENTULTIMATE GOAL IN LIFE is to lead “as normal a life as possible”.

I agree with Louie’s response that you don’t look at how to get somewhere in life (i.e. looking to other people for examples when your circumstances are going to vary so much that it doesn’t really apply) or even just being so indecisive as to miss out on all your opportunities. Opportunities knocks but doesn’t stay at the door and all that.

Losing motivation is also good (and a very real possibility), but only for macro-level I WANT TO CHANGE THE WORLD type things. When we’re talking about just living to the fullest there’s no excuse.

Not fulfilling goals doesn’t mean YOU FAIL AT LIFE because you may have just decided on a new goal. So uh, I disagree.

Feel free to disagree with me. Part of the caveat of opinion.

I’ll fight you, though.