From a young age we are taught that school is the only way to be successful. It is imprinted into our minds that we must have a high paying, and stable, job right out of high school. When we were in grade school we dreamed that we would be happily married and have a family by the "old" age of 20. Now that we are in are late teens or twenties, we face reality, and it is nothing like we thought it would be.
No one told you that college can last 4 years or more, or that bills will take up a majority of your paycheck. We are pressured to find who we are within our first twenty years of life, but we often forget that we have time. There is no need for us to overly stress about what we want to make of our time here. We have the means to try out different curriculum, careers, and choices. We are the generation of opportunity. We have the rest of our lives to be strained about our futures. We do not need to be fresh out of school and go straight to a job that we will be at for the remainder of our career. We need to change our mindset and live for now, rather than for the future. Yes, we should set future goals and try our best to achieve them, but we must understand that if we do not reach the goal, it is not the end of the world. When one door closes, another one opens. We may have disadvantages other generations did not have, but we also have so much going for us. There are a lot of factors that can get us down, but that is the thing, they can bring us down. In order to do that, we must allow them to do so. That is an aspect we strive in: we do not let obstacles get in our way. Sure, we may get caught up in a road block, but that means that we push ourselves harder to get out of the rut. This is a big, “We do what we want,” to all those who say we must focus solely on our careers, families, and future endeavors. We do not need to define ourselves by where we want to be in ten years. We need to celebrate finding who we are, and maybe even spending some extra time developing ourselves. Life is a party. It will settle down at some point, but first we have to socialize and become comfortable with our surroundings. We are now, and we are just fine being here.
