When I set out to write this article, I wasn’t really sure where to start. What if every other college student is pretty content with what they have right now, and doesn’t spend time thinking about the people out there leading much more exciting lives? Or what if one person aims for something another person views as average, or even boring? Being part of the first generation to grow up with Facebook and Instagram, it’s almost impossible to avoid seeing other people’s successes, and hard not to compare them to our own.
Living an average life could mean something different to everyone. Whether it’s just being stuck in the same routine everyday, or following a certain path in life that your parents or your advisors told you to follow, or simply having an okay job, being healthy, and earning enough money to live well and raise a family. And those are all great things to have. For most people that’s all they need or want. Or maybe they’re just too scared to want something more.
At this point in our lives, so much is unknown about the future. Most college students don’t have a set ten-year plan, or even a one-year plan. We all just procrastinated on real life by signing up to pay a bunch of money to get a piece of paper saying we spent four years learning stuff we’ll probably forget after graduation.
Obviously, college is a lot more than that; it’s a chance to learn how to make pasta without messing it up, a chance to get drunk with a group of strangers that will become some of your closest friends and an opportunity for you to live somewhere other than at home. But the reality is, we spend most days going to class, doing homework and maybe going to the gym before going home to study more or watch Netflix. Maybe on the weekends we’ll go to a party, go out to dinner or watch a movie. And if you put it that way, we’re probably not making the most of the essentially free extended holiday our parents are mostly-likely bank rolling for us. At Cal Poly, people tend to be a lot more motivated than students in the UK, especially those taking degrees in business, medicine, pharmacy or engineering. There are people who manage to earn more during their summer internship that most people’s yearly salary or spend their free time designing apps, volunteering for the homeless or researching new cures for cancer.
There are people who know very clearly where they’re headed, and that’s great. But it’s hard not to have small voice in the back of your head making you question how to make your life mean something more. After all, because most people do invest so much time and money into studying and getting a degree, it must be in the hope that it will mean something. We’re here preparing to throw ourselves into the real world, away from everything we know – but for what? What if all we do is just accept that graduate job offer at the large corporation where we’ll work for a few years until we realize that’s not what we actually want to do. But by then it’s too late to completely change careers, or simply too hard to push yourself out of your comfort zone. Or maybe you don’t get an internship or job offer in your chosen field, so you end up taking a part-time job in a café or shop.
Some people are okay with this, and that’s okay. For others, that’s their biggest fear. And maybe we should be more scared about settling, or maybe we should stop aiming for something unachievable. Maybe life is meant to turn out the way it does for a reason, and we should learn to love whatever we end up doing after college, because that’s the where we’re meant to be. We put so much pressure on ourselves throughout college to get good grades and be successful, that we either end up losing interest in our chosen field or pushing ourselves for success, only to aim too high and end up disappointed.
We can all make our own average life; a middle ground between settling and not doing anything about it and striving too high only to be disappointed. What that ends up looking like will be different for everyone, and that’s okay.