DISQUS

susan · 4 years ago

I can definitely see the merit of the "adultescent" argument and I can think of a number of people I know who would probably fit the bill--people who basically refuse to make any hard and fast decisions about their life and end up just kind of going with the flow.

But I can also think of some examples in my life of people who made important decisions, seemingly for the sake of making a decision. People who thought that marriage would make their life meaningful or that moving to a new town or picking a new career would make them automatically happy. And often those decisions didn't stick. And even when they did the people who made them ended up feeling a comparable amount of confusion and weirdness to before they made the decision. Though maybe the point is to keep going through that process until you have found things that are important to you and/or learned enough valuable stuff about yourself. You could make that argument.

When I think about people who are really engaged with life and know what they want, I usually think of people who have one or more big passions in life. Musicians come to mind, because I know a lot of them. (There are a lot of flakey overgrown teenagers in music, too, of course, but I usually find they're easy to tell apart from the people who have a calling and are committed to what they're doing.) But also people who have meaningful jobs that are helpful to those around them. I could imagine someone being really engaged in their life through activism but I haven't really seen that, except maybe with a few anarchists.

Sorry, tangent...anyways, it's an interesting thing to think about.

chris · 4 years ago

You bring up a good question that is actually addressed in another article I was reading yesterday. Basically, as I think you're saying you have to really search yourself for what your strengths and weaknesses are and what you could see yourself doing for ten years versus one year.