Practical Philosophy 101
What is your purpose?
What is the point of your life? And while we’re at it, who are you? Who are you really?
You may not have answers on the top of your head. These are deep, philosophical questions.
You may not have taken the time to sit down and answer them, but as an acting human being you are communicating your answers. And if you haven’t answered them for yourself you are probably living with someone else’s answers.
If you have never thought about what success means to you, you probably have accepted your parents ideas about what success is, what their idea of the meaning of life is, and you’re going to move in that direction unless you stop to consider where you are going.
The mythology around College is that you can find out more about yourself once you arrive on campus. Classes and clubs will guide you to the things you want to do with your life.
But when you show up to your first year of university you do no introspection about these big questions in life. You don’t spend time thinking about why you are there and where you are going. Instead you spend your time thinking about what party you will be going to on Thursday night, and what bar you will go to on Friday night.
Maybe that sounds attractive to you right now, but four years from now, when you are no closer to figuring out how you want to invest your time, you will be wishing that you started answering these big questions four years earlier.
Traveling opens you up to all sorts of questions that are natural, but sometimes easy to avoid. Instead of worrying about your first year statistics course of your calculus course, or getting drunk with your friends you are going to be having some deep conversations with fellow travelers in hostels. If that doesn’t sound fun to you, if you would prefer to just be partying with your friends, then traveling is STILL a better place for that.
You already know that I didn’t have great social skills when I arrived at university. I was shy and socially anxious. Being around people I didn’t know made me nervous, so I resorted to alcohol. Beer, whiskey, and rum were my substitutes for social skills for most of my time in university.
In my first year I had found a group of friends who wanted to drink a lot. I was happy because I could only really get human connection when I was drunk. Virtually every week for the entire 8 months of university I was drunk three or four nights a week. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, sometimes Monday, and depending on the week Wednesday as well.
I barely studied for my courses, and I was lucky to pass all but one of them. I passed nine out of ten of them and managed to barely avoid going on academic probation.
I would wake up hungover, skip class and watch The Price Is Right. I got fat; going from 180 pounds to 210 pounds and eventually all the way up to 235 pounds the next year. I was a mess, but it was completely normal in the environment. Everyone around me was destroying themselves with alcohol, doing terrible things, and laughing about it.
Universities are meant to be places where you learn and become someone that you can be proud of, but most students are there simply because it is what they think they are supposed to be doing. Students find their value and identity in getting drunk, being stupid, and seeming cool to the people around them. Drinking heavily is so culturally accepted that people rarely pull back and notice how absurd it really is. People poisoning themselves to the point of vomiting, blacking out and getting in fights. Spending their limited amount on escape in the form of beer.
A question no one seems to ask is why are young people so interested in alcohol and other drugs in college?
The common answer might be that it’s just youth experimenting, but I think there is something deeper than that. A general lack of purpose and meaning in people’s lives and a complete lack of self-knowledge.
You leave home at 17 years-old and go off to university with no idea what you want to do with your life. The K-12 school system is so detached from reality that you haven’t seen what any of the options are. You’ve been isolated from interactions with adults other than their parents, teachers, and maybe a handful of other adults. If you’ve never met anyone who has turned a passion into a career, or built a business from scratch, it’s pretty unlikely that you would try it.
When you get to university this problem only gets worse. You are now interacting with a bunch of people in the same position you are and the adults are mostly academics studying obscure topics with little to no actual experience in the economy. You have no idea what you want from the next few decades of your life, you’re not seeing any actual options, and the thought of really applying yourself to one area and then not liking it is terrifying. So you drift. You feel no sense of purpose, no sense of worth because you’re not really accomplishing anything and when you drink you escape all of that existential stress.
It is often said that if you don’t know what you want to do it is a good idea to go to university in a general area. This will help you become a well-rounded person. Well rounded because you know a little bit about a lot of stuff. Well rounded because you have shallow knowledge of many topics, but no deep understanding of any one subject.
This is the logic that I used. I had no clue what I wanted to do, so I went to business school, did four years and wasn’t anywhere closer to what I wanted to do. Looking back now I can see that university was never going to help me figure out what I wanted to do in life, because I wasn’t exposed to any of the options.
On college campus’ finding a career is talked about as if some divine being would one day come visit me on earth and tell me what I should be doing. People keep saying follow your dreams and follow your passion. But when you are being taught about human relations and operations management and the only thing I was interested in was sports, it didn’t seem like very practical advice.
Finding what you want to be doing with your life is a combination of figuring out what you don’t want to be doing and building up confidence and trust in your mind and your abilities. Finding out what really inspires you requires the awareness of yourself and when you are truly happy. It requires the practice of courage, moving against the irrational fear that’s pushing you to conform.
“Why do they always teach us that it’s easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It’s the hardest thing in the world—to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want.” – Ayn Rand (Through Peter Keating in The Fountainhead)
The practice of courage and self-awareness are both better developed on the road.
Instead of getting comfortable in your on campus friend group, when you travel you face challenges and fears every day so you slowly gain more confidence in yourself. You are more independent away from pressure to conform to your social group or your parents desires. You have the time and the space to really notice what is going on inside of you; what makes you happy, what makes you angry, and why it happens.
All this time you are interacting with the most diverse group of people that you have been exposed to. People from 19-29 from all over the world with experience, ideas, and backgrounds you didn’t even know could exist.
Going to university is largely the final level of education in your training for conformity. Travel is the best environment for non-conformity, and for figuring out who you are, and what you want to spend your time doing.
When you decide to travel instead of jumping into college, you are putting yourself into an environment conducive to building a personal philosophy. You will have space and incentive to replace the philosophy of your parents, social circle, and the school system, with your own philosophy; your own answers to life’s big questions.
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