It wasn’t just me

It wasn’t just me.

When I look around and think that I’m not where I should be in life, I know that I’m not alone.  I give myself grace, because I know that I was wrestling with difficult life circumstances.  Still reeling from the aftermath of my own family trauma.

But I also realize that the world was not a great place for young people. The economy wasn’t conducive to young people getting their lives off of the ground.  It wasn’t just me, it was alot of young people. And the pattern is repeating for Gen Z.

I was poorly prepared for life in the real world.

The first year of college can be extremely stressful for the student who has still not emancipated himself from the parents.  The college milieu usually requires new defenses, although some students manage to survive by refining and implementing their former high school defenses.  They continue to act out and settle for mediocre school work in a kind of extended adolescence, which merely postpones the inevitable rupture to the final year in college.  It is not uncommon for some college students to flunk senior courses, with the semi- unconscious intention of staying in school another year.”

–Masterson, pg 86.  

For me, college was a stop gap.  Instead of preparing me for life in the real world, it just became a holding space, a place to delay that inevitable rupture from the safety and protection of childhood, where I was taken care of and told what to  do, and launch into adulthood.

But then, again, that was the case for many millennials.

Some of it was the college that I chose.  I chose a prestigious liberal arts college, with a very open ended major system.  Everything was taught in a lofty, intellectual, overly erudite way, instead of grounding me in core concepts and principles.  I would eventually go on to take college classes elsewhere and found the information presented in a much more straightforward way.  I needed that.

They say in academia, “Stay in your lane.”  If you’re in psychology, focus on psychology.  If you’re in History, focus on history.  If science, science.  Cross-disciplinary thinking was discouraged.

This was limiting for global thinkers, people like Joseph Campbell, who I recently learned camped out in a cabin in Woodstock for a year, studying history and mythology.  There’s more space for people like this nowadays.

But I wasn’t ready for that.  I needed a lane.  I needed guardrails, boundaries and guidelines.  I needed my dad.