Kienna+K’s+OpEd+Article

Welcome. Please leave your passions, hopes, and dreams by the door when you come in. Here, take a Checklist of Success.

The Undisputable Path You Must Follow In Order to be a Successful Human Being in Society. (Checklist of Success):

1. High School. Take AP classes. All of them. (even if you hate the subject), be on a varsity sports team (or two or three or four…), be a virtuoso (or a prodigy of any kind. Or of many kinds. Just be exceptional), and dedicate a minimum of 200 hours to ending world poverty (only to meet the requirement of course. Why help people for the sake of helping them? No, it’s about the application) -Also, keep in mind that school is not about learning. You should not enjoy your classes or want to actually retain any of this information past exams. This is not about exploring ideas, learning about the universe, developing your own opinions, or acquiring any knowledge whatsoever. It’s about where your GPA can get you.

2. College. Mandatory. I don’t care if you want to be a deep-sea welder. No one will ever respect you if you don’t go to college. Get a degree or say hello to the homeless life.

3. Job. Yeah, it’s not everything you’re hoping for. But cubicles can be cozy. And even if you hate it, there’s always reality television to drown your sorrows in.

4. Retirement. And here we are: the ultimate goal. This is what you have been working for your entire life. Those SAT exams, that passion you gave up long ago, those identical days spent in closed walls with obnoxious people and work nobody cares about, the vacations you didn’t take… All for this. And now here you are, sitting in your reclining chair and swallowing half a dozen pills. Now you finally have the time and the money to take that trip to Italy you’ve always dreamed about…if only your severe arthritis and other ailments would allow it. Now this, this is the life. It was all just so worth it, wasn’t it?

Okay, so maybe that’s a bit exaggerated, but it’s not all that far off from what life seems to have become the expected reality for so many people.

When you’re sixteen years old, the world should be one big opportunity; a place to explore rather than tolerate. For so many, it seems like life has already become one long list of onerous tasks to endure. Hopes for an adventurous life and dreams of pursuing what you’re passionate about are already fading, outshined by the daunting idea that you, like millions of people, will have all of this potential and opportunity and passion, but still end up working a dull 9-to-5 job. And that’s just how it’s going to be.

There is this obsession with the future; we seem to live for it, even though we know it probably won’t be all that much better than the present. The American Dream of working hard to pursue your passion has devolved into working hard for a mediocre future: enduring high school to get to college so you can earn enough money to support your eventual family and send your kids to college (because that’s just what kids are supposed to do) and ultimately comfortably retire. Looking around, it seems like that is the ultimate goal: a nice retirement. And that has to be the most pathetic, dull, and terrible aspiration I have ever heard. Your whole life “endured” so you can have a few happy years when you’re too old to do anything with yourself anyway?

It’s frustrating. It’s discouraging. There is more to life than tedious routine after tedious routine, always looking to a better future as the escape from the monotony (a better future that never comes).