Am I growing up or growing vapid?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I was always ambitious. I wanted to be an astronomer when I was six - and I knew that this required something called a “Ph.D”. Goals changed - I wanted to be a physicist, a soccer player, a this, a that. As I got into my high school years, ideas became more concrete. I thought about what might fit my personality type and tried to attach short-term goals to possible long-term goals. But I still wanted to do stuff that one might call “interesting” or “amazing”. How about being a geographer who gathers data about rural areas of other countries? How about being a writer? I started thinking more critically about what I wanted to do, but I still wanted to do things that young people are bound to find interesting.

I’m still young, of course. I’m twenty now. But over the past year or so, I’ve realized a new emotion creeping in. Suddenly, the appeals and comforts of a settled-down life - and all the things that one generally associates with it - are coming to me.

Walking through Capitol Hill, I see beautiful apartments and think about settling down in one of them. Why don’t I just get a well-paying job, a pretty wife, a couple kids, and an apartment by Volunteer Park? The idea gets more tempting the more I think about it.

I didn’t expect these emotions to come to me. I used to think I would never want to have kids and as time passed, I still never thought that I’d have them before my thirties or even forties. But now…now the appeal has come to me. Children. I could have children. I could make money, settle my finances, and live the American dream. Whatever skills I would need to do so I could gather before I graduate from college. We could have a cat with a name like “muffin” or “flufferkins”. We could giggle at movies together.

Now, I’m not here to ask whether or not I can “do both”, so to speak. Of course one can combine interesting work and an interesting lifestyle with a marriage/children/home atmosphere. There are limits, of course - a family is a commitment, and one cannot go running the Amazon with people counting on you to come home and make dinner. But that’s not really what I’m talking about. Nor am I talking about the practical aspects of my goals - I know that I might not meet a woman I would be willing to marry, or that I might not make enough money to afford a home, etc etc. The real world is complicated, and I know it.

I’m talking about the change in my feelings and my emotions. Why is this happening to me? Is the harshness of the real world breaking into me and causing me to turn to thoughts of security?

I want to know if this happened to anyone else - if, at some point in their young life, they suddenly came to realize that they wanted the settled-down life in a way they thought they didn’t.

And I wonder what this says about my personality. Am I just growing up? Is it just natural to want to be Indiana Jones in your teens and to get older and realize that life is about commitment and family and not about saving the world and doing amazing things?

Or am I just growing duller and turning away from ambitions that actually have legitimacy? Am I subconsciously drifting towards a simpler life to avoid the complexities and ambiguities of pursuing a more off-beat and uncertain life path?

I need to know.

Cheers,
Joey

2

I’m surprised you hit that point at only age 20. I’m a year older than you, and the last thing I want to do is settle down with some whiny kids and a bitchy wife. That’s not to say that I’m a party animal or a promiscuous dater by any stretch of the imagination, but I like the idea that I’m independent, accountable only to myself, and have lots of options open at this point in my life.

3

You wouldn’t be growing vapid since there’s a lot of worth to each kind of life. Not to sound patronizing, but you’re 20. It makes sense you are having some thought and emotional experiments about what you might want to do with your life. It sounds more like you are daydreaming about the positive aspects of having a family and home; part of that may be a reaction to other uncertainties and part may just be dreaming.

Float with it, see where it takes you. Beliefs you held firmly for years will change and morph and that’s perfectly fine. It doesn’t mean you are betraying some sort of ideal you should have held on to.

4

I too think it’s interesting that you arrived at that already.

I do think it’s interesting that you think you couldn’t go running through the Amazon with a family. You actually could do this. It just takes having the right partner who wants to do that too. Granted, it wouldn’t be easy to find someone who’d like but it is do-able.

Here’s the best piece of advice I ever gave, kids are traps. Oh yeah they’re cute, but that’s only what junior wants you to believe. There is only one nicer feeling than holding a little baby, and that is giving it back to the mother when it starts crying :smiley:

Did you ever go to a resturaunt and the kid is crying and you are thinking, “Why aren’t the parents doing anything to stop him?” Well that’s because the parents know that as long as junior is crying he isn’t doing something WORSE. And kids are capable of a lot worse things than crying, and I mean A LOT WORSE :smiley:

5

I don’t think anyone ever actually wants whiny kids or bitchy wives.

6

I don’t know what’s going through your mind, but here’s what was going through mine when I had the same kinds of thoughts in my mid-20’s. (I was in graduate school, getting my Ph.D. I had always dreamed of being a great scientist. Or maybe a great writer or something. And win prizes. And the career would be my main focus.)

-I started getting a much clearer picture of my strengths and weaknesses relative to realistic actual careers. Yes, I am a good quantitative thinker, and knew how to play the game, could probably have made a decent enough career for myself in academia. No, I am not independently motivated enough or enough of a critical thinker to do the work to get a Nobel Prize. If I stayed in academia I would probably be doing second-to-third-tier work, nibbling around the edges of what was actually useful and interesting, and that would depress me more than getting the heck out of academia. A lot of jobs turn out to be rather different than you think they are when you’re a kid.

-I was living more on my own and having to worry more about stuff like rent, transportation, insurance, etc. This of course makes one think more about long-term planning (will I have enough money forty years from now, etc.)

-I started educating myself about the world and realized that people disagree a LOT about what the right answers are for the big questions. This made me less interested in “saving the world.” The world, you see, might not consider it had been saved.

-I started realizing more how important family and relationships are, partially because some of my friends had settled down and started having families, partially from biology (this is definitely more of a woman thing), and partially because as I matured I started understanding my own family and relationships a lot more.

-I realized that actually making another human being is kind of an incredible thing, and learned by the example of some amazing people I know that it’s a legitimate ambition to be an awesome spouse and parent. Yes, it involves a large amount of tedium and drudgery and sacrifice, but so does any career worth its salt :slight_smile:

7

No offense, but you sound pretty directionless and apathetic. It sounds like most of your dreams and goals are passing fancies, unable to withstand the reality of actually having to work at fulfilling them. What do you really want to do? You’re in college, right? What did you plan on doing when you graduate?

People besides corporate office drones live in appartments and raise families.

8

It’s a common theme. I always figured that as people get older, they tend to give up their dreams in exchange for petty comfort.

Somebody once put it as “you know you’re getting old when you stop worrying about what you can get out of life and instead worry about how you can hold onto what you have”.

Personally, I swore I’d never fall for into that trap. That was when I was 20. And 21 and 22. But just a few more years later, at 25, the dreamer in me has all but perished. Reality (and perhaps, to be fair, some degree of clinical depression – so this may not apply to normal people our age) took its toll and I can barely take care of my basic sustenance needs, much less aim for any of my old aspirations. I’m still fighting it, however meekly… as I hope I will until the day I die… but it’s getting harder every day.

They say there’s no wrong way to go as long as you don’t stop moving. So, hey, just don’t stagnate. Keep chasing your happiness. Even if it changes from time to time.

9

Have you repeated this exercise lately? What fits your personality type now, since it’s developed as you’ve been in school?

10

Yes you are getting duller. Like everyone else who’s not at the top of the ant heap today. Just think of life as a ball of ants in a flood, each crawling madly to the top of the heap as it rolls some other ant under. Life’s a floating ball of ants and then you all die. Or maybe life is a drawerful of knives and you all get dull. Or maybe it’s not everyone but just you. At any rate, yes you are getting duller.

A good solution: Lock up the house and thumb a ride to wherever anyone will take you. Figure on being robbed within the first three rides. Not safe. And not dull.

11

May I ask how much of an “interesting lifestyle” have you lived up to now? Because my life up until my 20s wasn’t particularly “interesting”. I grew up in a suburban town in Connecticut, played some high school sports, did regular teenage stuff, went to college, joined a fraternity, did a lot of drunken college shenanigans type stuff. But for the most part, I didn’t think my life got very interesting until after I graduated, moved to the big city and started working.