When Do I Start Taking Life Seriously?
Oh yes, that's elephant feces alright
This is a long one, a weird one, and a somewhat personal one. Reader discretion advised, or something.
1.
Most people would say that I definitely have a life right now.
Certainly in the sense that I’m alive and experiencing things (solipsism fails the self-indication assumption,1 loser), but also in the sense of “get a life!”
No one would ever say something like that to me! I have friends and a girlfriend and a blog! I consume popular entertainment and so on. Also, in some sense, I go to school and do academic things each day with the hope of eventually attaining gainful employment. I have a life!
Unfortunately, I have a very hard time taking that life seriously.
For one thing, I don’t spend much of my life living my life. When I’m at school, usually I’m playing Minesweeper (down to 218 seconds!) or reading through old SMBC comics. Those activities seem, if anything, mostly counterproductive to my future employment prospects.
I don’t know when the last time I had a real, deep, interesting conversation with anyone is. That’s friends or teachers or family. Maybe I’ve just been dumping too many of my interesting thoughts here, but there’s something a bit zombie-like about my days now.
This isn’t so shocking. In fact, I basically predicted this downturn the other day. I’m young, I’m hormonal and neurotic and mood-swing-y, so to this place I inevitably come. All the laziness that I’d been proud of and comfortable with is becoming unbearable, untenable.
And thank god! This is the emotional state I’m used to being in. It felt weird to be away, in happyland, and the slightly disconnected depressiveness is a reassuring sign that I’m still me.
2.
For a while, I really didn’t have a life.
Let’s limit it to high school—I know that there are similarities between me and the Ari Shtein of the years during and pre-Covid, but so few that he’s not quite a worthwhile subject of this discussion.
In fall of 2021, I showed up at a brand-new school with an awfully-short haircut, a dark blue quarter-zip, and a light blue surgical mask. And for the next 9 months, that was it, that was me. Same dumb haircut, same quarter-zip, same mask. I probably didn’t show my elbows in that school building until June, and never my knees.
I was scrawny (even more than now) and awkward, and had just gotten really into programming. So instead of socializing normally, I’d argue loudly in some classes, and then, in others, totally dissociate and hide in my website-building world.
I have almost zero easily-accessible memories from those days. I know that I often felt stressed, often felt unliked, and, most of all, felt extremely disconnected. It wasn’t too bad, though, I think I liked the disconnection enough to make up for the stress.
In sophomore year, little changed. I kept the mask even as most began exposing the lower-two-thirds of their faces. My parents would encourage me to lose it, but since I’d started growing some upper-lip fuzz, I’d give them the excuse that I hadn’t shaved in a while and didn’t want people to see it. Really, I think I just preferred not to be totally in school. To be able to make whatever faces and mouth whatever swear words I wanted underneath my mask, so it could still feel a bit like Zoom school.
I think I started getting a bit more social. Had my first kiss, made half-friends and so on. But, again, I remember very few details, only a generally apathetic and self-absorbed social sentiment, and a stressful academic one.
Something shifted in me that summer, though, and in junior year, I became a real full-fledged human person.
I’ve described this change to friends before as “gaining consciousness.” By that I mean social consciousness, I think. Not something like gaining empathy or the ability to put myself in someone else’s shoes—no, it’s that I really internalized the idea that other people existed.
See, before then, most thoughts I had were about myself. My political opinions, my preferences, or how I thought other people saw me and thought about me.
And then at some point, I began to make appraisals of other people. Began to think about their positive and negative qualities, to think about who I wanted to be spending time with and why—what about them made it so. And then I made friends and started wearing clothes that exposed my elbows. Simple as that.
I have more specific memories since then. A lot of them are good, though a lot are awkward too.
And the sentiments I have are a bit less self-absorbed, I think. At the very least, it seems like other people’s moods have started creeping into mine.2
I really can’t tell if any of this has made me better off! Probably it has, I guess. But I don’t think I was incredibly upset at being lonely and obsessively making websites for a couple years either.
When I didn’t have a life, it didn’t feel like I was failing to make the most of it. Failing to take it seriously.
Now those doubts sneak in.
I need to do a non sequitur now, since this train of thought has derailed. Please bear with me, sorry.
3.
Most of my life is still ahead of me, probably.
Most of my life will be spent outside of high school, probably.
There’s a scene I like in this show Shrinking, which is about a therapist who meddles in his patients’ lives to a crazily unethical degree. The therapist goes to his daughter’s high school because she’s gotten in trouble for something or other, and the therapist’s patient comes along since the therapist has been meddling in his life throughout the day.
The patient says something along the lines of “What? I can’t go to a high school, all my problems stem from high school.” And the therapist says, “Oh, shut up, everyone’s problems stem from high school.”
And I remember watching this a few months ago, chuckling, and thinking, “not me!”
Well.
I’m really trying to make it so! And I think I’ve got a good shot at coming out pretty well-adjusted. For the last year or so, I’ve acted like a normal and sociable human being. I’m on the home stretch now.
And yet!
It’s fucking high school, so everything feels an inch or two away from blowing up all the time.
Everyone knows that teenagers have this problem where our brains are so flooded with hormones that we feel very self-important. What’s interesting is that this self-importance falls along two axes: normal selfishness—putting myself above others—and shortsightedness—putting myself above my future selves.3
When I’m thirty, it seems like I’ll probably be looking back on all these feelings and emotions and thoughts and laughing. If the world is still around and the internet is still around and this blog can still be found, I’ll read posts like these and think, “wow, what a self-important fucking moron.”
I know this! I do!
And yet—every perceived slight, every argument, every tough conversation feels alarmingly close to an existential threat. How strange!
4.
Let me be ~60% honest: the whole reason I’m writing this all out is that apparently there are some rumors swirling about me. The sort of stupid, silly bullshit that anyone with enough years of separation will be able to roll their eyes at and say “wow, so high school.”
And I’ve really been trying to roll my eyes at it all, but the hormones are a-washing me. I guess it’s got me a bit wired, a bit frenetic, a bit worried.
Nothing can be done about it, that’s for sure.
Not to be a massively self-important asshole teenager, but I’ve been a focal point of at least a few rounds of gossip over the years. Certainly not as much as some, but more than you might think given my usually low-key social presence.
There are a couple reasons for this: while I can be pretty awkward sometimes, I like to argue a lot. So I’ll be loudly contributing a lot to certain classes, then totally inaccessible and silent outside of class. This builds some intrigue, I think.4
The other big thing is that I’m pretty clever. I get good grades and good scores on tests and into good colleges. Whenever someone is good at something in high school, the rumor mill will inflate it to ridiculous extremes.
For example, my dad was walking our dog the other day when he ran into a neighbor. This neighbor happened to be the mother of the only girl my age in the neighborhood. And the neighbor congratulated my dad on my earning a full-ride scholarship to Princeton.
Which I absolutely did not do, and I don’t think is even really possible these days. But somehow word had kicked around that I was pretty smart—I’d run into a classmate or two of this girl’s at the odd Model UN conference—and my relative success with college applications had been wildly inflated.
This pattern’s repeated itself in one or two other instantiations recently, in generally less charitable ways. I think I’ll leave it at that—frankly, I don’t know most of the details, I don’t want to, and I’d rather not give them any more airtime than they deserve.
5.
A friend gave me some critical feedback on my last post. He said to me, “generally, writing has a point.”
Well. Let’s try to tease a point out of all this then.
When Do I Start Taking Life Seriously?
Probably not now.
For a couple years, I had no life to take seriously.
Then I developed a (social) consciousness, and began to have a life. And I haven’t been taking it too seriously.
But that life seems to consist of a lot of high school bullshit. Which I guess makes sense, given my being-in-high-school-ness. So it doesn’t seem very worthwhile to take life seriously if it won’t take itself seriously yet.
Maybe that title is more of a plea than an answerable question. When can I start taking life seriously?
Does high school bullshit end in college? I think it might, if I can get in with the right people. Then maybe I could start to take my life seriously.
But hold on.
Do I even want to?
High school bullshit can be a bit stressful and dumb, but it’s also low maintenance, and lets me have a fair bit of fun on the side. If I took my life seriously, I’d probably have a lot less time for Minesweeper or for blogging.
I don’t think I’m ready to make that sacrifice yet.
So, to the muckrakers, to the heavens, to the Great Divine Originators of All Bullshit, for the time being, I say: lay it on me!
Lukethoughts
(Correspondent Luke Mathew’s got a lot of wisdom to deal out today.)
“Can we talk about what the fuck block blast is and why it was so popular” (Ed. note: I think I know what he’s talking about—I’ve seen both my little sister and my classmates equally obsessed—so I second this plea. We demand answers!)
“Shabbat means Saturday so [yo]u can’t say Shabbat shalom every day [because] that just doesn’t work” (Ed. note: Lucas learned something new today! Luckily, you can say “namaste Dominus” any day of the week.)5
“Can you believe that I ate 2 entrees for 22.5 dollars at Jerusalem garden what a bargain that was.” (Ed. note: Some rapidly changing food-price opinions from this guy.)
“If someone who you are not familiar or close with offers you gum, take the hint.” (Ed. note: Hear, hear.)
Honestly, this deserves its own post. I’ve been meaning to dig way into anthropics for a while.
Boy, I’m not sure what I mean by this. Need to do some more thinking on it all, I guess.
To clarify: what’s interesting is that both of these well-known teenager traits flow from the same problem. That they’re both downstream of this thing where you feel really big—kids are calling it Main Character Syndrome these days, and I’ve got a terminal case.
This here blog probably adds to it. I won’t spill my guts to any individual, but I’ll spill ‘em here in the virtual world, which (on rare occasion) will cause a real-life stir.
I should mention: Luke’s an Indian Catholic. Namaste Dominus is my very linguistically awesome retort. (Let’s be fully honest: I don’t know how to conjugate Latin nouns at all. If you do, please fix it for me.)
imo hs bullshit mostly does end in college but youll want it back 😢
What are you trying to conjugate it into? I have very basic Latin conjugating knowledge.