Towards the future!

After several weeks, I’m finally typing up my thoughts about the RSA Animate video The Secret Powers of Time about time perspective. I sent myself an e-mail with some notes so I’d remember what I wanted to say, and I think I’m good to go. Now that school’s over, I’ve got plenty of time :D

        Speaking of school, yes, I am graduating from high school next tuesday. My last exam was yesterday. Of my friends on facebook, 24 of them are in my graduating class. One girl, intelligent and likely with plenty of great things ahead of her, made a status update about being glad to be done. A middle aged man commented to say that she may change her mind about that in a few years.

        Really? I mean, seriously? Being a teenager and being in high school is lame. There’s nothing about that anyone sensible wants back. You can hang out with friends, relax, and have fun at any age. The fact that you’re a sad old man whose life peaked after winning the big football game is not a fact of life, it is a fact of your life. It is so simple and so essential that we refuse to accept the idea that the future is a terrible place where we will all be miserable, because it will become a reality if we don’t. If we allow ourselves to go to waste, jump into marriages we’ll regret, and generally just wait for happiness to magically come to us, yes, high school will in fact be “the best years of our lives.” If your life is on a downhill slope from the minute you accept the responsibility of being an adult and taking care of yourself, you have failed. I’m not going to sugarcoat that because I take for a given that anyone who reads this is not going to accept defeat and intends to go places with their life.

        After seeing that message, I went looking for similar comments by similarly downtrodden people. I was scared that everyone would have a sad old man (or woman, but it’s typically a male sentiment) telling them not to be happy, and that they’d better get used to pain and suffering because nothing they do will amount to anything. Surprisingly, very few people had even mentioned being done of school, and there were no other comments spouting “the best years of your life” bullshit. That’s pretty good, and I didn’t really expect it. It is a pleasant surprise, at any rate.

        Now, the RSA Animate video mentions two forms of past oriented people: past positive, and past negative. The man who tells his children that high school will be “the best years of their life” could be nostalgic for his past, or fixated on what went wrong in his life to bring him to the terrible miserable life he lives now. Neither of those is particularly healthy, when taken to the extreme that any possibility of progress is ignored and the thought of improving one’s own life is impossible. An appreciation for what your past has taught you is good, and paying attention to your mistakes so you can avoid them in the future is also good. If you spend your life living in the past, you will never find your way to the future. Then you’ll be forty, maybe fifty, years old, you’ll be well on your way to losing the metabolism that kept you fit and attractive as a young man, and you’ll drink beer and watch football and blubber about the good old days. You don’t want that.

        From the age of five, I have been raised to always be oriented towards the future. At the age of five, parents in Canada have the choice to put their children into french immersion (or english immersion, in places where french is dominant) or leave them in regular classes. Basically, if you are an english speaking family, your child will learn french for free and gain access to the bilingual jobs you wish you could have had. At the age of five, we don’t make these decisions on our own. Our parents, looking to give us the best life possible, have the choice to unlock a very large number of opportunities for us. Of our graduating class of roughly three hundred, only fifty or so are in french immersion. There were perhaps 60-70 in the very beginning, but that essentially tells you who looks out for the future of their children and who doesn’t.

        That sounds unfair, but the effect becomes more profound as you get older. The people in french immersion mostly keep to themselves as kids, so I know most of “us.” Later on, of course we made friends with people who shared our interests regardless of whether they were in french, but that didn’t happen much when our classes were almost exclusively in french. When we got to junior high and only 3/7 of our courses were in french, we went out and made friends with plenty of people. In high school, where only ¼ of our classes each semester were in french, you would think we would almost lose the tightly knit groups of purely french immersion people. This was not the case. In junior high, there was no choice of classes. You were shuffled randomly into the required courses and went on with your life, hoping you happened to land in a class with a group of friends. In high school, suddenly we got to pick our courses, and if we wanted to be with our friends, we could make it happen. As frightened young teenagers, picking courses was something we had no experience with. So we turned to our parents for guidance once again.

        What do you think the wise future oriented parents of french immersion children said? “Keep your options open. Take all the science classes, take the extra math classes, just in case you need them or find you really love them.” The “english kids,” who never actually thought of themselves that way, are a mixed bag. There are perfectly intelligent individuals whose parents never forced them to learn french, and likewise there are individuals who made poor choices after their parents chose to give them a chance at awesome bilingual jobs and ended up being not as intelligent. I can name each individual in french immersion who didn’t follow the model path their parents set out, yet I can also name the individuals outside of french immersion who took every science course, calculus, advanced english, etc. without giving up.

        Taking advanced english is a very good indicator of just how hard you’re willing to work for future benefit. Further, taking Advanced Placement English for university credit is the epitome of being future oriented. To put it bluntly, none of the thirty or so people who signed up for it were intelligent enough to survive advanced english. The twenty four people exiting that classroom, after much effort and an admirable amount of mental breakdowns, are finally intelligent enough for advanced english. Those who couldn’t handle the prospect of improving upon their failures (or couldn’t be bothered to read books) dropped the class, and instead took an easier english course where they might have received better marks. I’ve got a photograph of our class and those who elected to take AP English, and here’s the breakdown:

• 9/24 were in french immersion
• Half of us (12/24) chose to take the AP English exam
• Five of those students were in french immersion

        Nine out of 24 in french immersion doesn’t sound like much, but that’s nearly 1/5 of the french immersion students. However, seven of those nine students took at least 2/3 science courses this year and last year, as well as advanced math and calculus. There are, of course, students in french immersion who also did the science and math but not advanced english, and off the top of my head there’s… nine or ten people who did all the science but not advanced english in our french classes. That makes 16 of 50 french immersion students “keeping their options open” and overloading themselves with work for future benefit.

        Yet the RSA Animate video even says that a future oriented person must be able to trust that their decisions will benefit them in the future. Some people can’t trust that future benefit will follow their decisions because they are ignorant of the possibilities, and those are the people who never become future oriented. Of those who are, when we become disillusioned with the life of a model citizen, we crash. When we no longer trust that taking all the hard courses in high school, then university, will give us the perfectly happy (and also rich) lives we were promised, we doubt ourselves. We doubt the system itself. Will the degree I signed up for today be worth $20,000, even $50,000+, in the future? Will I be able to pay for getting it in the first place? Will it land me a good job so I can provide for the little munchkins who will one day follow in my footsteps?

        This is where I am now. I don’t know if I can run off to spend an exorbitant amount of money on learning about a field that I can’t guarantee will bring me either the joy I want or the money (and thus freedom) to find it. So I’m thinking about skipping that whole process. It’s possible that I will go to university to take something practical and tell people I’m smart so they’ll hire me, but that’s to be determined by my financial situation. If I either have far too much money or far too little, I’ll go. Maybe I’ll become a teacher and inspire a future group of kids much like those of us who took smarty pants classes like Advanced Placement English… Looking at this picture of us with Ms. Barrett, I can almost see it happening. I’ve never wanted to be a teacher, because it’s a mediocre job and I’m not very good at teaching people things, but I mean, I’ve got the perfect name for it. Sure, they’d laugh at first, but it’d be endearing after they realize how awesome I clearly am.

        Now I’m off to run through my daily routine of browser based games for future oriented mice like me who crave some immediate reward with their long-term plans. A character I’ve been playing for something like two years is almost the strongest among his class :’) He’s all growed up, and soon I’ll get to turn him into an immortal powerhouse. Aww yeah.