Earlier today I had a "farewell conversation" with the intern that's been working in our department this summer. He was telling me that he didn't want to go back to school, how working life was nice because "you go home at 5, and you're done". I was tempted to inform him that after my first few months, I thought that was the coolest thing about working too, but afterwards, the novelty of that wore off significantly. But my conscience kicked in, and I decided not to rain on his happy parade, so early in the life of a young one.
You know what though, I do believe that life depends so much on your perspective and how you choose to view things. I think that most, if not all of the grief you experience in life is self-imposed. Here is this kid who can't wait to graduate and start working, which was like me, 2 years ago. Now here I am, graduated and working, and I miss being a student. What happened to me?
Since graduating, I can look back on my life since then and divide it into a series of stages:
Stage 1 - Just got out of school, started working for my dad, but continued to look for a permanent job. Somewhat discouraged by the setbacks and frustrations that come with job fairs, interviewing, resume-whoring, etc. Felt like all my problems would disappear, if only I could become an electrical engineer at a large corporation.
Stage 2 - Became an electrical engineer at a large corporation. Enjoyed the excitement of starting my new job and discovering the working world. Began getting weekly paychecks and watching my personal bank account grow. Personal ego also grows as parents treat me more like an adult, and I feel more independent and important to this society.
Stage 3 - After a few months, work life starts to take its toll. I physically start to get tired from the daily commute and the lack of good sleep. Emotional decline also occurs as I realize that I'm still only a newbie at the job and I'm not all that important to society or even to my coworkers as much as I originally thought. The realization also occurs that I need to move out from under my parent's roof because A) I'm 23 years old, and B) I'm wasting 2 hours a day just driving to/from work. I miss college, I miss meeting new people, and I'm getting sick of having a daily routine. The situation is not helped by the gloomy weather of Chicago winter, and further deteriorates as I start to work overtime hours. Convinced myself that all problems would disappear when overtime schedule ended and I moved to Palatine.
Stage 4 - Overtime schedule ended and I moved to Palatine. Suddenly able to enjoy more free time and a return to life with a level of freedom not experienced since college. The new situation allows me to spend more time with friends and develop good relationships. Work related stress is relatively low, and I feel more inspired to do stuff, like learn to cook or plan for the future (investing my money, starting a family, navigating a career path, buying a house, etc.).
Stage 5 - Pretty much settled into life in Palatine. Haven't done much more than buy a cookbook and flip through it. Haven't really done much planning for the future. The demands at the job start to build up again, and life starts to fall back into a routine. No major problems in my life, so I can't focus on figuring out how to make them disappear. But I've definitely experienced better times than these.
The progression of stages described above is shown in the following chart:
Well, if nothing else, that was an example of me using a sophisticated and expensive software drawing tool at work (Visio) to create a crappy-looking diagram and save it as a jpg. But, hopefully it was able to somewhat illustrate my point, which is that life is a series of ups and downs.
If I had more time, I would try to analyze the cycle of ups and downs in depth and devise a theory about how to optimize your life. But I don't have more time, so I'll just say this: since I don't think it's possible to eliminate the down stages and only have ups, I'll just make it a goal to keep my life as steady as I can, while minimizing the downs the my best effort. So my ideal chart would still have waves of highs and lows, but hopefully progress to a point where the corners are rounded and I'm living in the "Smiley-face Zone" as much as humanly possible.
