Funnel Vision

 “Hope. It is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of your greatest strength, and your greatest weakness.”

I am often struck by how perfectly these words explain how I feel from day to day. Hope is such a wonderful thing- it propels us as humans to achieve what would otherwise be impossible. It is also the fuel that burns our minds when we are unable to realize a goal- without hope, we would not be disappointed.

I can’t tell if the almost-crippling existential crisis I’ve been suffering the last two years puts me on par or behind the curve. I’m slowly figuring out what I want to do with my life, but most of the clues on how to do so have come from my peers- they already seem to have a firm grasp of what’s going on. I’ve had this bad habit these past two years of putting all of my eggs into one basket. I’m a very hopeful and a very unlucky person, so I’ve been subject to some serious heartbreak lately.

I read an article today titled What are You Going to Do with That?, a paraphrased transcription of a speech given by William Deresiewicz. In it, he discusses how young people often let decisions make themselves, and the boring, single-minded elders around us did the same thing when they were our age.

This article is a little assurance that what I’m doing by re-evaluating my life is a good idea. I want to lead myself down a path of my choosing, not let the self-making decisions lead me their way. I’ve always worked towards my own goals, but a lot of the time I didn’t put any thought into what those goals were, as long as they were my own.

There’s a little bit of self-leadership content here, but I recently realized why my peers were figuring out their lives so much faster than me. The truth is that, regardless of how my college sells itself, it is simply a four-year live-in technical seminar. It is not a place to have “the college experience,” the self-discovery that my peers are accomplishing by way of their diverse and new experience at school is nigh impossible for a well-adjusted individual at my school. The socially inept may have the awakening they needed, but those of us with basic hygiene and the ability to ask someone to hold the door are already too far ahead.

I guess I always have to be on guard for surprises like that. Figuring out my life the hard way is a challenge I have accepted, but it irks me a little that I didn’t even know I was being challenged. Habitual tunnel vision aside, I think I’m going to enjoy the more holistic view of my situation. Deresiewicz calls the tunnel vision the funnel- you zoom in closer and closer on one thing and after a while it’s too tight to turn around and look back. Just think, if I had stayed just as clueless, I could have spent just as much time funneling as my counterparts at real college.