I'll start by saying i am not a football fan. I really couldn't give a rats ass about watching it 99% of the time and yet somehow i have watched 20 of the first 22 matches in the World Cup ... I'm not even just talking about having it on in the background or channel hopping past it, i have sat and watched all the way through twenty full 90 minute matches. That is 30 hours of my life that i am never getting back.
Ok part of the reason i have been watching must be that i am currently of limited employment, which means that i actually have the time to watch 3 football matches a day. But it still doesn't explain why i can't think of anything better to do, i'm not even sure that i actually enjoy watching football.
I have a sneaking suspicion that there must be some psychological reason (or subliminal messages in the tv coverage) that makes people enjoy watching big sporting events, but the exact mechanism - or how i can avoid it - elude me...
Friday, 18 June 2010
Friday, 11 June 2010
WSIDWML? - Typical Example
Last week I wrote about trying to work out what I should do with my life [WSIDWML?]. While I outlined, in general terms, my problems with answering the question, I didn’t provide any actual examples. This week I will run through an example of my typical train of thought, from inception to dismissal.
Inception
A common suggestion for how to decide what to do with your life, is to think back to what you wanted to be as a child and do that. I presume the theory is that what you wanted to be as a child is more reflective of your true desires, unencumbered by adult worries like pay, practicality and status.
As a child I used to love to draw and in particular draw things that I had designed, so architecture seemed like a logical career choice. At the start of secondary school I tried to work out what the best architecture course was by researching which one had the highest entry requirements - Strathclyde - and I decided that I was going to apply there. The entry requirements drove which subjects I would take in school and what grades I would need to get in exams. When I was 14 I spent a week in an architects office for work experience and loved it. Then when I was 15 I applied to the architecture course at Strathclyde, attended an interview and was offered a conditional acceptance (i.e. if I got the required grades I was in). However at the interview they recommended that I wait a year as I would only be 16 when the course started. Waiting a year would make it easier to live away from home and avoid the isolation of not being able to socialise with peers who would mostly be 18 and over. Both of those points made sense, so I decided I would stay at school for another year.
Somehow during that year I convinced myself that Architecture wasn’t technical and scientific enough - too much airy fairy subjective art - and I would rather study Physics. It turned out that Physics was a little too ‘technical and scientific’ and not practical enough, so I ended up switching to Mechanical Engineering.
In retrospect, throwing away 10+ years of aspiration seems like a rather rash decision, so maybe I should go back to university to study architecture ...
Excitement
Once I have an idea in mind I quickly move to thinking of all of the great reasons to follow through with it. In the example above I would quickly imagine:
That I would love to go back to university and make the most of the opportunity: actually turn up to lectures, study, go to the library, take more varied elective classes etc.
I still really enjoy designing things and I think my broader perspective from the last 11 years would be useful for designing buildings.
How great it would be to design something that everyone can see and will probably still be standing after I’m gone.
Depression
Just as I am getting really worked up to follow through on the idea, somehow everything flips and all of the positive things from the excitement phase are cancelled out by negatives that spring to mind:
Will my enthusiasm fade and I therefore end up as lazy a student as I was the last time?
Would I be able to cope with the artier less technical aspects of the course?
How would I support myself financially?
What would I do after the course, do I really want to be an architect?
The most depressing thought of all is; what if applied and didn’t get accepted? What would it say about how I had spent the last 12 years, if they would have accepted me on the course back in 1998 and wouldn’t now ...
Dismissal
By this point I have totally talked myself out of the idea. If there are that many reasons against doing it, how can it be something that I could conceivably spend the rest of my life doing? So I dismiss the idea and start the cycle again.
No sooner have I talked myself into a direction, than I talk myself out of it. Most of the reasons against pursuing the idea could theoretically - and often easily - be overcome, but I just can’t muster the same enthusiasm for it anymore. Hopefully the above should illustrate why I am having such a hard time narrowing my options.
[740 Words]
Inception
A common suggestion for how to decide what to do with your life, is to think back to what you wanted to be as a child and do that. I presume the theory is that what you wanted to be as a child is more reflective of your true desires, unencumbered by adult worries like pay, practicality and status.
As a child I used to love to draw and in particular draw things that I had designed, so architecture seemed like a logical career choice. At the start of secondary school I tried to work out what the best architecture course was by researching which one had the highest entry requirements - Strathclyde - and I decided that I was going to apply there. The entry requirements drove which subjects I would take in school and what grades I would need to get in exams. When I was 14 I spent a week in an architects office for work experience and loved it. Then when I was 15 I applied to the architecture course at Strathclyde, attended an interview and was offered a conditional acceptance (i.e. if I got the required grades I was in). However at the interview they recommended that I wait a year as I would only be 16 when the course started. Waiting a year would make it easier to live away from home and avoid the isolation of not being able to socialise with peers who would mostly be 18 and over. Both of those points made sense, so I decided I would stay at school for another year.
Somehow during that year I convinced myself that Architecture wasn’t technical and scientific enough - too much airy fairy subjective art - and I would rather study Physics. It turned out that Physics was a little too ‘technical and scientific’ and not practical enough, so I ended up switching to Mechanical Engineering.
In retrospect, throwing away 10+ years of aspiration seems like a rather rash decision, so maybe I should go back to university to study architecture ...
Excitement
Once I have an idea in mind I quickly move to thinking of all of the great reasons to follow through with it. In the example above I would quickly imagine:
That I would love to go back to university and make the most of the opportunity: actually turn up to lectures, study, go to the library, take more varied elective classes etc.
I still really enjoy designing things and I think my broader perspective from the last 11 years would be useful for designing buildings.
How great it would be to design something that everyone can see and will probably still be standing after I’m gone.
Depression
Just as I am getting really worked up to follow through on the idea, somehow everything flips and all of the positive things from the excitement phase are cancelled out by negatives that spring to mind:
Will my enthusiasm fade and I therefore end up as lazy a student as I was the last time?
Would I be able to cope with the artier less technical aspects of the course?
How would I support myself financially?
What would I do after the course, do I really want to be an architect?
The most depressing thought of all is; what if applied and didn’t get accepted? What would it say about how I had spent the last 12 years, if they would have accepted me on the course back in 1998 and wouldn’t now ...
Dismissal
By this point I have totally talked myself out of the idea. If there are that many reasons against doing it, how can it be something that I could conceivably spend the rest of my life doing? So I dismiss the idea and start the cycle again.
No sooner have I talked myself into a direction, than I talk myself out of it. Most of the reasons against pursuing the idea could theoretically - and often easily - be overcome, but I just can’t muster the same enthusiasm for it anymore. Hopefully the above should illustrate why I am having such a hard time narrowing my options.
[740 Words]
Saturday, 5 June 2010
What Should I Do With My Life?
A couple of weeks ago I read What Should I Do With My Life? by Po Bronson. While I enjoyed the stories and it was vaguely inspiring, I was initially disappointed that it didn’t help me answer the question posed in the title. Throughout the book the author emphasised that answering the question was not something that could be achieved by reading a book, but I still held out hope that somehow it might. Sure enough when I reached the end - regardless of the frequent warnings - I felt slightly cheated that I was no closer to working out what to do with my life. Having reflected for the last couple of weeks, I still don’t know what I should do with my life, but I think I have worked out what the first step is.
The first step for most of the people profiled in the book was to reduce the number of options of things they could do. “Keeping your options open” is something that a significant number of people seem to aspire to. Having ‘infinite possibilities’ is appealing in the same way that buying a lottery ticket is and is flawed for the same reasons. As things stand my options are about as open as they possibly could be; I have very few commitments tying me to a specific path or location. Unfortunately I am also naive and arrogant enough to think that I could try to do just about anything with my life if I wanted to, I might not succeed but I could try. With that many options, working out what I want to do - and more the point, what I could be good at - is rather difficult.
In hindsight a quote from High Fidelity seems apt:
There has also been an element of fear of failure in my decisions or lack thereof. If I didn’t try, then when I succeeded it felt like luck and when I failed it didn’t matter because I hadn’t tried in the first place. Either way I was damned: Attributing success to luck is a surefire way to feel like you don’t deserve what you have achieved. Attributing failure to not trying means you will always wonder what would have happened if you had tried. This has been true for me, both on the scale of micro-decisions and also on the largest scale of working out what to do with my life. By not narrowing my options and by not deciding what I really wanted to do, I made it impossible to fail, but also impossible to succeed.
Now that I have worked out that I need to narrow my options, the hard part is working out how to actually do that. The two obvious ways - deep analysis or random chance - both seem like cop-outs. Deep analysis seems like a cop-out because it would be very easy to spend a lot of time analysing as a way to avoid making a decision. Random chance seems like a cop-out because random chance is always a cop-out. There are other ways ranging from mixing analysis and random chance, to asking people who know me well what they think, to trying to remember what I wanted to be as a child, but again none of those options seem quite right... I know what the first step is, I just don’t know how to take it.
If anyone has any suggestions for how to start narrowing my options or what I should do with my life, I would be really grateful if you could leave a comment.
[731 Words]
The first step for most of the people profiled in the book was to reduce the number of options of things they could do. “Keeping your options open” is something that a significant number of people seem to aspire to. Having ‘infinite possibilities’ is appealing in the same way that buying a lottery ticket is and is flawed for the same reasons. As things stand my options are about as open as they possibly could be; I have very few commitments tying me to a specific path or location. Unfortunately I am also naive and arrogant enough to think that I could try to do just about anything with my life if I wanted to, I might not succeed but I could try. With that many options, working out what I want to do - and more the point, what I could be good at - is rather difficult.
In hindsight a quote from High Fidelity seems apt:
“I can see now I never really committed ... I always had one foot out the door, and that prevented me from doing a lot of things, like thinking about my future and... I guess it made more sense to commit to nothing, keep my options open. And that's suicide. By tiny, tiny increments.”Everything I have done in the last decade, I have stumbled into on a whim and had one foot out the door. From university, to hobbies, to jobs, to geographic locations, I never set out intentionally and always had an exit strategy. Maybe I committed for the first few months, but then found that I could successfully coast along without trying which meant I ended up bored. After a while being bored I would stumble off to the next option.
There has also been an element of fear of failure in my decisions or lack thereof. If I didn’t try, then when I succeeded it felt like luck and when I failed it didn’t matter because I hadn’t tried in the first place. Either way I was damned: Attributing success to luck is a surefire way to feel like you don’t deserve what you have achieved. Attributing failure to not trying means you will always wonder what would have happened if you had tried. This has been true for me, both on the scale of micro-decisions and also on the largest scale of working out what to do with my life. By not narrowing my options and by not deciding what I really wanted to do, I made it impossible to fail, but also impossible to succeed.
Now that I have worked out that I need to narrow my options, the hard part is working out how to actually do that. The two obvious ways - deep analysis or random chance - both seem like cop-outs. Deep analysis seems like a cop-out because it would be very easy to spend a lot of time analysing as a way to avoid making a decision. Random chance seems like a cop-out because random chance is always a cop-out. There are other ways ranging from mixing analysis and random chance, to asking people who know me well what they think, to trying to remember what I wanted to be as a child, but again none of those options seem quite right... I know what the first step is, I just don’t know how to take it.
If anyone has any suggestions for how to start narrowing my options or what I should do with my life, I would be really grateful if you could leave a comment.
[731 Words]
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