Be a city-doll and postpone your life, or live already
The first day of Exobase is a very introspective exercise. We make you think about how you did get to the point you are now in your life. We make you think of the big decisions you took, and which assumptions they were based on. We discuss the reasons we tend to suffer social pressure and do what other people think we should do instead of following our own star. And we list the fears connected with taking risks and explore independent ways of living.
Among other authors, we help this process by reading parts of Self-Reliance. Emerson says:
“There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”
During our Exobase tour in Europe last summer, I had the chance to meet many people, mostly young people. I met Italians, Austrians, Germans, Hungarians and more. Going through that introspective process many times in a row and with many different people, I was able to identify one of the biggest pain for young people today: having to decide once and for all what they will do with their lives.
The school system all over the world is designed in such a way that we spend most of our years both physically and conceptually isolated from the real world, sitting in a closed room most of the time, either in class or at home doing homework, and “learning” abstract theories and memorizing notions.
Then, suddenly, you are asked to take the decision of your life.
We are supposed to know what we want to do with our lives without knowing anything about the real world.
Our choice now determines the course of our life.
We are put in a room with many doors, with labels on each door, and we are told: “You have to pick one. And be very careful in your picking because beyond each door there is a tunnel and you can’t go back.”
This is scary and hidden pain for everyone. “What do you like to do?”, or “What do you want to become?” are worthless questions, but to the young mind those questions come with the assumption that if you do not know the answer, then it’s your fault. Then you are failing. Most people end up pretending and living a delusion, in order to not disappoint their parents, or themselves. And often waste their life.
The truth is, other than a very few lucky people, nobody knows how to answer. Because “none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried”, and you have never tried!
You have never tried because you aren’t allowed to. Slowly more and more people are coming to the realization that our educational system is obsolete, as it was conceived along with the industrialization of our economies and therefore designed to manufacture specific categories of workers with specific skills in order to accomplish a particular repetitive job in the economy. Schools are factories with ringing bells, separate subjects, batches of items (us). Each item entering the system needs to follow a specific route and go through specific gates in order to get to be a final product (a mechanical engineer, a lawyer, an economist etc..).
The paradigm was: Hard Work -> Do Well -> College -> Job -> Retire.
But life is not linear. Life is organic.
Until recently, that linear paradigm worked at least from a financial standpoint. Now not even that. With the world changing, and a degree being no more a guarantee for a job, it has clearly begun to fail. And it’s alienating millions of young people. It is destroying lives.
There is no new paradigm to substitute. There shouldn’t be. Thousands of contingent solutions will be created by educators around the world, and each of them will serve the contingent needs of particular people in particular steps of their life. Our programs at Exosphere are one of many examples: we provide solutions for certain kind of people when they are in a certain point in their life. It’s up to you to decide if it is what you need or if you have to look somewhere else.
So you and the world are forced to embrace the organic life again. The bad news is that it’s much more difficult, the good news is that it’s much more worth living, full of excitement and novelty every day.
By solving problems you get meaning in your life. An organic life is full of problems, because it’s full of uncertainties, full of doing things before knowing how to do them, because you have to try many things, and sometimes you’ll fail.
Again from Emerson:
“If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it,peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not ‘studying a profession,’ for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances”.
Remember, the power which resides in you is new in nature, and none but you know what that is which you can do, nor do you know until you have tried.
It’s our choice. Be a city doll and postpone your life, or live already.
Stop postponing, start living. Check our site to find where to start: http://exosphe.re/
