Get married and have two children
I always describe my upbringing as a child to have happened in a social studies family. My reality directly aligned with many of the things I was taught in social studies class. Some of those things have now revealed themselves to me as being really dangerous and outdated ideas. I had the model Nuclear family; a household with both parents present and seemingly happily married. My parents had three children, a reasonable number that was later shockingly revealed to me to not be the norm. Not in Nigeria.
There were, of course, a few areas were my life deviated from what I was taught in school. My father did not live with us growing up, but that particular detail contributed to the narrative that fathers invested their whole lives providing for the family while mothers’ nurtured. As a result, I was much closer to my mother (the parent I saw every day) than to my father ( the parent I saw one weekend every month ). This was further reinforced by the fact that my mother would threaten to report my misbehaviours to my father. It did not paint a great picture but it fitted perfectly into Social Studies class. And because my reality checked a lot of the boxes I was presented in class, it was easier for me to believe other things like:
1. Boys were stronger than girls and so therefore naturally should be higher in most things.
I think I disliked girls for most of my primary school (at least until I had my first crush on a girl named Eunice). I didn’t think negatively of girls, I just had this competitive belief. It was always us against them. In primary 3 when I was the class captain for a week, on one occasion of writing names of noisemakers, I wrote only girl names to the extent that I wrote girls that weren't even in school on that day. That was the day I stopped being the class captain.
2. There were exactly three types of people in the world, Christians, Muslims and traditional worshippers that had now become extinct.
I didn’t begin to meet atheists till University. And didn’t begin to have a more complex understanding of faith until I was much older.
3. If I did well in school, then I could easily find a good job and be happy ever after.
This article is specifically zooming into this last point. This simple strategy for having a happy life. There was a particular narrative that my childhood life had that made it easier to believe. I am privileged to have grown up in a setting that incrementally got better. Although my family lived in the same apartment for 22 years of my life, our lives changed in other ways. There were clear signs that we were climbing up the social ladder. The climb was slow and it did eventually plateau but for the most part, it existed. It was useful to think that it was possible to live a life that only got better progressively. Social studies taught me that If I did well in Primary school (by reading my books), I would enter a good secondary school and do well (by reading my books), and then get admitted to study a good course in the university where I would do well (by reading my books), and graduate with a first-class and get a good job which would guarantee a fat salary, an official car and a nice house. With all this wealth I had gathered, the next thing to follow would be a beautiful wife, two nice children and happily ever after.
This year I am 22. According to the life map I made for myself (guided by Social studies class), I should currently be earning #1 million a month (or it’s inflated equivalent from 2008) and I should be getting married next year.
Needless to say that I am way off schedule because Life is not a Social Studies class.
So what is Life?
Life is incredibly complex. The thing about social studies class in primary school is that it tried to define society as rules. When explaining things to children, we define rules without exceptions. But Society is made up of more exceptions than rules.
You are either a boy or a girl (except when you are born with both sex organs or feel out of place being either or feel like neither)
You are either Muslim or Christian (or Jewish or atheist or a Buddhist or Hindu or one of the other 4200 religions in the world)
In one of the classes where we were taught large rules that had too many exceptions to actually make sense, social studies tried really hard to convince us that our careers depended on whether we were good at maths (Banker/Accountant/Engineer), argued a lot (Lawyer), were natural caregivers (doctor), were really intelligent (teacher), knew how to update Whatsapp (computer scientist), or knew anyone in government (civil servant.)
We’ve learnt that this is false. We’ve learnt that living isn’t going to be as simple as the definitions we were taught growing up. We’ve learnt that domestic life isn’t as straight forward as the gender roles we grew up believing. We have learnt that the strategy of teaching people a bunch of rules (that were mostly wrong) about life so that they could make a life-determining decision at 15 was quite frankly just a bad idea.
I don’t know who was responsible for designing education and the knowledge acquisition system but as we grow older, we learn more and more of less and less in other to one day become experts.
As we have grown older, we have learnt that everything is exponentially more complex and to actually learn anything you have to learn a very small part of it.
Social studies did not survive this exponential increase in complexity. At some point in time, Social Studies ( a single subject responsible for teaching us about society) became tens of courses taught in dozens of faculties. Now I learn about the society from social media (a poorly design social system that exaggerates some of our worse traits because they are easiest to exaggerate) and self-absorbed books written by authors that take themselves too seriously.
And because of that, I am 22, unmarried and broke.
I’d like to go over some points established so far.
‘Social studies’ is not one thing. The rules it taught us about life are not exact (read as ‘mostly wrong’). Life is not one thing. Life is many things. And because life is many things, the strategy for having a happy life cannot be dependent on only one thing = what you do.
New point
What you do is not your whole life and therefore not your whole identity. You are not what you do but what do you do is an important question.
What do you do?
I think there are two main schools of thought when it comes to getting advice for what you should be doing with(in) your life.
- There is the ‘Alan Watts’ group that believes you should chase what you have passion for and that if you do that really well, then you will eventually find money and fulfilment in that. The ‘passion is key’ group.
- The second group which includes my parents (and probably yours too) postulates that you do whatever will enable you to buy a nice car and house, get married, have two children and live happily ever after. The social studies group.
It is more nuanced than this but for the sake of argument, let’s stick with these two thought groups.
Some research has shown that people in the generation before mine (the Boomers/Generation X) are more likely to describe their preferred job as something that pays well while Millenials are more likely to describe their preferred job as something that makes them happy. Because being happy is very important to us.
One problem with this research is that it was carried out with Americans. I was having a conversation with a friend and realised that In Nigeria where my life is, being married with two children is much more important than being happy (ar at least it feels that way due to societal pressure). The choices I am making now feel like they are not determining my present happiness but my likelihood to be married in the future. This is what being in my 20s feels like to me.
The anatomy of decisions
Any choice I make today isn’t determining what I am doing today but instead the likelihood of me soon becoming able to live the rest of my life.
If today I say I am a writer and I decide that. The real decision I am making is that in ten years from now, I will be somewhere farther along the lines of being a writer and preferably, wherever that point is will include a wife, a car and a nice house. No decision is actually being made for the purpose of what feelings that decision will create. They are being made to determine my future. And this is because, for 15 years, social studies taught me all the rules and then at 15 gave me a form and asked me to chose the path of my life.
I like the phrase “married with two children” because of how I can use it to describe a whole idea.
Justin used it to describe the idea of ‘settling’ in his article on how we think about career choices.
Many people in my immediate surrounding tend to want to take the‘passion is key’ strategy when choosing what to do with(in) their lives. You know because they are looking for happiness (and money will come with it like Alan Watts suggested). People that take that advice tend to fall into one of the following subgroups.
Group 1:
Chases their passion until they realise that the money they want is not here so they give up and decide to marry and have to children (Settle for something that lets them marry and have two children) aka result back to social studies.
Group 2:
Chases their passion — persists. Become individualistic, find the money and continue to do whatever is giving them money (because let’s be honest, passion is only good for finding the money)
Group 3:
Chases their passion until they are scared shitless by the uncertainty (when will the money come?)They decide being married with two children is more up their speed. Aka result back to social studies.
Group 4:
Chases their passion — persists- lives with the uncertainty for the rest of their life.
There is a fifth group that was already too far along on the social studies route before realising passion was a choice that was available to them.
Group 5:
They want to follow Alan’s advice but they have no passion and they already chose their life at 15 and now must stick with it forever. This group, I feel is the least discussed group in social circles just because no one knows what to say to them.
What group are you in?
Last year, while I was thinking about the anatomy of decision and my future. I realised I couldn't possibly make decisions for my current happiness if I kept thinking about my future because the things I wanted to do now did not include a guarantee for that future. All the rules I had been taught leading to this point made me believe I made choices for my future not my now.
The group I fall under is the fourth one, the people that chase their passion with an uncertainty of the future. Unless I learn to be comfortable with that uncertainty, I won't be able to be comfortable with the choice to chase my passion. I would continue to think about my future wife and children and making the right decisions (now) for them.
Which was the last big social studies rule I still had ingrained in me.
Get married and have two children.
If I (you) stop thinking about getting married and having children, what kind of life choices will I(you) be making? More specifically, what would I(you) be doing?
Thank you for reading all the way to the end. This is the first “original impostor’ article of the year and it sets the theme for what is to come this year. Looking forward to sharing more with you.
Plug
I really enjoyed reading Justin’s article on ‘good job, bad job, medium job’. You can find it on substack.
Tim Urban (waitbutwhy.com) has two articles that influenced this one. The article about picking a career and the one about getting married.
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