Post #7: Let’s stop acting as if we know what the fuck is going on
I was a few misplaced words and unshaken hands away from freezing my ass off in Wisconsin for the next 4 years of my life. And at the time I was pissed about it.
Throughout my senior year, I took part in a series of complex, high-stakes, and increasingly competitive interviews in the aim of being selected for a prestigious full ride scholarship to one of several well regarded universities. A year earlier, my sister had been nominated, competed for, and won the same scholarship. Although I had good grades and a well rounded application, I wasn’t expecting to get a financial offer from any school that could match the promise of a full ride. I’m also physically sickened by the idea of being in deep debt, so this scholarship process became the focus of my college search, this was the silver bullet that would save me from soul sucking student debt, eliminate the existential burden of selecting a college that I thought would define my entire adult life, and would make me feel good about myself for winning something valuable and shiny.
I made my way through the first round interview without too much trouble. In fact, I heard indirectly from a sibling of one of the judge/interviewers that I got the 2nd most “points” of the 100 kids in my first round pool (The scholarship consists of approximately 1,000 nominees and 50 eventual winners). I had a good time at the first interview and it was interesting interacting with a diverse group of the smartest and most accomplished students in the DMV. It felt good to be a part of it. Next interview was a 1 on 1 and I walked away with the same result: next round.
At this point, I was still feeling myself, but I was feeling something else, too. Doubt. I had now locked in University of Wisconsin-Madison as my first choice school. And at the rate I was going, I began thinking of winning the scholarship as an inevitability rather than a statistical improbability. And the thing about this scholarship is that there was no backing out of it; if you chose to continue past the 2nd round, you were obligated to accept the offer if you were selected. I began to google: “How cold is Wisconsin” “What majors does UW have?” “How white is Madison, Wisconsin”. The answers all gave me pause.
The day of the 3rd round, I was a brief parental argument over the phone away from flaking on the whole thing. I had made plans to go to a rally for presidential candidate Andrew Yang at a local college, but the time coincided with the next interview. Already feeling more weary of the implications of accepting the binding offer, I was getting ready to just forget about the whole thing. However, after being talked off that ledge by my parents, I turned my car around and headed to the bougie downtown office for the penultimate interview. I gave it a good faith effort, and to my slight surprise, made it to the next round.
Now I was kind of panicking. What is even in Wisconsin? Did I actually want to go there? It gets how cold in the winter? I’d never visited campus, I’d never even been to the midwest. However, these doubts were often quelled by the voice in the back of my head asking me where I thought I was gonna find 300k to finance my higher education if not through this scholarship. So I kept going, and found myself in the final round. 20 kids left, 10 spots, 50% chance. Looking around the room, sizing applicants up, I was confident I was easily in the top half. When this thought came over me, I felt my heart sink almost imperceptibly, knowing what that meant. I went through the interview, a little shaken by the strange mixture of pride, doubt, relief, and regret that I was trying to suppress.
A few days later, I received a brief text message informing me that I hadn’t made the top 10 cut. First, I was offended that they didn’t think I was good enough. Next, I was relieved that I wasn’t being sentenced to the temperatures of Wisconsin like a soviet dissident to the gulags. After that, I got a stomach ache realizing that my future was back to existing in a state of absolute uncertainty. I wasn’t sure if I should be glad that I retained the freedom to choose where and what my future would be, or terrified that I might’ve thrown away a chance at real financial freedom. I don’t recall any other time in my life in which I was so deeply uncertain as to whether what had just happened was good or bad news.
Thankfully, as with many of life’s greatest challenges, Kurt Vonnegut has something to say about this. In a lecture on the anthropological history of human stories, Vonnegut spoke some of the truest words ever uttered by a human tongue by telling the audience that “we don’t know enough about life to know what the good news is and what the bad news is”.
A few weeks after the scholarship rejection, I was admitted into USC film school, my top choice. Several days after that, I received a sizable grant from the University, and after that, I was awarded a University scholarship. I was going to be attending a school that I actually had a personal interest and motivation in going to. After the initial shock, I thought about Wisconsin and retroactively realized I had never been more happy to be rejected from something in my life.
Maybe I would’ve thrived in Wisconsin, maybe I’ll hate Los Angeles. It is impossible to know whether an event is “good” or “bad” without knowing all of the consequences they beget. And since we can’t know that until the event is far in the past, we can’t know it at all. We have to accept things that happen to us as nothing more than things that happen to us. We can still feel however we please towards these things, but it’s absurd to imagine that we can unequivocally tell the “good” from the “bad” as they happen.
As Søren Kierkegaard, another quotable old white man, once said “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward”. When trying to visualize how I experience the passage of time now, I picture myself walking down a street backwards, running into things because I have no clue where I’m going, and only being able to see what they are once I’ve walked past them.
Several months after the fortunate scholarship rejection, I was given the life advice that perfectly put words to Vonnegut’s idea that we don’t know enough about any situation in the moment to be sure whether it’s ultimately positive or negative, and offered a lens of looking at life that was less obsessed with classifying events into rigid categories of “good” and “bad”.
“It’s not the kill, it’s the thrill of the chase”, said the rambling ex-con troubadour turned beach bum named Redwood (who, even though we were in a total lack of hurry, said there wasn’t nearly enough time to tell the story of where he got that nickname). This motif has been rattling around my head for about a year now, and has been really helpful in a lot of the situations I’ve found myself in. It reminds me that a life shouldn’t be lived exclusively in service of some far distant goal, that the process of living is where the action is at, not the consequences of living.
This line of thinking has managed to insert me deeper into the present moment than I previously had been. I’m able to focus more on the action of what I’m doing (whether I’m enjoying it, what I’m learning from it, how it feels, etc.) rather than fixating on the long term goal that I’m trying to accomplish through this action.
