Thinking about the future

I’ve been reading through the Wordpress.com Post-a-day prompts, and I have noticed that there is some repetition. This isn’t totally surprising, as it would be very difficult to come up with 365 completely unique post ideas. It is often said that there are no truly original ideas - just adaptations and original ways of portraying them - and that is what I’ve noticed among these prompts. It also helps that the vaguely repetitive ideas are spaced out quite a lot, so, if you were doing these prompts in a timely manner, you might not notice. Certainly there’s possibility for wide variation in the treatment of the prompts: later prompts about protesting, for example, pull in reactions to the Occupy movement where earlier ones might be less specific and more philosophical.

One of the trends I noticed among the prompts is thinking about the future.  Write a letter to yourself to be read in a year. Or ten years. Where do you want to be in ten years. Come up with a bucket list. Or a list of life goals. Is 2011 anything like you’d thought it would be in 2001, and what do you think 2021 will be like.

I sometimes think about doing these prompts, but I run into problems. I write a bucket list, but then realise that there’s nothing preventing me from accomplishing some of these things apart from spending my time writing a bucket list (or surfing the internet or watching TV) instead of getting started on things like learning Japanese/French/Arabic or revising my novel. I have a list of books I want to read, and there’s nothing actively preventing me from reading them except my own relative apathy and procrastination.

The other problem I have is just thinking about the future. I learned very quickly that the future rarely turns out like you expect it to. I certainly didn’t expect to end up in Slovakia. I didn’t expect that the only full-time work I’d be able to find with a Master’s degree would be as a barista. I didn’t expect to find Jon. It’s good to have goals, of course, but I have found that setting those goals too far in the future almost guarantees that something will come up to change them.

I can’t think about the future. At this point, I can’t see past February, when my current visa runs out. (Goal for today: at least one job application and compiling the paperwork for the next visa.) I can’t even fathom what my 31st birthday will be like. I certainly can’t think as far ahead as 2021. Will we be married? Have kids? Still be in Nottingham? Still working? I have no idea. It’s completely dark to me. And this isn’t a depression-based thing, either - I don’t think that I’ll be dead or anything. I just don’t have an image for what it will be.

I have goals, of course. I want to stay in the UK, get a non-minimum-wage job, stay with Jon. But those are all either short-term or continual goals, not ticks on a long-term list.

Wordpress post on Blogspot!

The wordpress “post-a-day” prompt a while ago was “Name one thing you wish you could go back and change about your education.” My wordpress blog is dedicated to my reading life, so I’m blathering about it here.

From a quality perspective, I have no dissatisfaction with my education. I went to excellent schools for high school, undergraduate, and postgraduate studies. What I would change, if I had the chance, would be some of my choices. There’s more than one thing that plays into it. Some of it is the difficulty that English non-education majors have in finding appropriate paid work. (I currently work as a barista.) Some of it is the fascination of the paths not taken.

The main thing I would change would be studying more math and statistics. I am not uneducated in math – I took AP Calculus in high school and a refresher calculus course at Luther that ended up being far too easy to keep me motivated. I wish that I had bothered to continue on with it. I wish I had studied more statistics so that I could have moved more easily from literature to linguistics – a field that is coming to fascinate me more and more.

The other thing that I would change about my educational experience, if I could, would be to pay more (read: any) attention to career possibilities. It’s all well and good to say “You have a liberal arts education; you can do anything” but in a world where specialisation has become the norm, a liberal arts degree – the idea of a Renaissance man (person) – has become archaic and dismissed. I support liberal arts degrees. I think it’s important that people have experience, education, and interests in a wide variety of things, and that liberal arts educations are more likely to provide analytical and communication skills that are necessary in every field. But as I have learned to my cost over the last decade, employers want the relevant piece of paper. If I had documented proof of my math/stats/linguistics/scientific interests, I would find it a bit easier to find gainful employment. If I had work experience in a field, I would be more able to find a career in that field.

There’s also the problem of paralysis of choice. Sure, I *can* do anything with a liberal arts education; by extension, though, I can also do nothing. It might have been easier to start with a specific career that I could then change from, rather than drifting from job to job, trying to find something I enjoy, answering “anything but this” to the question of what I want to do with my life. I am an educated, literate and numerate individual. Unfortunately, some hiring managers look at the English degree and assume that the last part of that description isn’t valid. And my last few jobs in retail haven’t done much to change that perspective on paper.

Of course, just having more of an emphasis on math and stats may not have made much of a difference to my life and career, but I can’t help thinking – looking at all the job descriptions requiring someone with a numerate degree – that it would have helped a little.