Independence Day

For those who have not yet been completely sedated by the monotony of everyday life, who still dare to dream big, are still full of hope, and whose individuality, or perhaps their unquenchable desire to create, has not been entirely extinguished by existential dread. The generation of faith, the bearers of the power to change the world. This generation is an impressionable age group, which is why the message conveyed to them is of amplified significance, because sometimes even the most insignificant things can have a life-changing impact on a person's life.

What should the message be? Should I continue to fuel their faith in the unknown? Or should I pat them on the back and lie that everything will be alright, you just have to want it, and you can achieve anything? Should I reinforce in them that they just need to believe in themselves, and that will be enough to reach their goals? Or should I simply write the truth, giving them one of the many slaps and disappointments they will encounter on their journey, slaps that life will deal them? Then I realized that I don't need to write the truth, because the truth is merely a useless fiction, and due to its subjective nature, it's impossible to achieve anyway.

I don't want to discourage anyone, but adulthood is not a brave new world, there is no perfect happiness, and there will be times when you truly do everything, but it still won't be enough. It's not enough to just struggle, because achieving true success requires much more than hope, faith, or an all-conquering will. Hope is the worst evil, because it only prolongs your suffering, and faith is nothing more than not wanting to acknowledge what the truth is.

 

Your parents, of course, will make you believe that you are beautiful, talented, and special. You probably think of yourself as a true individual now, and you surround yourself with objects that express your personality, even though you don't realize that your life is no different not only from your acquaintances' lives, but even from the daily lives of hundreds of thousands of people your age. You go to parties in the same way, in the same clothes, and behave in the same way as everyone else, and the objects that surround you are nothing more than mass-produced items from a McDonald's-level franchise company. Does that make you special and unique?

But let me ask you something. What makes you think you would achieve more than those around you right now? What extra quality do you possess, or what special ability makes you feel like you stand out from the crowd now, or will in the future?

The longer you believe you are an individual while existing as an unnoticed part of a huge mass, the less inclined you will feel later to truly create something unique, something fantastic that others are incapable of, or simply cannot do. Until you realize this, your future will paint an even sadder picture of you than your insignificant present.

Your destiny is not pre-written, but what you absolutely must not ignore is that adulthood is no better or different than what you, as a teenager, imagine it to be. In this post, I am talking about facts, dictated by the experiences of life's opportunities, experience, and the passage of time, or if you prefer, guiding my hands over the keyboard.

You will never be an individual if you don't achieve your independence, because independence is granted to fewer than the few. Independence is a status, independence is the prerogative of the strong, and achieving it should be the true and only goal of your life.

At 15-18, everyone and everything wants to influence you and your thoughts. What to do with your life, what you should do to live a happier life. The main manipulators and coordinators of your thoughts will be your parents, who, of course, on the one hand want the best for you, although given the undoubtedly dismal nature of current family models, I'm not even that sure about that. Parents have already experienced what awaits you, so if I may suggest something, definitely listen to them, because it's not a foolish thing to listen to someone who has already been where you haven't.

However, one thing you absolutely must understand, and this idea will run through the entire post and resonate with you, is that the words directed at you, whether they come from the person closest to you and no matter how much that person wishes you well, are only one possibility, one piece of extra information from the multitude of impulses you receive daily. Do not accept any thought without reservations. Do not dismiss anything, even if it sounds like the biggest nonsense. Do not believe, do not follow, and do not live other people's lives, or try to fulfill other people's desires, because if you do, it will always end in a huge fall, and this fall will be followed by a deep sense of hopelessness.

Parents don't want the best for you; instead, they want to achieve through you what they couldn't or weren't able to achieve themselves. You are the erasers of their own life's mistakes, through whom they believe they can erase the mistakes they made in the past. They see themselves in you, and they don't want to see the mistakes that prevented them from achieving the dreams they had for themselves when they were your age. They also made mistakes, made many bad decisions, and the fact that these mistakes and the multitude of their bad decisions ultimately messed up their lives – well, they don't want you to make them too. Your parents' life is not your life, so don't let their actions, their professions, or what they want to make of you, or who they want to see when you stand before them, influence you. Don't let them know the person you are. Become who you want to be and always follow your own damn path; in all other cases, you will fail in your life and will not be able to live it.

After a certain age, parents should no longer be part of your life, and although they will always remain for you, and you for them, your life must be your decision, in which no one else has, or can have, a say. You must decide, but you must also take responsibility for your decisions. Only in this way can you become a person, and not a puppet manipulated by others, a character in a film you don't direct. Until you realize this, you will not be living your own life and will not be pursuing your own dreams, but rather your parents' dreams.

You, the 16-18 year olds of today, are soon facing one of the most important decisions of your life. High school and secondary school are the last places where people from a wide range of social strata can coexist for an extended period, entirely regardless of their qualities. Right now, in one classroom are those who will achieve something, those who live unnoticed, merely increasing the numbers, and indeed, among you are the dregs of society, who cannot even reach the average, and probably never will. Right now, CEOs sit in the same room as bartenders, and successful entrepreneurs share a table with those whose mouths will most often utter the question "Can I get a larger fries and drink with that?" in the coming years.

However, upon leaving the high school system, the selection that comes with adulthood begins, and you will soon experience what the caste system means, and what we understand by social, cultural, and existential differences.

At 18-19, one stands before the most important decision of their life, and this decision can never, under any circumstances, be made by anyone else, only and exclusively by you. You have to decide which way to go. You cannot decide as your parents see fit, you cannot be influenced by where your friends went to study further, because now you are standing in a large square from which thousands of streets originate, and if you start down the wrong path now, you could screw up your whole life. At this point, a bad decision has unforeseeable consequences, and even if you don't feel its negative impact now, you will feel it years later, and from then on, either there will be no turning back, or you will no longer have the strength to start over.

Adulthood is a stark, cruel, unfair world where the stronger dog always prevails. The great tragedy of women is that they believe beauty can achieve everything, and this is true for a certain period, but the years rush forward relentlessly, and basing an entire life on fleeting beauty would be as big a mistake as basing your existential advancement on a Provident loan. After a while, everyone is tested, and you start putting weights on the scales at 18.

When you're young, you can be and live however you want. What passes for rebellion at 19-20, and seems like a cool thing to play punk, drink VBK, and beg for cigarettes at festivals, a few years later will only be called being a bum, and you'll feel society's contemptuous spit on your face.

You can only reach certain stages of life with the advancement of age, and only with the passing of years can you gain insight into a world that has always been before you, but which you could not see because of your age, because time had not yet allowed you to see it. Nothing in life is what it seems, and everything should only be a stop, not the final destination, and it's good to realize this.

At 19-21, you think that a job is what you need for your prosperity, you still think that if you get an internship at some place you consider cool, if you get inside the walls of a multinational company, then your life is set, and you can consider yourself a successful person.

Well, you're dead wrong.

Given your age, this definitely seems like a success and a commendable achievement on Facebook, but if this entry is the endpoint of your life, and not an insignificant stop on your journey, then no matter who you think you are or how successful, you are nothing more than an insignificant and unnoticed shade of grey.

Adulthood is a different world, with its own specific rules, which surround us like an invisible shell. No one sees this shell, the unwritten rules are nowhere written down, no one can step on the rungs of the class ladder, and yet, this invisible, tangled, sometimes chaotic-seeming chaos works in a system. You have to understand this system, but you won't be able to learn it any other way than through a tremendous multitude of slaps and disappointments.

Love the slaps that life gives you, in fact, seek them out, and be glad if these blows are as big as possible, because without them your development cannot be realized. A job is not an alternative, only a stop where you can learn a lot, because a workplace is a reflection of life itself, where you experience what human evil, pettiness, petty malice, and crushing others mean, where you learn how to trick others, how to turn the wheels so that you ultimately get the grand prize, where you have to win, because if not, you will be crushed. The first test of adulthood is not whether you achieve something, but whether you can stay afloat when everyone else is pushing your head underwater. The early twenties are about survival and acquiring the skills necessary to achieve it.

Creativity, talent, clear-sightedness, the desire to act and create – that is, all those qualities with which you can achieve anything independently in life – are not welcome guests in the corporate world, and they will not allow you to bring them out of yourself. Of course, every company would benefit from having many learned, talented, creative people working for them, preferably in large numbers, but the human factor, as always, must not be forgotten here either. There will always be people trembling for their jobs and willing to do literally anything to maintain their position, who, if they see a more capable person coming along, will do everything in their power to make your life impossible, or if that's not enough, remove you from there.

Being an employee is only good for maintaining constant subsistence. Rent, food, drink, one trip a year. The classic way of life, but is that all life really is? Due to the limited nature of the employee lifestyle, it is unsuitable for bringing out what is truly within you. On the one hand, they won't allow it, and on the other hand, the ceiling associated with positions doesn't allow it.

At 21-23, if you're still afloat and not a cashier at H&M, you'll start to get a taste of life, and until then meaningless connections will take on meaning. As I mentioned, the goal is to become independent and to be your own master, so that others don't decide for you or over you.

Learn about life every single damn day, and be grateful for fate if you can meet someone smarter, more cultured, more experienced, who has seen more than you. Devour the information you get from these people or from life situations, when you have to prove yourself and overcome even the most difficult obstacles. University years are not fantastic because of the subjects you study, but because of the professors you talk to over the years. Absorb everything that improves your life, integrate it into your own work, and if you encounter something great, reshape it in your own image. You don't have to invent new things; it's enough if you develop what already exists, but for this, you also need to have that extra something that makes it further develop.

The years of being an employee and subordinate are just a stage, and they should be viewed as such. Just a stage, an unavoidable part of your path to your goal. If you're good at something, it will find its way, but for that, you have to do what you love, and it's precisely at this point that it comes back to whether you went for what your heart dictated after high school, or for where others led you. You will never produce anything outstanding if you live a life you don't feel is your own, or if you do what others forced you to do.

However, the matter is not so simple, and the story cannot end here, because there would still be something, without which you will never be able to assert yourself. Unfortunately, this is not something that can be learned, bought, or definitely not acquired knowledge.

This is an ability that you either have or you don't, and this is the true selection of society, that is, the superiority of inherited abilities, motivation, and that certain attitude that ultimately forms a person's individuality.

This is the feeling of being called to create, the desire to create something, the design of a world in your head, its realization in life, and the presence of the qualities necessary for its realization. You either have this or you don't. You will sooner or later find out about the existence of these qualities, because society, life, or I don't know what, but it will confront you with it, and when that happens, that will be the first day of painful realizations, or perhaps your path to independence.