Half of my college experience felt directionless, freeing, chaotic and exciting. Normal adjectives for a coddled American like myself, experiencing the early 2010s like most lucky, young, and energetic students.
There’s one adjective I’d like to focus on though, and that is directionless. On the outside looking in, I had plenty of direction. I had come from a great family, was raised partially by the Greek Orthodox church, and had gotten a good enough score on the SAT to get into Purdue University’s engineering program. I am, however, an artist at heart, yearning for freedom of expression within creative outlets that I cannot conceive. I still don’t see how my creativity can truly be expressed, like most creative people, it’s difficult to bring thoughts to reality. In other words, I did not want to be an engineer, though I was taking introductory courses in engineering and had plenty of homework riddled with numbers.
I struggled in my sophomore year of college. With grades, my health, and my psyche. A couple of terrible decisions led to a downward spiral into depression. The worst of it lasted for months in the summer after my sophomore year, and then bleeding into my return to college campus. It was at this moment that I hit a breaking point and had enough of just going with the motions. Long story short, I took a break from college and from life. I packed my stuff up and drove from Indiana to Seattle, with no plan at all. It was quite a 3-day field trip, but when I got to Seattle, it took until sundown for me to call my mother, apologize and come home.
This was the beginning of my understanding of identity. Questions surged. Why had I ended up in this position? Someone who had a great childhood, went to great schools, and was positioned for success. I was angry. I thought if I had just done what was laid out in front of me, with no need for excellence, that I would end up in a good position. I thought that I could be a happy pebble floating down the river of least resistance. I was wrong. This had brought me great unhappiness and an identity crisis.
One of the worst feelings in the world is being angry, resentful and lost with seemingly no reason at all. We like to talk about traumas and how they turn people into the way they are. But what if everything has been fine and dandy your entire life?
It feels weird not going into details, as this was a huge turning point in my life. But it is not the reason why I am writing this. Basically, I’m attempting to describe myself as someone who was searching for meaning in this life, just like most of our youth. Take a look at young activists today. At the core of their efforts, and their loud voices, and their willingness to sacrifice the time they could be using to truly make themselves better, is a lack of meaning and purpose. When it was time for me to go back to school (I took one semester off), I decided to go to a local university in my home state of Florida. Deciding my major this time was easy. I have always been extremely interested in animals, nature and how life works on our planet. I chose Environmental Science & Policy at the University of South Florida. This time at least, I was following my passions and interests. I’d be an extension of the late great Steve Irwin’s work in conservation and leading the way into a future that requires care for the planet we live on, knowing there are 7-8 billion people on the planet, and the industrial nature of human beings.
Picture who I was, though. A young, self-critical, directionless human being searching for meaning. Why were other people my age able to choose a path in life so easily? Questions and thoughts like this flowed through my brain at this time. The mistake I was making though, was that I was having outward thoughts. I was feeling resentful about things that were out of my control when I should have been looking inward. It is most difficult to avoid outward thoughts, nouns in which we can place our blame, rather than taking a deep look at foundational problems within our lives. Problems that require us to be confused for long periods of time before gaining a lick of understanding. These were the kinds of problems I was having at the time, without realizing it. Instead of fixing my bed, as Jordan Peterson would say, or “trimming the fat” as Dwayne from Dry Creek Wrangler (search this guy on YouTube) school would say, I instead wanted to leapfrog into a feeling of importance.
Leaving Purdue and my early 20s behind felt like a positive change. It felt as though I was ditching a forced study for a more relevant one, environmental science. My environmental courses were eye-opening, interesting, and depressing. In one class, we learned about tar pits in Ethiopia due to poor excretion practices by Exxon. In another, the dangers of fracking to nearby bodies of water. These were important discoveries that most people had no clue about. However, in one class, we watched a video where a specific quote struck me. The video was showing the earth in darkness, with only the lights of human civilization being vividly portrayed. The “scientist” or whatever he was, said, “it’s as if we’re looking at a cancer upon the earth”. Of course, I understood where he came from, the yellowish cracks upon the earth that were indicating human civilization did remind me of the disease you might see on infected wounds. But what an incredibly negative statement to make upon humanity as a whole. It took me years to come to that conclusion, and I’m a bit repulsed I didn’t think of it sooner. What do you do to prevent diseases? You exterminate and prevent them. Of course, humans have a destructive nature, but we are much more complicated and interesting than “a cancer upon the earth”.
Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful for what I learned while studying environmental science. It was exciting to learn of environmental stewardship (huge difference from “saving the planet”), and how we as humans can work in tandem with mother nature. However, it took some active inward thinking for me to not become completely resentful towards humankind. I was, at points during and after college, feeling completely hopeless about our future and hateful towards the human race. I remember thinking that I don’t want kids and if I were to have kids to have no more than two so that I am not contributing to overpopulation. I remember despising human advancement because advancement only leads to ecological disaster. Some of my thoughts were valid. But they were also childish, mundane and incredibly pessimistic.
Fast forward years later to 2020. A year filled with unshakeable instability. The George Floyd riots, the COVID-19 epidemic, the political unrest, the social media outrage and the unprecedented activism. I will not go into every reason that these events occurred. But I think we can all agree that there was some sort of snowball effect. Social media, celebrity worship, lack of purpose within our youth and a lack of community. I could go on and on. But what I’d like to focus on is that word again, directionless. We have been a directionless country with directionless youth. But we weren’t like that not too long ago. The pendulum of direction was cocked up tight to the left when our grandparents decided to take charge of their lives to become something in a world where their best selves were needed. As the saying goes, “hard times create strong men, easy times create weak men”. And then the pendulum swung right. The hard times became easy after a handful of decades because our grandparents took responsibility for an unstable world that had suffered two World Wars. The 90s became arguably the best decade of all time. But now here we are in a crumbling, easy world. It makes it all to easy to point fingers and say, “You’re the reason why we are suffering!” It makes it easy to say that humans are a cancer upon the earth.
WAWD 