Baggy Eye Badges

Here’s another sneak peek of my summer writing project! I wish I could say I was spending my evenings writing and being productive, but I picked up my guitar again and now all real productivity has officially left my being. But it’s okay, it’s still only June and I know that I don’t really do anything until the last minute, so… 😉

 

Section 4: Baggy Eye Badges

            The other day, I was sitting in my living room by myself eating ice cream right out of the container while taking the most ridiculous SnapChat pictures I could and sending them to my friends. I was in the middle of drawing a sombrero on my head when I stopped and took a good hard look at myself. I had a stack of papers to grade in front of me, a half-finished documentary I had to finish watching before I showed it in class the next day, a load of dirty laundry sitting in my bedroom, and a bathroom floor that hadn’t been swept in a month (I wish I was kidding about that last one, a sincerely do). While I wasn’t sure what my idea of success was, I knew that this wasn’t it.

 

As I said earlier, my generation is an oddball mixture of extremely driven individuals and lazy kids, but we are all in this generation of causes. We could be drilling wells for clean water or raising awareness about children’s cancer or making beads to support women getting out of prostitution or riding our bikes across the country to raise money for vaccines, but whatever we do, we go big. Our generation gave birth to companies like Tom’s Shoes and LiveStrong. It’s cool to buy organic groceries and wear jewelry from other countries. It shows the people around us that we stand for something, even if we only stand for whatever our friends stand for.

 

We are the generation of Google. If you can’t remember a certain fact, look it up. If you don’t know how to do something, look it up. If you can’t remember how to spell “mosquito,” look it up. We live in a hybrid version of the American Dream. We don’t work hard to achieve our goals, we work smart. We complete online degrees and connect on LinkedIn. The entire world is literally at our fingertips, which gives us the feeling that anything is achievable if we know where to look.

 

The problem with this is that not every cause is turned into a multi-million dollar company, not every website will attract thousands of subscribers, and not every meme will go viral. For every success story, there are a hundred people who failed. But no one talks about them, so we continue thinking that every move we make must be continually affirmed by tons of people. Our success depends on it!

 

Can I be honest? It’s stressful! Every time I post a new blog post, I find myself glued to my blog’s stats for the next week. If not enough people read it, it must have been a bad post! I obsess over each and every word I wrote, critiquing my voice and thoughts as I re-read. It’s a very narcissistic mentality.

 

But that’s what success is, right? Having hundreds of people subscribe to your blog? Does it make you prettier if people “like” your pictures? Are you funnier if people tell more stories about you? Is your worth based on whether or not people affirm you?

 

Success for our generation is a finicky topic. We’re the first generation to have our successes or failures broadcasted for your entire world to see. You know how you just got laid off and to cope you’ve been pinning a socially-unacceptable amount of motivational quotes from Pinterest to your “It’s Gonna Be Alright” board? Yeah, Suzy from twelfth-grade math noticed, and she told Jenny who you kind of knew from tenth-grade biology while they were at a party with Ben and Julie who both had a class with you during your sophomore year of college, but they heard that you had originally wanted that job at the big firm, so you must not have gotten it and, “poor thing, she worked so hard to come to such a hard time.” Or you know that really bad break-up you had last fall that completely broke your heart because you thought you were going to get married? Well Mrs. Johnson from church noticed that you went from “In a Relationship” to “Single” so she told the church ladies and now they’re praying that you’ll find “the one God has for you.” These life events that used to be speed bumps in the road of life have turned into axel-annihilating potholes that suddenly everyone and their brother know about.

 

Not only do we have muddled views of what success is, but we also have pressure to succeed quickly. When that success doesn’t happen immediately, we don’t know how to recover. We do our best to move on as quickly as possible, rarely taking time to learn from our mistakes and discover more about ourselves.

 

This summer I’m working as a summer camp cook. When I first accepted the job, I’ll admit, I was a little embarrassed to tell people, not because I did’t want the job but because I felt like I had to do something huge, exciting, and great now that I was a graduate. I always had a rational for it. “Well they offered me free rooming and food, so how can I pass that up?” Do you want to know why I accepted the job? Because while I was desperate for a job, I was even more desperate for a break from thinking. After four years of college and a stressful final semester, I was ready to not think for the summer and just cook. I didn’t just want to work as a camp cook; I needed to work as a camp cook. However, as someone who just graduated with a college degree, this is hardly what people expected from me.

 

When I look at the world’s definition of success, I feel tired. It looks like early mornings and late nights, short weekends and few holidays all for the sake of impressing a few people or rationalizing that you’ve done something worthwhile. I’ve met people who seem to brag about their busy schedules—they wear their exhaustion like a boy scout who earned his final badge. “See these bags under my eyes? They’re because I only slept one hour last night because I agreed to plan an event this weekend even though I had stuff going on all week. Am I not awesome?”

 

Did our lives really become a My Dad is Stronger competition with our schedules? Are we really obsessed with who does or doesn’t “like” our posts? Is this what success looks like? If so, I give up because that sounds miserable.

 

I believe we can better define success, that we can intentionally pursue a meaningful life that leaves us feeling more fulfilled than a busy schedule and a couple diplomas hanging on the wall. I think we’re called to a greater purpose than that, a purpose that makes those ambitions seem goofy and trivial. The problem is that you need to take the time to consciously choose a different definition.