Carving your own future

This time I want to discuss the weight of expectation.

Of late I have been thinking about my life.  While I love some parts of it, I have missed out on others.  I find myself struggling to define myself in this world.  So far I have only the option my ancestors had, that of being a house wife and mother.  In a modern world that wants its women to have it all - career, family, a perfect house - it can be a difficult task to reconcile your mind to this when you have only one piece.

I grew up with the weight of expectation.  I was the first person in my family - on either side - to be intelligent enough to be considered for university.  I was forever told that I would go to university and have a great career.  Now approaching thirty I am the only one of my family without a job and no prospects for any job better than a fast food restaurant.  This is despite achieving a bachelors degree.

Looking back at my life I have come to the conclusion that this weight has set myself up for failure.  It was so expected that I would follow this one path I didn't have room to grow in any other direction.  But what if this path was not the correct path for me?  What if I have now wasted close to thirty years of my life on a path that I cannot follow?  So far I have accumulated nothing more than a massive student loan that will trail me for the rest of my life.  While obtaining a degree is has opened doors that normally would have been closed, in my life it has not really given me the future I desired.

But what if I had never been pushed to go to university.  What if like my siblings, the expectation was they just get through high school.  My brother has become a builder.  He will do well in life because there is a growing demand for people with a trade.  You know like an electrician or plumber or builder.  One sister is a personal trainer.  Perhaps not the most lucrative of professions but one that will be increasingly in demand with the expanding waist lines of the population.  My other sister works for the courts after having a long career in the government sector.  And then there is me ... unemployed for the fourth time in my life.

You could argue that without my past experiences I would not have the husband I do now.  A man who is willing to let his wife stay home while he works his butt off to bring in enough money to take care of our ill advised debts.  But when you do nothing more than sit at home and spend that hard won money it slowly weighs on you heavier and heavier.

Perhaps if it had not been expected of me I would have looked outside the path of university and found something I enjoyed more.  I might have taken up a trade or I might have skipped study altogether.  Perhaps I would have ended up in the same place.  But at least I would have had the choice.  It would have been my choice.

It wasn't until I moved away from my family that I learned to hear my voice.  It has yet to set me on a path that I can be happy with but listening to that voice in my head has taught me a couple of things.  First of all student loans shouldn't be handed out to kids.  An 18 year old is not an adult capable of making good financial decisions.  If someone puts a piece of paper in front of you and says "sign here and you get $150 a week to live on" an 18 year old is probably not thinking about the long term consequences of this action.  In fact I believe that the age for obtaining credit of any kind should be at least 20.

If most 18 year olds are like I was at 18 then they will not be mature enough on many levels to understand finance.  This is something that we are not taught to understand as few of our parents understand it themselves and no schools force you to take a class on life skills like how to make good decisions around finance.  I only learned about it because I held a job where I processed massive numbers of finance contracts and having to explain them time and again gave me a detailed insight into finance.

Secondly I learned that university does not give you any fraction of a clue about what a job will be like.  If you want to an engineer they don't tell you that a lot of engineering roles will have you on call 24/7.  This means they can ring you at 3 am and you have to get up and go in and fix the problem.  This could take 24 to 48 hours.  So congrats your awake this long.  They don't tell you that you have work with managers who don't want to fix things, they just want to save money and expect you to fix it up with a roll of duct tape.

Or if you want to work with computers so that you don't have to deal with people (not all of us are social creatures).  This is fiction because now days developing IT solutions is all about working with the client to get the best result.  If you want to be a biologist then you have to accept that that this is the degree with the lowest employment rate, unless you want to teach or do genetic engineering.  The realities of a career option are often glossed over so that when you get to the end of your degree you probably don't want to work in that industry because its really not suited to what you need in a job.

Thirdly no one tells you how important maths will be.  Maths should be compulsory at all levels of schooling. Not English studies, but maths.  I thought I left maths behind in high school.  How wrong I was.  It likes to pop its little head up and say "hello.  Thought I was gone for good right?"  Maths is far easier to get your head around in high school than as an adult years later.  So any high school student should be studying a maths subject.

My point is stop expecting things of people, especially your children.  Let them find their own way.  When my children get to the end of high school I will be encouraging them to take a couple of years off to learn about themselves, explore the world and decide what they want for themselves.  My only condition I will have on them is that they hold a job and pay their own way through life.  If they want to be musicians, models, actors or actress then they fund that by working.  If they want to be doctors or engineers or vets or computer scientists, then they work and support themselves until they get there.  It is so important that they learn the lesson of supporting themselves while they find their paths.  This gives them a better grounding for a brighter future.