Twenty seven, twenty eight

Sites like Facebook are a good way to gather some sort of personal statistics based on the number of people you actually know on there. You can also keep track of predictions, such as the one made by my philosophy teacher when I was 18 and about to leave high school.

After spending a year teaching us the basics of thinking in depth using the logical side of our brains, the philosophy teacher ended his last lesson with a gloomy, dismissive outlook. He claimed we'd all have forgotten what we'd learned by the time we hit 25. By then, he claimed, all of us would be married with babies or careers to obsess over. That was the fate that awaited us all, he said. No escape. Every student in the class protested loudly at that point, accusing him of stereotyping people without knowing any better. I was petrified that his outlook could be right, somehow, but by then my life had turned upside down so abruptly that I also knew there had to be some exceptions to that rule of conformity.

"There are exceptions," I told my teacher, who sneered back at me dismissively. "No, really," I insisted, "There are always exceptions to rules, come on." He looked at me again and shrugged unwillingly. "Yes, there can be one or two, but no more than that," he said. He was the only teacher who knew me a bit better than anyone else in that school, which I'd joined for my last year of high school out of the blue a few weeks after the first term had already started.

The reason he knew a bit more about me was down to the fact that he was also my headteacher. When I started bunking off school and not attending certain classes (Latin and History) he was made aware of my repeated absences and confronted me one day after his lesson to threaten me with disciplinary action. That day wasn't a good day for me mood-wise, I'd tried calling my mother, but she wasn't answering, so all sorts of fatalistic scenarios were dancing inside my head by then (I lived alone in a foreign city where my new school happened to be but no one knew that apart from me and one girl I'd made friends with by then). As he threatened me, I got angry and words began to flood out of my mouth - how much I didn't care, because it was hard enough to find the motivation to go to school at all when you were accountable to virtually nobody. It's not that I didn't want to go to history class, it's just that the lessons were always so late in the afternoon that by then the temptation to just leave was too great to resist. As for Latin, I couldn't stand the teacher, so why should I force myself to endure it when I can simply not attend the class? All I had to do is keep walking past the classroom and leave school grounds. It was too simple and easy not to do it. And once you've done it once, it gets easier and easier because you realise no one is doing anything about it. Nobody is actually stopping you, because nobody can ever stop you in anything except yourself.

The teacher stopped threatening me and sort of blinked in surprise, saying he had no idea I was alone here. "How come you're alone in this city?" he asked, puzzled. What was I supposed to say that would be short enough to prevent the meeting from lasting a whole afternoon? I embellished my story, that's what I did, making it simpler for anyone to grasp, because even I couldn't make sense of what my life was at that point. I said: "My mother and I can't stand each other, so she sent me away to get to know some of my family over here. Unfortunately none of the family members in question live in this city, and we can't speak to one another because I don't know the language. So they dropped me off in the city with my luggage and drove off. Now I'm here."

The story seemed to have the effect expected and the teacher suddenly turned more sympathetic, no longer threatening that I 'had to attend classes, or else...", but instead urging me to 'try and attend classes' as much as I could. He also said something about how he'd assumed I was just another spoilt brat.

Anyway, to revert back to the last comments the teacher made on our last day of school with him...

Ten years have now passed, more or less, and his outlook turns out to be rather accurate, except his timing was off. Most people didn't conform completely by the time they reached 25, oh no. Modern times mean that 'clever' people now take longer to 'settle down'. They'll have spent the greater part of their 20s studying for pieces of paper that will then get them a steady foot on the ladder. Apart from a wrong timing, everything predicted seems to have materialised. And how could it not be the case? I guess it all comes down to whether you end up settling down with a career to keep you busy if that's a choice you derived for yourself. More often than not, though, people end up trapped in such settings not by choice, but according to social expectations because that's what you're expected to do. You're expected to get a good job, get married, have kids, do like everyone else is doing, basically. So you do it. Not by choice, but blindly according to what others expect and the pressure from seeing everyone else do it.

I wonder... Is it realistic to even think it's possible to lead a life derived from personal choice, or is it more likely that most will just lead a life derived from expectations? In other words, is it possible to lead a life for ourselves, or are we doomed to lead it according to others because others have ultimately become the symbol needed for our own validation?