Turning 20 (8/2/2022)

 On Growing Up (Or, the Present)

On the eve of my twentieth birthday, I arrived into SFO at almost 7am, having spent 2 months in Taiwan. In another 5 hours, I was picked up by my friend, and in about another two hours I was sitting in my other friend's apartment in San Francisco that he rented out, with four other roommates, in order to work over the summer.

Pretty crazy. At this moment, I knew I was old enough to be grown up.

I mean, I sort of got this feeling when I first went to college. I moved out for the first time. But, on some level, it still felt like college was still another stepping stone before I hit the real world. This was different. I felt like these people were just that much closer to being in the real world than I was. 

It's fitting that this happened on my 20th birthday, because I'm not a teen anymore. I was already an adult, and some people move out and start working and start a family and go clubbing, but I feel like I don't really meet those people, or maybe I just wasn't exposed to those people. So, on some level, they don't feel real and I never really felt behind.

But now, being honest, I do feel behind. I haven't started an internship, I haven't made money, and I pretty much have made zero advancement to my career. I'm pretty much fine with just staying at home (mostly) everyday, and going out to have fun, which for me is mostly just hanging out with friends and also doing my hobbies.

I'm a person motivated by competition. It might be toxic, but I sometimes I don't get motivated to do anything unless I see people better than me doing something. And I felt a little bit jealous, or maybe a little bit left out that I wasn't just living 

So when I see my friends living like that, partying every week and working their high-paying job on the weekdays, I feel as though I should catch up and start making money and connections of my own.

It's hard though. Living at home and doing what I do isn't bad at all. I've found that stagnation is easy, and it's easier when there is a reason to do so. While irritating at times, I like hanging out and being around the family, and I like living with my parents. Work is scary, and I have a feeling of incompetence where I feel as though I just can't do things relating to my major, with the classes I have taken so far and with the skills I've learned.

I think this happens to everyone, but it's pretty hard for me to try new things. I have been saying that I'll find research before next year, but I'm around halfway through summer and I haven't even started.

On Missing "The Good Old Days" (Or, the Past)

One of my friends has a playlist called growing up. That one is happy. I made one myself. Mine is sad. For me, growing up has been hard. I don't know if I felt this way just a few years ago, but I fondly reminisce on those last years in the grey area of COVID between high school and college, and even back towards high school. All things considered, I think I had a pretty decent high school experience, and there was a lot of highlights.

At the moment, I definitely think I liked high school more than college. I liked the system where you were always around people, so not only could you make friends easily, you could also maintain those friends easily because you were seeing them everyday. Making friends in college is a lot of college, and even risky because you don't know how well you will be with people. On average, I do not enjoy hanging out with people in college as much as I did in high school. 

I miss those days where I would just hang out with my friends and talk, and we could seem to just laugh about anything. I miss the days at the lunch table, and then future back the days at the Lynbrook parking lot.

Yet, funnily enough, I seem to remember that people in high school used to say that middle school was also just better. With the highlights of high school, there were also lowlights, but the difference is that I have to somewhat think harder about them. Perhaps we as humans tend to think of life in the past as just better, and I'm seeing the past through rose-tinted glasses.

At UCI, I met a stupid amount of people. I think, at some point, I just got so tired of it all. I thought that the more people I met, the more I was going to meet people I vibed with, and then I would just have more close friends. That didn't happen. Perhaps I spread myself too thin throughout last year, but at least in the third quarter I found a few people that I did actually care about, one of them being a girlfriend. Yet, on some level, I just don't feel as satisfied as I think I was when I was with my high school friends.

I think some of that is starting to spill out, because sometimes all I do is complain about my college life. I don't think that doing that is very healthy.

On Finding Out How to Spend My Life (Or, the Future)

It seems as though all people want to do nowadays is party. I am finding it more and more annoying. It's starting to feel as though partying is becoming this huge part of everyone's lives and it's all people talk about. Even conversations have begun to be affected; a large chunk of every conversation always seems to involve some story about some past party experience. I'm hoping that it'll get better as I grow older, but since partying is also what a lot college upperclassmen talk about, I don't think that that'll be the case for some time.

As a non partier, I'm also surprised by just how prevalent it is. It feels like the thing that everyone just seems to want to do now. When planning events in club's I'm in, we'd actually decide to put things not on Friday evening, because people would just want to party every Friday night. 

I guess I'm a little bit annoyed because I feel like a lot of people feel like alcohol is the way to have fun, but I already have a lot of fun doing other things already. Few things can compare to the fun I have at a good dance session, or at a good meetup with the boys.

When I went to USC to meet up with my friends, we stayed up really late and just talked about different things, and it was so fun. One of my friends mentioned that it felt like we were drunk, and that just made me feel like alcohol isn't necessary at all to have a good time. If you could have this much fun without destroying your liver, then what's the point?

And that's the thing that bothers me most about alcohol, which is how much it harms and changes your body. There is really no safe amount of alcohol that you can consume, especially when you are under 40 years old. There was actually a new study that was published about this by the Gates foundation recently:

https://fortune.com/2022/07/15/alcohol-study-lancet-young-adults-should-not-drink-bill-melinda-gates-foundation/

Alcohol also just takes up a lot of calories, and as someone who tries to stay physically fit that's pretty annoying for me. I do still eat sugar, but alcohol just doesn't taste nearly as good as like a milkshake. Actually, most alcohol actually tastes pretty mid/bad to me, so I just don't feel like it's worth it at all.

I think my biggest worry with alcohol and other drugs is that I'm afraid of losing control if I go overboard, which is pretty easy. Alcohol literally changes your brain, and I don't really like the idea of becoming a different person when I'm drunk/high/whatever. I like keeping my identity, thank you very much.

Yet, literally most of the worlds population still continue to consume alcohol, so there must be something that I'm missing. I've drank a few times, but I've never felt anything other than a little dizzy while walking. Some part of me feels like alcohol must be an acquired taste and if I just keep drinking eventually it'll become fun, but I don't really want to spend the effort drinking enough piss water until I actually enjoy it.

I think going to college has caused me to go through some sort of quarter life crisis, where I feel like everyone must have some secret to having fun doing things that I just don't enjoy. This feeling started when I went clubbing and I hated it. Sure, part of it might have been due to me going there with people  I maybe didn't vibe the best with. But, to me, clubbing just felt like what my middle school and high school dances felt like. The most you can do is jump in the middle of the circle while you listen to music. It can be fun for like thirty seconds, but anything more than two minutes and I start to want to kill myself. Even worse, you can't really make friends or talk to anyone, either, because the music is just so loud.

I actually started dancing because I wanted to be able to actually do something at the school dances (and maybe in the future, at the club). What I didn't realize is that most people don't actually know how to dance, and also no one actually dances dances at clubs. The more I got into dancing, the more and more I appreciated what a good dancer does, and I realized that dance sessions with experienced dancers are infinitely more fun than just walking up to a club and watching drunk bozos flail around. 

I'm a person who believes that a fun person makes any activity fun, but doing an exciting activity with people you don't think are as fun is just hell. Despite this, for some reason, I was hoping that all the "fun" things that people did, such as partying and clubbing would just be fun in of itself, but it turns out that isn't really the case. Trying out something "fun" doesn't mean jack shit if you don't have the right people.

One of my friends told me that the reason why I'm so disappointed by things is because I have too high expectations. Perhaps that was true, around this first year at college I've tried to just lower my expectations for everything. It's somewhat worked, but I still feel like I'm just trying to convince myself that I am having fun instead of actually having fun sometimes, which I don't like. I think I'll still keep trying things out just in case one day something clicks and I love doing it, but at this moment I am mostly pessimistic about everything.

One thing I am excited about is going to concerts. At the moment, I actually haven't even gone to any concerts yet, which I think is a complete shame because I'm already twenty years old but there is so much music I like. There's a lot stopping me from going to them, such as money, transportation, and (most importantly) finding the right people, but I'm really hoping when I get a job at least the first two of these problems will be solved. I'll be going to 88rising in a few days, and I am really really expecting it to be a great time.

Young adulthood is tumultuous, and I don't think that it'll change any time soon. I don't really want to waste my youth away, which is why I'm doing my best to enjoy all these young adult activities, but I still think that, on some level, I might just end up wasting all my youth, whatever that means. I'm a bit pessimistic about the future, but hey, I guess I just gotta take things one day at a time, and go wherever life takes me.