First day of work, it’s 7:30 in the morning. Motivated by the excitement of a new co-op job, you easily rise and emerge into your strange kitchen. Your glass of water is slightly saltier than normal; the calcified showerhead produces a weak spray in all directions. This is a time of absolute potential. Your new life is about to spring from the seed of these humble beginnings.
I am writing here to advocate moving to somewhere unknown for your next co-op job. Ideally, go alone to somewhere completely unknown. It is a chance to build an entirely new life from the ground up, to meet people you never would have otherwise met, and to take advantage of opportunities that would have been otherwise missed.
Of course, it is much easier to simply continue the life you have already made. The superposition of possible relationships in first year has mostly collapsed by now, and the low energy state now occupied by us all requires few introductions or explanations. But one must consider who we are now compared to who we were back then. University ripens the intellect and broadens the perspective. The quarterback of the high-school football team is humbled, and the student with a 99% average in high-school calculus is shown that he is a much smaller fish than he once thought. There is nothing wrong with having an ego as a teenager; in fact, it is an important aspect of our development. But we must recognize the subtle effects that this ignorance can have on our lives. If we were to repeat the Frosh Week experience now, who knows how different our friends today might be.
This is why moving to a new city is an amazing experience. There is potential to be anything you want, your clean slate can be filled as you wish. Descartes enunciated this line of thinking very eloquently: “we acquire the powers of critical thinking after we already have established a certain set of assumptions and methods of thought. Although we may think that we live by our philosophy, it is almost impossible to objectively analyze our whole method of thought”. This is a topic for another day; I encourage you to read Cress’s translation of Discourse on the Method and Meditations on First Philosophy.
Let us take this concept and apply it to the external aspects of our life. Let us be reborn, this time with our critical abilities fully intact. We can learn from our victories and mistakes from frosh week, and start a new life based on better principles. Perhaps you wish that your circle of friends included non-engineers. Maybe you want to try ballroom dancing, or learn the guitar. When in school we all sit inside an energy well; escape is only possible with an input of energy.
As we all know, there is a small tragedy at the end of each transitional term. You and your colleagues shed a tear upon realizing that you won’t see each other for at least four months, and maybe forever. It takes energy to move, but you are going to be moving anyway. This is enough to make a new wavefunction – go collapse it, and all of your desires for the ideal life can be realized at once. Building a life from scratch is not an easy task, but you will find that your surroundings are a mirror that reflects truths about yourself that would never otherwise have been discovered. There is a niche available out there waiting for you to fill it, all you have to do is pack your bags and show up.
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