If I had young people ask me for advice (which they aren’t and when I was young I also didn’t) I’d say this: The world is designed to keep you docile and distracted. If you want to do adventurous things, risk things, go far, you must do it now. If you wait, you will be too late.
Everybody going on adventure everywhere is ill prepared. There fact that you cannot prepare is what makes it an adventure. Great things were done by people who were ill prepared.
It’s true for sports, for your career, for politics. If you wait until the time is right, all the people who got started when the time was not right will have made the decisions for you.
The same is true for any kind of change. People like me tell you that we’ve got this but we don’t – and by the time you realize that everybody is fumbling and improvising, and when you finally learn how important it is to network and to be sly, how nobody who gets anything done just speaks the truth, when you realize that just because you are right people aren’t going to change their opinions, when you realize that to make changes you need to be politically active, to organize, even though you won’t learn how to do this in school because school prepares you for the world that is, for the system that upholds it, not the better world that is possible because it isn’t tried and true and nobody is financing that, then you’ll be as old as me and still won’t have done a thing.
Sure, it’s never too late but if you get started early, there’s still time.
And if instead you think, old man, I have done all that and more, what are you talking about? Then I am relieved and my fears are unfounded. Thank you!
#Philosophy
Related: To the young ones, where I talk about physical health deteriorating.