Reader warning: this post is really just me just rambling to myself, maybe even verging on a philosophical rant, but it’s a ramble I’ve been thinking about for a while now so I needed to get it out of my head.

I think the biggest difference between this summer and last summer is that last summer I learned how beautiful life can be, and this summer I’m learning how ugly life can be. I don’t at all mean that life in Colombia is ugly, I’m just getting a different experience (I was on a train visiting beautiful cities last summer; this summer I’m working 9 hour days at a poverty-reduction agricultural research institute).

Last summer I learned a lot about enjoying life and appreciating everything I have, and I thought a lot about what I was doing with my life and what I wanted to be doing with my life and why I was doing any of it at all – the typical I’m-a-college-student-backpacking-through-Europe revelations, blah blah blah. And all of that changed me (I think for the better) because it forced me to question myself, and I kind of came to the conclusion that all of the stuff we do is a little bit pointless, but we take it SO seriously. Having just done all of the college application madness a year before, I think that was still pretty influential in my thinking. A lot of times I think we lose sight of the fact that we should be taking advantage of the moment rather than pursuing all of these lofty goals that we may or may not accomplish. People always say it’s nice to take time to stop and smell the flowers, but nobody ever actually does. I think people are actually criticized for taking time to stop and smell the flowers. People who take a year off before going to college, or take time off in college, or decide they’d rather study art than biology, or rather work in a lovely coffee shop than do research for a professor, etc. There’s a lot of pressure to ‘be the best you can be’ all the time. I still think all of that pressure is ridiculous and pointless, and a problem with our society. But I also realize now that my point of view is much more first-world than I thought before. Not that I was ever unaware I was from a first-world country. I just didn’t realize that my views about life were so affected by it.

This summer I’m realizing two things: first, that work is a huge part of life – having an actual job is soooo many hours of your life, and it’s usually not that fun even if you’re doing something you really care about (kind of a depressing realization), and second, that my laissez-faire attitude about the importance of working hard is from a societally-privileged point of view. There’s probably an actual term for it, but by societally-privileged point of view I mean that I know how to get what I want in society. I know what I’m supposed to say when and to whom, what kinds of things are expected and rewarded, etc., and because of that I feel like I could get a job pretty easily, anywhere. Maybe that is naively optimistic of me, but thus far (and I know that is only 20 years) I have never had trouble finding work or opportunities. Not because I’m a really good talker or really well qualified, but just because I know how to play the game because I was raised in it.

So last summer when I developed all of my ideas about how seriously things should be taken, there was no necessity factored in. Because, (and I could be wrong) I feel like I have a lot of security. If I needed a job, I’m pretty sure I could get one, so I’m free to do less long-term planning. I’m also pretty sure that I could make a lot of money. Not that I want to, but I know how I could if I did want to. And that’s not something that a lot of people could say; that’s a particular kind of privilege.