Free
will by Kamilah Duggins
I think I should send this into a teen magazine-a warning to people
who think being 25 is cool. Free will has it up sides—but
the down sides really, really suck. Everyone tells me that I’ll
one day look back on these moments of 20s angst and wonder what
I was so worried about. I really can’t wait for that to
happen.
Open letter to free will:
Free will guidelines
Someone was talking about free will today. Oh, I think it was
in my horoscope—something about free will being a bit sourer
than we humans may have expected. Especially as we get older,
the concept of free will becomes far less appealing because the
older you get, the more complicated your decisions are and the
more you just wish that in the midst of your decision-making process,
a little person or billboard would appear that blows you in the
direction that’s sure to give you the most success. We want
so badly to make our own choices when we’re young, but later
in life, we want even more badly to make the right choices—or
as the SAT puts it, the best choices. But why is there so much
angst in these decisions of our 20s and perhaps early 30s?
Maybe it’s because by the time we’re 26 we’ve
spent the last 5 years trying to figure out and then rectify the
decisions we made when we were 18 and felt really, really good
about free will. We psychoanalyze ourselves to the point that
we can’t even trust ourselves to make a sound decision.
Am I close? Maybe not for you. But that pretty much summarizes
my life. Well, I’m 26 and that’s how I’ve spent
the better part of my 26th year here on earth—figuring out
what the hell I’ve been doing since I’ve been out
of college. And I suppose that’s okay—to be a little
bleary-eyed about life in the first half of your 20s-- if you’re
not accumulating debt in the meantime, that is. But, of course,
I’ve enough debt right now to be depressed about it.
|
