Big Brother's Guide to Life

For most, if not all of us, experiencing a level of unfairness within "the system" has been an all too common theme. We have experienced getting passed up on jobs or promotions when we think we were the most qualified. We have all been rejected by many in the dating world.

In this episode, I look at the reality that we all experience unfairness at many times in our lives, and what we can and should do about it.

Should I have kids or should I not? Should I have them early in my 20's or should I wait until my 30's? If I don't want them, will I be looked down upon? If I do, can I actually afford them without sacrificing my quality of life?

These are questions that people in my generation always asked. So did Gen X and the baby boomers. But what's different today? Is it possible that this question is even harder to answer in a day where everything just keeps getting more and more expensive?

More and more, it has become hammered into our heads that if we do not have our life together by the age of 30, we must be screwed. If we are not married with a family and at least one person has a good, stable career, then we've been left behind.

As you might guess, this is not the case at all. In this episode, I briefly break down how my generation learned from Generation X about what the expectations are for people in their 20's and how in today's world, our lives don't begin until we are over 30.

We listen to our friends and those we trust to give us advice about what we don't know. We also take what little experience we may have in a subject and form an opinion on anything we see in the future that relates to what we had experienced in our past.

We assume we know enough about many different topics. We assume that we have been educated enough to know that what we believe is true.

But is it possible that many of us are leading lives with false assumptions about how the world works? If so, are we willing to listen to people who know a different side of the story? Maybe if we did, we would realize just how much of what we thought was true was actually more complicated than we knew.

The typical American life. At one point is was so simple. Two people would get married, the man would find a 30-year job, they would start a family and everyone involved was happy. That's what had happened for 3-4 generations in the U.S. after World War 2.

A television show was even created to showcase what this typical American life was. It was called The Simpsons. The father in the show was called Homer Simpson and he represented so much off what the typical American man was comfortable achieving in his life.

But was Homer Simpson's life something that was even possible anymore? Could all of the Homer Simpsons of the world do the same thing in today's world of technology and be satisfied with their life?

At any point in our life, we can cross paths with individuals that we never expected to. Very often we make assumptions of others based upon how they are dressed or where they are from. Very often as well, those other people can be surprisingly similar to us in terms of how we think and what our goals in life are.

Once we give others an opportunity to give us their point of view, we start to see that we all are not so different from each other.

As we advance out of our early 20's, we start to see how a lot of the decisions we made in our youth were not always the smartest. Sometimes we reflect on those decisions and say "what was I thinking?" or "why did I let that bother me so much".

Life has its way of giving us the experience we need, provided we put ourselves out there, to build up our tolerance for hardships.

But in today's world, like everything else, we try to have our cake and eat it to. We try to get as much knowledge and experience as we can without having to go through some of the difficult, and sometimes embarrassing, experiences that have built up our older siblings and our parents.

But do we really think we can have everything we want without experiencing losing something first hand? Is life supposed to be all wins and no losses?

It's no surprise that for many young adults in the western world, taking the safe path throughout your life sounds like the best choice when it comes to having the life you desire. Whether that's marrying the "safe" choice, or having that job that you have simply to pay your bills, or even the decision to have children.

The safe choices offer less chance that you will fall flat on your face, but they can also lead to boredom. At the same time, societies look down on those who make "bad" choices. Whether it's infidelity, working at a low wage job by choice, or purposefully not having children.

Can we keep our sanity if we only make safe choices? Is the excitement and unknown that comes with taking chances worth it? How different could our life be if we took a leap of faith every now and then?

Depression used to be something that we assumed only occurred in people who have suffered tremendous loss or who are suffering from a chemical imbalance in the body. While this can still be true for some individuals, the reality is that more and more of our young adults say that they are depressed.

What's worse is that there are many more young adults who function normally in day-to-day activities and who secretly are depressed. So much so that those who know them best would never guess.

In an era where the quality of life in the western world is at an all-time high, how can people who have access to these new resources possibly be depressed? Are we relying too much on our new technologies to solve all of our problems? Is there something that we have lost over time that may be responsible for this?

By our early 20's, most of us are either expected to, or we put pressure on ourselves to get that "real" job. The one that is supposed to define us. The one that we spent all that time preparing for in college. A job that our parents would have spent 30 years, or so, committed to.

Times are different now and we don't stay at companies as long as we used to. But still, how do we get that first job? What if we can't find that ideal first "real" job by the time we are 23. Are we failures? Is the system against us? In this episode, I reflect back on getting my first "real" job after college and how it definitely was not what I thought it would be.