Ageless
By Jonathan Lam on 02/08/16
Tagged: the-homework-life the-homework-life-thought
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I go into a little fit of jealousy every time I hear someone about my age that does something amazing, or someone younger than me doing something better than I have. It's in my nature: I'm a competitive boy. But, in silent retaliation, I've decided to argue that we are, in fact, ageless.
The most common example of the aforementioned example I encounter is when someone skips a math class. This happens frequently at our school so that it's not uncommon to see a boy from two grades your junior excelling in your grade1. I feel so inferior, and this makes me rage: Why couldn't I be that one kid, going ahead so far in school? Why didn't I shoot ahead when I had the chance2? In the end, all those should've-could've-would'ves and what-ifs have done to me is killed me. In the words of Holden Caulfield, when I hear a superstudent like that:
It kills me.
I know another "superstudent." My Dad's friend's son has skipped two grades, and is the top of his class (literally, by a test score), even beating out his second in the class sister who is in that grade. But even hearing about those geniuses who are accepted into college at ridiculously young ages, even though they are so distant and will likely never interfere with my life, it saddens myself when I put my accomplishments up to compare with theirs. I've done so little. It makes me feel like Holden always does.
Chances are, I'll do at least somewhat decent in life, with some decent job and a decent salary. But I don't know how great I'm going to achieve. Even if I do go and pursue my passions and live a life of satisfaction— knowing that I did what I felt-like doing— where will I end up? I want to be up there, but everyone4 is fighting to be up there. There's a quote5 something along the lines of "Not everyone can be in the top 99th percentile. The lower 99 percent have a life, too!" And it's true.
But what I was trying to get to specifically was age. Why do we care so much how far ahead we get above other people when we're still so young? Why does it matter if we're 15 or 16 or 14 or 12 or maybe even 42 in sophomore year of high school? Why do we care so much if we're just a little bit ahead of others at our level?
And I argue that it doesn't matter. We're just making a big fuss out of everything. What doesn't matter is the now. Instead, what matters is the future. The lasting impression. After all, "the ends justify the means"— so if you've gotten ahead one year or achieved x, y, and z so many years before so-and-so, so be it! It all depends on what you manage to achieve in life holistically, a final collection of things you've done being more important than the individual ones and the moments you've done them.
Back to the examples I've given. Sure, if they've gotten ahead in math, let them be. This isn't to say you should slack off, but work to your full potential. If you can get there sometime later, if you can muster the determination to catch up, then they don't have anything over you. My uncle, for example, is finally getting his college degree because he didn't have the financial ability to attend a university when he was younger. But he knows full well that he still has the chance to make it up. He missed the original, most advantageous window of opportunity, but he still has a chance. Oftentimes6, if a person toils steadily and tries his honest best, the little differences in age become negligible.
The short bursts of energy that get you ahead don't matter. Being "good" for a little bit is useless. It's the long term that counts. We are ageless.
As a side note, if you haven't noticed, I'm trying to avoid the little text and parentheses that I often use as a sort of aside to the reader. I'm instead switching it over to a footnote system, a basic one which I have implemented here. I hope to make it more official in the future, perhaps with a scroll-to-footnote feature as in Wikipedia7.
1: This has not yet happened to me, but a person once in my grade did go up two math levels.
2: As in in (not a typo) middle or elementary school, where the curriculum totally would have allowed me to go far ahead of the grade.
3: No specific page number needed because there are so many usages of that phrase.
4: Everyone but people like Holden
5: I'm afraid to quote this because I cannot find this quote and I do not know its author. It's just the general jist.
6: If you're really old or really young (e.g. perhaps less than five or greater than eighty years-old), then this may not apply. But I believe it works otherwise
7: With one major difference: Wikipedia's system's is mainly for citations, namely "references (bibliographic citations)"; their secondary concern is the same as mine: "explanatory information."