My perspective on my 20th birthday?

Question

What should i think about now i'm turning 20? I guess i'm the philosophical sort, but i just sort of feel blank about tomorrow. What should i focus on as i look behind me and ahead and eat lots of jelly and icecream?

Answer 1

You're older than most cars on the road. You're the same age as a very good bottle of Chateau Mouton Rothschild Pauillac, which sells for about $600 a bottle. And in 1,000 years, no one will have cared that you (as well as I) existed, and anyone we had helped or harmed will be long gone as well.

Answer 2

Focus on what you intend to do with your life to make yourself happy and fulfilled. At 20 responsibilities begin to pile up and you cannot act as wrecklessly as you did as a teenager. There are grave consequences.

It's time to take inventory of that person you see in the mirror everyday. Learn to love her and be proud of her. Try to start each day with a positive foot forward. And remember there will be a LOT of life's lessons that you may fail, but when you do, don't lose the lesson learned.

You have your entire life ahead of you. Go and make something of yourself!

Have a wonderful birthday..

Answer 3

Think of it this way --

This is really the end. You'll never be a teenager again. From here on out, you'll just get older and uglier. And life will only get harder, since the older you get, the less people care if you fail.

Happy Birthday!

Answer 4

We live in an age of transition. The old conventional wisdom isn't working anymore, and the social, political, and moral problems we face become increasingly more frustrating. One problem is that conventional wisdom doesn't recognize itself as such, and takes trivial movement along the lone of centuries-old trends as "radical".
___Such frustrations become evident in the reductionist philosophy applied to the human condition, in attempts to reduce the mind to a meat machine, freedom to determinacy, and evil to concreteness--in bringing physical violence to the center of the moral stage and in other more trivial concretenesses such as using smoking as a criterion for second-class citizenship. Destructiveness to the soul is pretty much ignored in our ethical system, or only lip-service is paid to it; physicalist, materialist ethics is easier to grasp, though if you think about it, materialist conceptions of personhood, which are deterministic, render any considerations of ethics and morality irrelevant.
___The warning signs of a culture in decline are there-- a bloated legal system that's required when citizens lose faith in the collective cultural enterprise, the rise of spectator sports as a way to harmlessly channel culture-building masculine energy, the rise of feminism, increasing skepticism, the proliferation of apocalyptic movements and themes, from the anarchism and "The end is near" of over a century ago to new-ageism and so-called "post"-modernism more recently. Take a look at the declining centuries of Rome and the Middle Ages for comparison.
___Read up on creative processes and creativity in individuals, and notice the parallels between invividuals and societies in the way both pass from old beliefs to new. Also check out Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" for the ways in which scientific communities process changing beliefs. (It's a lot more accessible than the title sounds.) Check our Anthony Storrs on the similarities between mental illness and stuck" creative process in "solving" individual human problems (though you'll have to do a little reading between the lines).
___The above should provide a rough preparation for looking at the future without the usual extrapolations from the present, which don't apply when a culture is going through major transitions. (No medieval could have imagined the Renaissance-- the later era was inconceivable to one operating within the prevailing assumption-set of the earlier.)
___One other fluke to keep in mind. Though relativity and quantum physics have been around for a century, out cogintive customs are still based for the most part on 17th-century mechanistic presuppositions, and in the popular mind (& even in the minds of many scientists), the philosophical import of the more recent physics amounts to little more than another skepticism-justifying novelty. But skepticism is one of the most central conventional wisdoms of later modernity, and taking realtivity and quantum physics as "true" is itself a contradiction of skepticism.
___So use your imagination to anticipate a very different future, in which the presuppositions that underpin the usual fururist projections are superceded. One thing you can take for granted is that the future will include some radically different assumptions, and will not resemble the consensus that conventional wisdom bestows its credentials upon. Look for any consensus among academics, and assume that it is inadequate, and will be radically changed--not proved untrue, but added to so radically that it will look like Medieval scholasticism did to early modern thinkers like Descartes and Locke.
___Play with these notions, and maybe you'll find some grounds to have hope for the human prospect in the future. Your current blankness is a good place to begin, for you don't sound like someone who's buried himself in conventional wisdom to leap to pessimistic and skeptical conclusions about what's coming.
___And maybe, if you use your imagination enough, you can participate in the constructing of an authentically POSTmodern intellectual paradigm. But you'll have to learn the conventional wisdom well enough to be able to discern the most of it that is true from the hard-to-spot holes and incompletenesses in it.

Answer 5

The only perspective I have about age, is a saying that the Amish or Pennsylvania Dutch coined; "Too old Too soon, Too Late Too Smart".