What Happens Now That the Pandemic Generation is Out of College?
So I just graduated college.
Attending Arizona State really wasn’t like attending a traditional university. It was more like Spring Break University as the common saying in Tempe, Arizona goes. Imagine sunny days, skipping classes, and hanging out with friends by the pool for your average weekday. At least that’s how I viewed life in Tempe.
Reminiscing on the past four years makes me realize that I had a weird experience for an 18 to 22-year-old. It started with me entering business school thinking I was going to be a wealth manager. Midway through my first year at college, the coronavirus pandemic hit.
I was a freshman at the time and shortly after I was “social-distancing” for about 6-8 months. It was one of the most challenging periods of my life because I’ve since learned that I need people in order to maintain my sanity. At the time, life was very draining for me because I let the idea of not knowing when the pandemic would be over and life would return to normalcy control my entire thoughts which made my mood and self-esteem terrible. Around the winter of 2020 is when I had serious bouts of depression and episodes of anxiety attacks. I was at my lowest. I was born a shy kid and have always dealt with the occasional feelings of social anxiety which I have fortunately unlearned. But those episodes were scary and can hardly be compared to the social nerves I felt as a child.
I needed change.
I ultimately rediscovered my passion for life through filmmaking during those winter months. I had always been into entertaining through storytelling and acting and I would record stop-motion Lego videos as a child where I would unknowingly be directing, performing, and editing these micro-stories. Somehow it took me years to find the mini-DV tapes to remember that I used to make these so often.
How did I forget that period? Funny enough, some depression and time alone made me remember those naively blissful times and I yearned to feel how I once did when I would make videos such as those.
So, I picked up the camera once again and it ended up showing me how I could maintain happiness independently. I was at such a low point in my life during those winter months – I didn’t talk with most of my friends about how I was feeling because my communication skills and ability to look at myself from a different perspective were still very immature. I would seek answers from gimmicky online personalities and cheap dopamine to distract myself from the pain that I was feeling.
Again, I was so isolated that I didn’t know how to communicate my pain because I thought it was a natural feeling that everyone was experiencing given the state of the world so I thought my struggles were insignificant.
But that was a lie. Anyone can escape that feeling of isolation and sadness even during the hardest of times and no feeling is insignificant. During that time, I read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and discovered his philosophy on how some people find purpose in life even when they’re in the deepest trench. To summarize, he lists out the experiences of victims of the Holocaust and posits questions as to why they still keep going. What meaning could a person derive from being in an environment so horrible such as a concentration camp?
While reading, I found that:
The Power of Purpose: Life's primary driving force is not pleasure or power, but the pursuit of what we personally find meaningful. Even under the most challenging circumstances, individuals retain the ability to choose their attitudes and responses.
Suffering Can Have Meaning: Frankl contends that suffering itself is meaningless; however, we give suffering meaning by the way we respond to it. Even in the most unbearable circumstances, life has potential meaning, and therefore even suffering is meaningful in the right context.
Responsibility to Life: One should not just ask what one wants from life, but also what life wants from one. He posited that the individual's task is to answer for his or her life and to be responsible for it, to find the right answers to its problems, and fulfill the tasks that it constantly sets for each individual. This is an antidote to the existential vacuum that our modern world makes so easy to feel.
No matter where I am in life I thought at the time, my problems and insecurities may feel massive but the odds are that it will never be as bad as what Frankl experienced.
Going forward, I don’t know what life will throw at me. But having gone through a pandemic in college, I know that I can not only tackle those related tasks but I now have those skills needed and can apply them to decipher any future problem that is presented. I would really recommend reading Man’s Search for Meaning as it was very helpful for me during my sad times. My realization of chasing purpose and finding childlike joy again was accelerated thanks to the internet and youtube videos so I would strongly encourage anyone to learn how to use the Internet for deciphering information more effectively in order to grow. It’s the most powerful library humanity has ever had and it will continue to expand and add to human wisdom.
Watching Tik Tok and Netlfix is entertaining. But what happens when pivotal moments occur and you need to focus and problem-solve?
In my opinion, it is in the best interest of the individual to spend their time learning where each section of the library is rather than spend all their time reading one section of the library. That way, you will have a better understanding of knowing where to go to find the answers to your problem. Our modern world values us specializing so much in our labor as if we are drones. this is productive in the economic sense but you need to be a holistic and independent thinker to stand out in the age of automation. We are not worker bees with one unitary purpose. We are human. The human journey is to experience and feel and you will undoubtedly return to high highs and lower lows.
It is in your best interest to equip yourself with the most useful information in order to effectively maneuver the highs and the lows.
Best regards,
Reece
