I started keeping a journal for several reasons. One of the major reasons was that I had begun to notice that my opinions on all manner of topics were changing, but I had trouble remembering exactly why I had felt one way in the past and another in the present. It seemed obvious that my opinions would continue to change, so I had hoped that by writing about things I would create a record of some of the opinions that I would be able to consult in the future in order to get an idea of what had caused my opinions to change. I had initially suspected that it was education; that by encountering more ideas and information, I was seeing new facets and thereby coming to a more nuanced understanding of the topic and changing my opinion accordingly.
I still feel that education was the key factor, at that point in time, for the way my opinions were being reshaped, but it now seems that education was just an expression of a more fundamental change that had taken place in my goals of who I wanted to be as an individual and how that would fit into society as I imagined it existing at the time. I had transitioned from my teenage desires of nothing more than to acquire a slightly better lot in life than that of my parents, with all of the typical trappings of the middle class, to caring less about having a particular lifestyle, and more about achieving intellectual satisfaction.
I am, thus far, not intellectually satisfied… My goals seemed to have transitioned again, or to be in transition, so that intellectual satisfaction isn’t primary. There are a number of very important factors in this change, but one that I haven’t dwelt on much is how my perception of society has shaped my goals.
I told a friend yesterday that the world in which his 20 year old son is trying to find his place is not the same as the world in which he found his place as a 20 year old, so it isn’t fair to expect him to take the same path, nor would it even necessarily be a shrewd path for the son to attempt to follow. In the same sense, society doesn’t present the same opportunities to us as we age. Society is different than it was ten years ago, and so am I. The differences in these two things magnify each other, and as a result things that seemed impossible or undesirable ten years ago now seem the opposite, and vice versa. Because these changes are inevitable, it makes sense to keep oneself in a position to most easily cope with an uncertain future, and the best way to do that seems to be to secure the maximum amount of resources.
Securing the maximum amount of resources seems like a shitty goal.
