I have not catered this to be super concise or entertaining, you have been warned. After all, I primarily wrote this for myself. But I believe there are some insights in my ramblings and reflections that can possibly apply to your own life.
For 8 years, I have lived in a small section of Delaware, rarely encountering other new people and things - and even when I did I couldn’t recognize their value. I’m still young. I think every perspective by nature of existing from a singular point creates shadows. The things we can see end up creating larger shadows that we need other people to fill in.
Being someone recently initiated into the world of human culture, I see things I wish I could change about the world. As a student, I see the structural failures of schools: how they compartmentalize students and subjects, optimize for grades and not learning, the way kids often develop an aversion to learning itself that lasts the rest of their lives. I see this, but of course I’m unable to fully understand the daily struggles of teachers who have been at this for decades, the issues with scaling personalized education and capturing resources, and also the cultural framings that persist from one generation to the next.
The same sort of shadows are created by other aspects of my upbringing. I value learning and connection above all, and many things have enabled this shift in me: my stable upbringing, my genetics, my teachers, and chance encounters with life-changing books or experiences (philosophy camp). By being a clarified individual who knows what I value - I’m actually prevented from seeing the struggles for my peers to seize hope and control, to overcome barriers. Does this mean I should return to my addictions to gaming, social media, and comparison just to understand? Should I embrace the brain rot?
There was a philosopher who lived in the early 1900s. She was sharp, unyielding, and uncompromising. Upon encountering Simone De Beauvoir at the school they both attended, De Beauvoir expressed her view that the aim of life is to find meaning. Weil immediately countered by saying “it’s easy to see you’ve never been hungry.”
That was the last time they ever spoke.
Weil lived her philosophy uncompromisingly - she believed that pure reason and abstraction were not a substitute for understanding the reality of a particular position. Marxist philosophy was flawed for the reason politicians today fail to understand the struggles of their people - they are isolated from reality, theorizing in an ivory tower. They are above the people, not on the level of the people.
To bypass the dangers of a flawed philosophy, Weil set out to truly understand the working class. She did this by voluntarily working in a factory for months on end. Keep in mind, this was a lanky woman in her thirties prone to sudden headaches and migraines, who decided out of her own volition she wanted to do grueling factory work to better understand the working class.
I have respect for Simone Weil’s uncompromising pursuit of truth, but I don’t think I have to go as far as to live in another perspective just to understand it. First of all, there are some cases in which this is impossible (I can’t just biologically morph into a female). And some are very demanding or potentially dangerous, like giving up any money and security to live as a homeless person. Also, I’m not meant to be everyone else, I’m meant to be me. I think having the audacity to take my individual experiences seriously while also respecting others is important. At a certain level… I must let go. I cannot understand everything and everyone.
So no, I am not going to consume brain rot for the sake of it. And perhaps it was easier for me with whatever combination of reasons to seize agency over my life, but I can’t see a solid justification for why people would stop trying to direct their own lives and keep learning. Again, this is a shadowy area stretching directly from my value of learning.
This fishbowl I’m in can’t last, and it won’t. It’s on the verge of teetering into a wide ocean as I transition from youth into adulthood. I am a high school senior graduating in only two months. Since third grade 9 years ago, I have been a somewhat shy kid. It has been a constant struggle to escape the perceived chains of judgement, failure, and mindlessness. I’m starting to realize, almost too late, what I could have been doing all along.
My world has expanded in this past week. By some chance, I had the opportunity to attend 3 mind-moving events in only one week. On Tuesday, the highest supreme court of Delaware came to the smallest little community college to showcase two real cases. The seasoned defense and prosecution attorneys presented their case to the judges within 25 minutes, with a 5 minute rebuttal round. I got to see firsthand how the Delaware judiciary process works. From my view, it seemed like the least corrupt branch of government. The Justices were all very down to earth, answering questions and engaging with students.
Amidst the hundreds of students and guests in the audience, I stretched my hand up tall and held it there, shaking ever so slightly, heart pounding. Upon being called on, I asked if the justices’ own ethical views ever affect the decisions they make, or if they consider the long term implications of their choices. They said they have guidelines to ensure if justices feel strongly about a particular topic or have a direct connection to a case, they will step off the panel. More interestingly, they said they judge cases on a day-by-day basis, using only the evidence they have and the past judicial decisions to make choices. They don’t take long term implications into account when deciding.
I only wonder, what are the implications of this way of judgement?
After the trials, I walked out and I spontaneously decided to ask the first defense attorney, “how do you feel while you’re up there?” She said she always starts off very nervous but gets into the swing of things when the judges start asking questions. The stakes, she said, are just so high since she’s been preparing this for months. I asked what she likes about her job and she said that it’s rewarding to defend people who cannot articulate their own defense for themselves.
Just like that, I got a little peek into how the judiciary branch actually works in a way that will stick in my brain far longer than any droning on textbook.
Next, on Thursday I attended Conservation Day at the Legislator Hall in our state’s capital. I didn’t know I would be attending this until two days before when my girlfriend, I’ll just call her M, invited me to come and advocate for green space. I had no idea the amount of crazy people who would be there - all these leaders from state conservancy organizations and senators and representatives of Delaware.
Picture us little youngins walking alongside amazing advocates and leaders through the esteemed halls of powerful political figures in this chaotic mess of meetings, all without a clue what we would be walking into and with very little preparation ourselves.
Yeah, it was scary. But what I found after the first meeting is that it got much easier. I realized that I didn’t have to put on a show or elevate myself to meet some crazy standard - I just had to be myself. I shared how I really appreciate the open space and parks for running, and the accumulative beneficial health effects that they have had not only for me but for tons of other students.
What I found was that somehow, most of the representatives actually listened. I think. I didn’t need to present some grandiose thing, I just needed to connect with them somehow. What I hope is that every voice and conversation will be taken into account when they’re deciding where to allocate state funding. Ironically, this event was entirely public… but there were basically no normal citizens. I didn’t even realize I had a chance to be an active, real part of the governmental process through opening conversations with various people. Getting involved locally is truly a pathway to change.
My third event this week was yesterday, Saturday - a youth forum discussing education, media literacy, time management, and mental health. The 22 students there were set in rows with a panel of judges in front of us, and we were asked four questions total. We were allowed to raise our little bidding number (I was #18) to answer all of them, but we were limited to minute-long responses. I knew a number of other students there already from different schools, and I was excited to learn about what others thought on these topics.
It was not as much of a conversation as much as I’d hoped and more like a competition. The presence of judges and a prize changed the nature of the conversation into a tense game of appearance and perfectionism. Still, the pressure forced me to articulate my dormant insights into new forms. For instance, they asked about how we could manage our time better to achieve our goals. In that moment before I was called on, I realized that it’s not about time management at all, it’s about the quality of attention and the channeling of our internal energies. Time management itself seems to imply that we should be optimizing our time every single bit - managing it. Recently, I have been starting to question that. We are not machines, we are dynamic beings who thrive when we are allowed the space to reflect, or have spontaneous conversations, or just to be in the present moment. Leave some time to go unmanaged. In fact, prioritize the things that fill our energy throughout the day. When there is a chasm between the things that energize us and the things we do, we are inevitably going to burn out. When measuring value, it’s not about the amount of time either, it’s about the quality. Are we actively engaging with what we’re doing? Or are we distracted and multitasking? Multitasking may feel productive but the largest opportunity cost is the depth that we give up (which we need to truly learn). Similarly, doing work all the time may feel productive but we give up the periods of rest that let us absorb insights and renew our energies.
Anyway, I started off a bit shakey but I truly spoke from the heart in my responses. I believe in embodied learning - taking the things we learn and integrating it into ourselves. All the ideas I have engaged with can therefore be brought up in conversations, articulated like this. All the researching, writing, and reflecting I’ve been doing this whole time is what prepared me for this event. Luckily enough, the judges didn’t think my ideas were too abstract or incomprehensible so I was able to get second place. I will be putting that money towards the business I’m co-founding (Shaman) to encourage media literacy among the youth.
What I learned, however, is that we the youth really can make a change. I’ve often heard this encouragement from adults and it sounded great and all but I honestly haven't fully believed it until now. I haven't believed in my capacity to make change… for some reason I had been believing that I needed to wait until I was older and experienced enough to. I thought yes, we would make change, but when we inevitably grow into adults (because clearly we’re not prepared enough yet). Well even now as an adult I still feel like a kid, but I think the only thing holding me back was that misconception that I needed experience before starting.
All along, I could’ve started before I was ready. I did try to do that often, but I didn’t realize just how much of a difference it makes. I have always been somewhat shy. I’d want to talk to people, but then worry that I’d bother them. And that was when I consciously even saw it as a possibility. For the longest time, I just didn’t see the people around me - it was as if they were padlocked books in a library that I could only glimpse the cover of.
I have been truly embracing my life philosophy lately, the Socratic spirit of asking questions out of mere curiosity. The justices, the attorney, the senators, fellow students, teachers and mentors, even the judges on the forum panel - it’s been as simple as unchaining the questions in my head and then listening closely.
I asked the moderator of the youth forum who has been involved with it for 30 years now, how the discussions have changed over time. He said increasingly, his hope has been growing. If our group of students is representative today’s youth, and if we can continue to be leaders to advocate for change, he thinks the future will be in good hands.
It’s about getting a dynamic group of people together, recognizing that we may not know what we’re doing right now, and doing our very best anyway. We can do more than we think, we have only to shrug off the mental chains of fear and judgement to embrace the empowering energy of working towards a better world, together. The people who can make change are not adults, they are not politicians, not CEO’s and not PHD recipients. They are the kids in the flat farm-fields of Delaware, the unseen students in the corners of cities, and the youthful at heart who are willing to try before they’re ready.
Maybe the only true sign of adulthood is in how we embody this idea. This is the moment when we stop waiting for someone to tell us what to do, and when we start living for something greater. It’s when we seize agency over our own lives, taking flight and hurtling towards the steel ceilings only for them to part, dissolving like cotton candy. They all and we ourselves have been insisting for so long that those ceilings exist - but it’s only through an act of courage do we realize… the whole cage was imagined.
