You will be presented with five different pairs of options. Please choose correctly. Blue socks or white socks? Hair up or down? Cereal or oatmeal? Walk or bike to school? College or gap year?
How do you know what the right choice is?
Recently, Netflix released the interactive film Bandersnatch, in which the watcher continually chooses the future of the storyline. The character in the show soon realizes that his life is being controlled. If someone is controlling him, doesn’t that mean someone could be controlling us as well? I soon realized that it is not someone that is controlling us, it is something. All your decisions and thoughts are influenced by subtle influences. Think of cereal, for example. Would you choose the on brand or off brand if you were faced with the choice? Throughout your entire life, probably without even noticing, you have been trained to prefer the well-known option over the perfectly reasonable alternative. Unfortunately, this effect is present in your life decisions.
College is the right path, anything else is just lazy. These types of messages have circled throughout society for decades, and although people tend to respond positively to the news of someone they know taking a gap year, I can still tell that high schoolers are still very reluctant to take the gap year path even though they complain over and over again about how much they hate college. College right after high school has always been preached, pushing teens to follow the norm and forget everything else that exists. They get so rapt in their imminent college experience that they forget to even focus on any actual learning that could enhance the way that they think, socialize, or communicate. They not only miss the opportunities to develop their own sense of drive, but they also lose the option to focus on something other than themselves for a year. There are two major issues with strictly focusing on the direct college pathway. First, when you are constantly looking towards the future, you forget to focus on what you have in the moment and will always be searching for this amazing prize that you were told you could find in the future that just never existed. The second is that no one can possibly be ready to begin their life when they have barely even lived or experienced.
Another issue of going straight to college after high school is burn out. According to CreditDonkey, 57 percent of all college students don’t graduate college after six years, and out of that 57 percent, 33 percent don’t graduate at all. For many students, even in high school, belonging to a non-stop intensely structured system for 17 years straight can take an immense toll on their mental well being. This norm, for many people, puts them through so much mental strain when an easy thing they could have done to prevent it was right in front of them. Take a year off. Learn how to speak a different language, imbue yourself in a culture, take a salsa class and work at Safeway, step out of your comfort zone, gain some independence. Life waits for the people who take time to look up from their textbook and notice how beautiful the world really is. I would never try to discourage anyone from going straight to college because only you know what’s right for you. I am only trying to encourage those afraid to divert from the preached path to take that chance and reap its benefits.
We are so scared to take advantage of the amazing adventures life has to offer because it’s not the praised option that your mouse is forced to click. Instead of gaining independence and forming crazy relationships, high schoolers mindlessly march towards yet another form of structure in which they barely have to think for themselves. Don’t be afraid to take the unconventional path, create a malfunction in the game, and live a little.
