Time Bomb

Your success and happiness lie in you... Resolve to keep happy and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulty. ~Helen Keller

I've been continuing my achingly slow perusal of Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, and I've gotten to a particularly interesting chapter, in which Gilbert discusses the perils of - and failures in - predicting the future, and specifically, future happiness.

It seems like common sense, that the inexactitude of emotions in general, coupled with basic human ineptitude in understanding our own happiness, would make it difficult for us to know what will make us happy. But because we have a certain base of information - that is, we know what is making us happy - arrogance, another trait of our humanity, reveals itself and appears to tell us that we do know exactly what will happen and exactly what to do in order to be happy. According to the studies that Gilbert references, we regularly set ourselves up for disappointment and end up less happy than we predicted.

This worries me.

It's no secret that I am quite indecisive. I spend inordinate amounts of time weighing options, considering scenarios, attempting to quantify and compare potential satisfaction. Along with a relatively recent NY Times article about how stupid we become when we are given options, this section of Stumbling confirms what I should have learned long ago: thinking too much is just the same as thinking too little. I need to find the healthy medium, a balance in which I am more bold, more proactive, and yes, more accepting of the possibility of making mistakes.

Of course it's difficult to be open to the idea of screwing up, especially when there are certain life decisions that are not easily rectified. What if I decide to forgo grad school only to end up on a career plateau five years later? What if I decide to go to law school only to discover I hate being a lawyer? To say that I think too much is sometimes a woeful understatement. And I wonder, would it really be terrible to take a detour or two from the planned-out path?

After all, I've already got my heart set on one: Teach For America (assuming I get in, of course). One thing I've noticed in meeting and getting to know new people at work is that most people find it extremely strange that I, a bioengineering major, want to teach after college. Though many have no idea that there are programs like Teach For America out there, their surprise, I think, stems from the ridiculous belief that one should always follow the normal career trajectory dictated by one's major. I do think that fewer and fewer people subscribe to that idea nowadays, especially considering the variety of majors of med school and law school applicants, but still the pesky assumption that "X" majors must become "X" career people persists.

But I wouldn't be myself if I said that this deviance from the perhaps predestined path (Mom = engineer, Dad = engineer, is it any wonder?) doesn't also induce trepidation and "what if"s. I don't doubt that I will have troubles in the classroom. I foresee plenty of tears, sleepless nights, and frustration. That's actually not what bothers me.

The main problem is that Present Self wants one thing while Future Self could very well want another. Because of past experiences, Present Self thinks she will enjoy teaching, thinks (somewhat naively) that she owes it to America. But Future Self? Future Self could turn out to be a bitter cynic, someone who would look back on today and think that the Present Self was a schmuck. A saptastic, bleeding-heart schmuck who could have better spent those two TFA years in grad school, writing research papers. (Hey, wait, this Future Self kind of sounds like Present Mom! Weird...) Anyone who knows me would probably say, "Oh no, you love teaching. And you're not the kind of person who would ever end up bitterly cynical about it." Really? We'd all like to think that it won't happen to us, that we'll never become regretful, unsatisfied or jaded, that the decisions we make now will be justified and vindicated years down the line because at that time, we won't be able to imagine ourselves any happier. Unfortunately, as Stumbling tells us, our imagination tends to lean optimistic.

Would it be too much to hope to be an exception to the rule? To end up happier than I predict? Though it's impossible to know the changes that will occur within me between today and four years from now, I hope that I will look back on my TFA years fondly, without regret. For now, I can do little more than invest in blind faith.