Time Traveling

This anecdote was drastically improved by your disclosure of how much you paid for your house. It drove your point home nicely.

Oh, and I’m 28 years old. I wouldn’t trade where I’m at now for a chance to revisit my high school or undergrad years for anything.

I look forward to my thirties and forties, where I hope to really shine.

I can only speak as a liberal arts undergrad and grad student (history), but my experience is exactly the same as Phil’s.

I am a grad student in history currently and the people I see are grumpy, grouchy, and snippy. I remember my undergrad years as chatty and amiable.

I think it has to do with the vitality of the undergrad years. You’re studying a wide range of subjects and it’s all a completely new experience. As a grad student, you’re studying a much narrower range of subjects and you’re interacting with much the same people.

In history (and liberal arts degrees in general), the subject matter is depressing, obtuse, and self-deprecatory. No matter what the ostensible topic, the discussion and scholarship inevitably revolves around genocide, oppression, and evil deeds. Most of my colleagues are incensed by the slightest thing and never seem able to exude the tolerance they praise and seek.

I am constantly feeling like I’m not one of them because I’ve worked my way throughout my college career in the real world and have been married for nearly a decade. I listen to their tired carping and wish they’d realize how self-absorbed they sound.

Dr. Martin E. P. Seligman (a psychologist based at the University of Pennsylvania) wrote an excellent book about what actually makes people happy. The book is called, Authentic Happiness, and the following link will take you to the Amazon page that describes the book:

Authentic Happiness

I highly recommend it. Although it may seem like one of those saccharine “Chicken-Soup”-type books, it’s not. Seligman has a solid reputation as an experimental psychologist, and the book has a lot of good science in it.

When I went to school I lived at home and worked full time. I’ve made almost no friends. To make things worse I moved to another contry and lost contact with everybody at home. Right now I have no friends except my wife. I can’t call anyone just to chat. I don’t make any new friends because of language/culture barrier. If I didn’t have a family this would be unbearable. Whatever you do, try not to end up where I am. Dmitri is right. Cheers.

For those saying “well, we’re not that happy, and it’s not so good really,” we must still answer the question: Why do the undergrads in Phil G.’s classes generally appear happier than those in graduate seminars, and than older adults do? He posited some theories, but his initial reason for teaching undergrads was that he finds them in a better mood, at least where he teaches. There must be _some_ reason.

–
Derek
http://www.penmachine.com

YMMV, but it seems to me the reason undergrads have reacted so violently is that they don’t know what’s coming.

Two pieces of advice to undergrads:

* make friends, hang out with them, have fun. I know it’s cliche, but it’s true. Stop taking things so seriously, really. Grades matter very little later (that may depend, of course, but mostly, nobody cares). Friends do. Most working people hang out with the friends they made in highschool, mostly because they are working and don’t have the time and occasions to make new friends. So at least, if you are going to become a boring workoholic with a house loan, make sure you have some good friends.

* what are you doing in electrical engineering school in the first place?! Do you want to sit in front of a computer screen, improving some small detail of something that nobody cares about, for the next 40 years?

When I was an undergrad, I thought I had it rough. No job (but few bills), no privacy in the dorm (but no mortgage or home repairs), and only other broke people as friends (but at least I had friends at arm’s length).

Now that I am significantly older (15 years after undergrad) and have a wife and kids to keep me busy (and quite happy), I realize that I had it easy then. All the free time in the world to read, learn, play, and live it up. Only 18-21 years old with a campus full of people who want to have fun the same ways as I wanted (including the occasional sexual encounters). No mandatory reason to be anywhere at anytime except for the 20 hours of class time per week, and even that wasn’t mandatory if I had a better idea like lunch or sleep. Parties, minimal supervision, available facilities for whatever, cheap food (which wasn’t THAT bad), all night card games, beautiful women (and a few ugly ones), and anything that you could imagine. Anything.

If your undergraduate days were unsatisfying or dull, that was unfortunately your fault even if you lived at home or had to work. As my old boss used to say, “There’s always time at three in the morning.” Translation: you had time to find all the fun you wanted, even if you had no money because my best times in college were free of charge…just show up and get it on.

However, now that I am on the other side of the academic environment, I think most undergrads today are stupid…

Although I’m not a doctor (nor do I play one on TV), I think can diagnose Phil. He has an affliction that’s nearly ubiquitous among those for whom numerous years have elapsed since undergraduate status. It’s a form of nostalgia combined with amnesia that makes the unpleasant memories of undergraduate years inaccessible (or at least less accessible than the pleasant memories). Those who have this affliction genuinely believe that their undergraduate years were somehow blissful– or at least more blissful than their current lives.

The fact is that for most people, life is largely a series of monotonous chores, punctuated with random periods of bliss and anguish. It is these periods that are remembered, with the monotony conveniently forgotten. The difference is only in the details of the monotony, bliss, and anguish, which may very considerably with age and circumstances. So the monotony of commuting to and from a cubicle and striving to stay awake during interminable and unnecessary meetings (for example) displaces the undergraduate monotony of classes, homework, and studying (things that tend not to be remembered with much fondness by former undergraduates).

Unless you’re either very privileged or very unfortunate, there’s no escape from the “punctuated monotony” model of daily life. An individual can make some effort to increase the ratio of bliss to monotony (using either the model of Mill’s utilitarianism or Johnny Mercer’s “accentuate the positive”) but I think it still works out a wash in the end. But the process of looking back tends to distort things by neglecting the monotony.

While I’ll certainly admit that undergraduate life affords largely unique social opportunities that don’t exist in the “real world,” on balance the undergraduate years probably aren’t significantly “happier” than grown-up years (if it were possible to measure such a thing objectively). The bliss and anguish are surely different in composition, but monotony is monotony no matter how different it may look.