As I reach this milestone, my daughter is entering the summer before her senior year and is stressed with all the baggage that carries. I'm looking backward knowing the truth of the old Yiddish adage "man plans and God laughs." Or as John Lennon said, "life is what happens when you're busy making other plans."
Sitting there with people I've known, a few since I was in preschool, I realized very few of us are where one might have thought in 1989. As people share their life stories, it's clear we've all taken our own journeys, and where we thought we'd be in 30 years is far different, and is also far less important than we thought it was 30 years prior.
Kids in 2019 have far different challenges than we did in 1989. It's not just the internet, social media, school shootings, and the pressures of technology.
We expect our kids to identify at an early age what they want to be when they grow up, what they want to major in, and where they want to go to school. We fill their lives with activity after activity meant to prepare them for this same purpose, and want them to build a resume before they're even old enough to vote.
Our politicians, education policy makers, and local business leaders don't help the situation much by insisting that certain degrees have no value, or that the primary value of an education is to prepare you to man the factories and offices of the businesses of today.
My classmates are lawyers, doctors, artists, teachers, stay at home parents, entrepreneurs, and more. And some graduated high school with a career in mind. Others got there by trial and error. Our education and life experiences inform our work. Your major in interpretive dance might lead you to become an amazing standout in the field of dance, or it may spark an interest in developing better shoes for dancers, or to open your own dance studio. Maybe that acting class teaches you confidence that enables you to become a better leader when you enter the business world.