First Post of 2014: Lamenting the Fast Passing of Times

It is not particularly surprisingly that as people get older and older, their attitude toward the coming of a new year turn from excitement and anticipation to something more akin to avoidance, nostalgia, or in extreme cases, hatred.  When one starts to become more aware of age and less aware of concrete progress in life, the passage of time, as symbolized by coming of a new year, becomes more and more a sign of meaningless aging, of another year passed without significant accomplishments or achievements, and, again, in extreme cases, another step closer to that inevitable end of human life.

Chatting over lunch to his former student from a previous Seoul-based employment as a SAT teacher, the author has become more keenly aware that he, as many others of his age, is coming to that turning point for which celebrating new year's is done with more dread than happiness.  It was a simple conversation mainly focused on her life as a undergrad student as a second-year student at a top university in the US, recalling the stress, tribulations, and the joys of the momentous changes in life, transitioning from when the author first met her as a Manila-based international high school student.

Relating to her stories, the author had to dig up his own memories as an undergrad student at Yale, an experience he himself does not view all that positively, especially after all these years outside the US.  Dining hall food, dorm parties, 8am classes, summer internship...despite having worried about the same things a merely four years ago, all these concepts are beginning to sound completely foreign and novel in the author's mind as he listens to the student.  "What was it like in my time?"  He kept on asking himself, trying to add to conversation with vaguely recollected memories.

After all, for the author (as would be the case of his Yale colleagues), much has happened since graduation in summer 2010.  A year in Rakuten, a summer in Korea, a year in LSE, and a year and a half in Rocket Internet...each experience that came after Yale is like a layer of soil fallen and hardened on the ground, making the ancient artifacts buried underneath so much more difficult to discover and extract.  And as the employment in Taiwan gets finalized in the coming months, the new year of 2014 will surely add more distance of who the author is today and who he was as a Yale undergrad.

At least a part of that "growing distance" with the undergrad self is more deliberate than simply memory loss.  And it is not just an age-related issue.  As the author mentioned to the student, life outside university is just so different from an enclosed capsule that is college life, making one more mature and in tune with all the perceived unfairness and problems of the world that students in school opposes so idealistically.  Looking back, all the talk in college about wanting to "see the real world" soon lost its glamour soon after its realization, making it all the more painful to reflect on ideals of past.

Of course, the intentional avoidance of those past memories occurs precisely because there was that positive thing back then that has since been lost.  Those ideals, simple joys of facing exams but not having to thinking about anything else, and most importantly, seeing self and others around progress visibly toward something greater.  From freshman to senior year, every year is a year of steadfast discovery, of steadily gained social consciousness, of one's passions through internships and travels, and ultimately, of (decidedly tentative but present) one's place in the fast-approaching "real world."

That sense of growth disappears after entering the real world though.  So many of the author's colleagues have now been stuck in their first post-graduation jobs for some three years plus now, complaining about "indentured servitude" and "corporate slavery" of doing similar thing day in and day out, but too comfortable with the steady cash inflows and stability of an unchanging lifestyle to get out of the arrangement.  They traded, consciously, the chance to discover what is new, a skill, in author's opinion, that is the most valuable one can learn in liberal arts schools, for a post-grad life of stagnancy.

Looking at the student gushing about a slew of new courses she got to experience thanks to her school, from theater to stress reduction, the author, like her school office without a doubt, has to approve of her decision to step out of her comfort zone.  But it was also a keen reminder of that massive gap between college life and what is outside of it.  Realizing it really makes one hates today's oneself for being so satisfied with the status quo.  That is perhaps the reason people do not like to look back.  Sucked out of those youthful ideals and challenges, people really just become, well, old.