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The You That Might Have Been

What intrigues me about this thread is the admission by the posters that they did not know what their direction-in- life/goals/career would be. There was not a day of my life I didn't think I was going to be a writer. In fact, it wasn't a matter of "if I became," it was more like planning it out, i.e., "I'll probably have to grow up and go to college before I can write the alien invasion story properly," or "I can't write a proper Talking Mongoose story until I actually read The Haunting of Cashen's Gap." (A book that still eludes me after 30 years of searching.)

To my father, there were no other jobs beyond accounting, and he tried to prepare me for such a course of life from the beginning. (I can remember from before kindergarten -- about age four -- thinking, "That's not gonna happen.")

Unfortunately, money from writing is insufficient for living (unless you get novels published; no luck so far). And I've always had poor luck with more mundane jobs because -- frankly -- I've never looked upon any job or occupation as anything but hours of useless activity taking me from writing.

I get caught in a vicious circle, though: Unemployment = worry and panic = I'm so nervous I can't write, so I can't use my primary interest to support me. Guess it's time to start applying to fast-food places . . .

As to the OP's query -- I have imagined alternate me's in scenarios based on possible turning points in life (that I recognized retroactively, of course). Oddly enough, I say after 13 months of joblessness -- most of them turned out to be worse than the present timeline. Even if I could back up time 40 years and re-do school, I still don't know what courses/careers I could follow that I would willingly "share" with writing.

Ah, heck, I've reached some of my publishing goals: A novella set in Andre Norton's Witch World, a novella with Charles Fort as the hero, two Jack the Ripper tales, Cthulhu Mythos stories and articles, flat-out science fiction, and -- finally, just this month -- a story set in My Own Fantasy World. Maybe there is more to come . . . Eat your heart out, Alternate Universe Chartered Accountant Me!
 
Well her reality stinks if it topped out at faxing as the ultimate in communications technology. :p

/posting via internet on smartphone....

I did wonder about that. Probably my alternate self stepped on a butterfly at some point and now smartphones don't exist in that world. ;)
 
I agree there's no point in focusing on regrets. No way to change the past. There are some experiences that, IMO, have made me a better person and some that have caused permanent damage. Still, we can't go back in time (yet :p) so there's nothing to do about it now.

Am I happy in my skin? Absolutely not, but then I'm an American and I'm pretty sure all post WW2 Americans were handed a copy of Maslow's hierarchy of needs at birth and told to get busy.

Still, I'm intrigued by the concept. Perhaps I've read too much Borges. :D

The Other Half and I were discussing this subject earlier today, about times we've felt fated, or sensed a warning about some choice we were about to make. We even have a half-baked theory about deja vu being when you and your alternate self are doing the same thing at the same time. (Can you tell we love thought experiments? Ha.)

To me, it does seem like some situations are the equivalent of taking a wrong exit off the freeway and being lost in a confusing neighborhood. There's a sense of relief when you've found your way out again.

I didn't mean to sound smug about being OK with myself, nor does it imply that I just lie back and let things happen.

Various bad things have happened to me, including being bullied a lot at school. With help from my Dad, I found a way of not only surviving, but of feeling pretty good about it as well. Perhaps it also helped that my parents and grandparents had been through fairly awful wartime experiences. Also, the 50's and early 60's were a tough time in England in many ways, and things like having good food on the table were things you looked on as plus points, not rights. (Dad worked in the catering industry and we got 'perks'.)

I was fortunate in my parents, but otherwise I've experienced a pretty full range of success, failure, daft decisions, hostile actions by others, good luck, strokes of fate and so on.

As my mum used to say when I grumbled - count your blessings, there's many worse off.
 
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I've not so much imagined an alternative current self as been given quite a strong indication that I was alive before my birth. I have always felt that, even despite being the youngest and smallest in my school classes, I was born 20 years too late, and that so much that occurred in the 60s and 70s was my era. Is that unusual? I don't subscribe to reincarnation. I am open to the possibility though. Several of my Korean friends were convinced that I had been Korean in a past life. My wife, a Korean non-practising Buddhist does not believe this is the case. I'm inclined to look more deeply into Buddhist thought and practices.

Just curious - if you aren't very keen on the idea of reincarnation, do you have a theory about why you feel this way? Influences of elders while you were growing up, perhaps? Or something else?

I have heard of people who describe feeling more comfortable in other eras. A sense of belonging to that time period. IIRC, Umberto Eco described something like this in the introduction to The Name Of The Rose. He set his novel in the 1300's because he felt more comfortable there than his own time.

I didn't mean to sound smug about being OK with myself, nor does it imply that I just lie back and let things happen.

Various bad things have happened to me, including being bullied a lot at school. With help from my Dad, I found a way of not only surviving, but of feeling pretty good about it as well. Perhaps it also helped that my parents and grandparents had been through fairly awful wartime experiences. Also, the 50's and early 60's were a tough time in England in many ways, and things like having good food on the table were things you looked on as plus points, not rights. (Dad worked in the catering industry and we got 'perks'.)

I was fortunate in my parents, but otherwise I've experienced a pretty full range of success, failure, daft decisions, hostile actions by others, good luck, strokes of fate and so on.

As my mum used to say when I grumbled - count your blessings, there's many worse off.

Oh, no worries, I didn't think you were being smug. :)

You've lived in the states, you've probably noticed the pressure to "be all you can be", etc. If a person succeeds, they risk becoming a sanctimonious jerk. If they fail, people tsk at them and make them a cautionary tale. Most everyone else fakes it until they break under the strain. Then they have to take medication to beat back the cloud of existential darkness that threatens to engulf them at any moment.

I joke, but I fit the second two categories there, so...
Oftentimes I think other cultures are better at accepting hardship as part of life, rather than a personal failing.

Not that being sanctimonious is endemic only to American culture, BTW. *cough*Sting*cough*
 
Just curious - if you aren't very keen on the idea of reincarnation, do you have a theory about why you feel this way? Influences of elders while you were growing up, perhaps? Or something else?
Yes, that's most likely. We were regularly forced to remain at the dinner table when visiting or hosting guests where quite weighty matters were discussed at length. It had to have had a subconscious effect even though it bored the hole off me at the time. The reason why I have had such an enduring obsession over the Vietnam War and the Troubles in Northern Ireland might be due in part to that early socio-religious environment. I dunno. Its a good question.
 
Why is this thread in Notes and Queries? I'd have thought this topic a good candidate for the Human Condition forum...
 
Why is this thread in Notes and Queries? I'd have thought this topic a good candidate for the Human Condition forum...

Mainly because the OP was based around a question. I didn't think it would get as many replies as it did!
 
You've lived in the states, you've probably noticed the pressure to "be all you can be", etc. If a person succeeds, they risk becoming a sanctimonious jerk. If they fail, people tsk at them and make them a cautionary tale. Most everyone else fakes it until they break under the strain. Then they have to take medication to beat back the cloud of existential darkness that threatens to engulf them at any moment.

Yes. Some people thought my wife and I positively subversive because we didn't feel the need to outmanoeuvre everyone around us. And I guess that is, in the end, partly why our time there didn't work out.
 
...
You've lived in the states, you've probably noticed the pressure to "be all you can be", etc. If a person succeeds, they risk becoming a sanctimonious jerk. If they fail, people tsk at them and make them a cautionary tale. Most everyone else fakes it until they break under the strain. Then they have to take medication to beat back the cloud of existential darkness that threatens to engulf them at any moment. ...

Oftentimes I think other cultures are better at accepting hardship as part of life, rather than a personal failing ...

The 'be all you can be' theme has become so deeply ingrained in American culture that only a minority of folks ever recognize it for what it is - the most persuasive sales gimmick short of holding a gun to the consuming rube's head.

It leverages hope and (let's face it ...) greed so as to browbeat the rube into evaluating his / her state relative to some nebulous representation of success defined on someone / everyone else's typically materialistic terms, then nudges the rube to pursue this fabricated vision because he / she is the one who most certainly must want it.

All you have to do to realize the potential we've made you paranoid about is to pay us to help you - and to never question whether it was really your own idea.

The point is nicely summarized by the SubGenius slogan "You'll pay to know what you really think!"
 
The 'be all you can be' theme has become so deeply ingrained in American culture that only a minority of folks ever recognize it for what it is - the most persuasive sales gimmick short of holding a gun to the consuming rube's head.
It also neatly shifts blame for any 'deficiency' in life to the individual, as if somehow socio-economic conditions, family wealth or college fraternity membership don't matter. It's still you're fault you're poor. Or ill. Or uneducated.
 
I waived an invitation to an Honour Society at my first university some 20 years ago because I did not want to associate with the elitists. Was I a snob?

"If you want find out who your friends are, check out their enemies."
Rev John Smith
God Squad C1990
 
Yes, probably :).

See, though I'm far from egalitarian, I find even uneducated people quite often have interesting points of view, and can sometimes solve problems the educated can't. And being stupid is quite independent of level of education. However being stupid and arrogant with it - as I found perhaps a disproportionate number of people in the US to be - is not very pleasant. Such people are not unknown over here, of course, so it may just be that I was unfortunate in my professional life in the US.

On the other hand maybe the be all you can be stuff forces those who are not able to achieve it on the defensive.

Anyway, its not really 'be all you can be' , its 'be all that someone else thinks you ought to be'. And do it in the way they think you ought to as well. So my way of doing things didn't always go down terribly well with some of my US bosses. Oddly, the fact that it worked seemed to annoy them even more. I also refuse to behave as if work is the be-all and end-all of life, another unacceptable attitude, at least to bosses.
 
I waived an invitation to an Honour Society at my first university some 20 years ago because I did not want to associate with the elitists. Was I a snob? ...

To the extent you rejected it on the basis of a stereotype you projected onto the society's members, I'd frankly have to say, "Yes - you acted like a snob."

... But IMHO the more important point is that you dismissed an opportunity to add a supportive factoid (however trivial ... ) to your ongoing resumé. I always advise younger folks to take all such opportunities, because sooner or later it will prove useful to have such glosses on your record.

I was in the same position over 40 years ago, when I received such invitations from both Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Kappa Phi honor societies. My first inclination was, "Screw that establishment BS - no way!" I then relented, based on the prospect of being able to claim acceptance from a pair of such affiliations whose criteria traditionally rendered them mutually exclusive in most cases.

Four decades later none of my close college-era friends remember my debating the issue, so a rejection decision would have been lost to history. During those same four decades I've had interviewers consistently compliment me on the cumulative laundry list of such academic / educational 'bonus points', and I've won every job I've seriously pursued.

You don't have to subsequently participate to obtain the gloss.
 
... See, though I'm far from egalitarian, I find even uneducated people quite often have interesting points of view, and can sometimes solve problems the educated can't. ...

'Education' (as institutional certification specifically) is a sideshow to 'real life'. 'Education' (as learning / knowledge accretion generally) is not the exclusive franchise of educational institutions.

My experience has been that the person(s) most knowledgeable and competent at performing a given 'real world' work activity are rarely the same as the person(s) in the same environment who hold the most or highest institutional credentials.

The hardest thing to get across to mainstream 'analysts' / 'designers' (especially here in the USA) is that they should shut up, get over themselves, and submit to being humble students to the real 'expert(s)' on how an operation / task is actually done. Phrased more succinctly: "Shut up, listen, and observe."
 
Dad worked in the catering industry and we got 'perks'.

My mother worked in a bakery during the war and she too received 'extras'.

One day she was given an entire fresh Swiss roll wrapped in paper, three feet long, which she tucked under her raincoat for the 20-minute walk home!

It was sliced up by her mother and distributed among the family and any passing neighbourhood children. They must've thought it xmas! :clap:
 
Just a feeling of living on or at the margins, so to speak. My birthday is August 27th. The practical consequence of this is that as the "selection year" for schools (academic year begins in September) runs from September 1st - August 31st and everybody born in that year goes into the same school year, there would only have been 4/365 of the population in that peer group who would have been younger than me at school. In fact there was nobody in the year either at first or second school who was born between 28th-31st August, making me the youngest kid in the year in both schools!

This explained a lot, in hindsight: part of the reason why I was "excluded" by the in-group of alpha males in my primary school who formed their own little group and rebuffed outsiders. They all had September- December birthdays, I now recall. A year is a long time when you're four or five: from their point of view I'd have been the irritating baby kid (to all intents and purposes a year younger) trying hard to join in. Ah well, **** 'em.

Had I been born four or five days later, I'd have been the oldest kid in the next year down. I do wonder how THAT would have worked out - with a different class of kids among whom I'd have been the oldest. And my academic year was the last one to be eligible for eleven-plus and grammar school. I passed 11+ with flying colours and got to grammar school. I didn't realise till long after that the local council had a sort of "informal arrangement" with the local public school which meant they could approach the top half-dozen or so eleven-plus passers in the borough and offer them a scholarship: my mother told me years afterward that she'd had the offer via my primary school headmaster, but had turned me down as she didn't think I'd be happy there. (She wasn't exactly happy about me going to the grammar, either). Thank you, mum. But had my birthday been five days later in September and I'd been in the next year down - end of selection and comprehensivisation happened. I'd have automatically gone to the local secondary modern, a place with a reputation for being a complete sink, behavioural hellhole, and an academic graveyard. So how might THAT have turned out... at least it would have been co-educational.... no girls at my school (which turned out to be a higher social class of behavioural hellhole full of dysfunctional people) - not only a closed book but padlocked and stored in a locked box in a deep cellar)

And at Grammar School, the "sorting hat" meant drawing a list of all 180 new boys in alphabetical order and drawing a line under every thirtieth name. Guess whose name fell exactly thirtieth on the list... one more bloke above me on the list and I would have been in a form with twenty-nine entirely different people to shape myself to and 150 complete strangers in other nearby classrooms. Now there's another margin....

Then I left in May 1980. In September 1980 the school opened its first computer studies department. Another interface I was on the wrong side of!
 
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I'm not sure that's actually changed much. Even though I passed my 11+ and went to a very good grammar school, careers advice (other than, as mentioned, how to apply for uni) was worthless. ... That piece of luck is the defining thing in my life which has led to pretty much all the other good things.

I got that too. Careers advice was lacklustre. And towards the end of the 1970's, it worked on the principle that the post-war consensus that we'd get middle-management jobs for life would carry on into the 1980's and beyond. We were being prepared for a continuing 1970's where, if nobody got especially rich, we'd all have guaranteed jobs for life and nobody would be especially poor either. We left school in middle 1980. And guess what.... the rug was jerked from under our feet in a BIG way when we realised how quickly things were changing and everything we'd been educated for was rapidly becoming obselete. Hard times...
 
I left school in the 90s and I received no career advice. Excellent advice about university and academia; nothing about work - not their department it seemed.
 

I just sat and watched that. it was very interesting/disturbing. An American roommate of mine at uni had tried to explain sororities and fraternities to me but I didn't really get it.

Didn't they all have strangely dilated pupils? And the Director Of Something guy, the older one, was very greasy. Yuck.

I am sorry you have these things to deal with American friends. :(
 
There have been times and moments in my life where if i'd made a different decision, my life would have been very different, and looking back, I know those moments as being that 'Y' in the road.

They have been mostly times that would have been rather uncomfortable for either me or those connected with that decision, and so the degree of uncomfortableness has made the decision for me.

While either decision has had it's rewards and adversity, where I am at present is not too hard to bear, and so i am comfortable with my choices.

There have been one or two decisions that I would have done differently, and I suppose would have brought about a different outcome, but i find that life is 'swings and roundabouts', and as such will not complain, because...

[Yith video link repaired]
 
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I find that life is 'swings and roundabouts'.

I can't read that without thinking of this:


I've learnt a fair bit on this Earth, but when it comes to happiness, another song sums up the simple lesson.

You've gotta know when to hold 'em,
Know when to fold 'em,
Know when to walk away,
Know when to run.

You never you count your money
When you're sittin' at the table.
There'll be time enough for countin'
When the dealin's done.
 
Cocaine. Because they're rich.

Yes basically dumb kids who'd parents have the cash to put through University, now the future of the world is in these idiots hands. I can see a capitalistic future causing, all promotions not to be on natural talent, or because you are the most qualified to do the job. But because it was bought. This will have consequences through the fabric of society, it probably already has.
 
Even Cameron's been spouting positive thinking bollocks, declaring at his final PMQ "You can achieve anything if you put your mind to it".

(Aside from winning a referendum, as the Twitterati were quick to point out.)

I find Stoic philosophy quite comforting. We may each be captains of our little ships, but the winds and tides are beyond our control. No point boasting when they favour us, no point whining when they don't.
 
Even though I passed my 11+ and went to a very good grammar school, careers advice (other than, as mentioned, how to apply for uni) was worthless.
That was my experience, at that time, as well. Quite amusing really. The Careers Advisor (singular) came to our school, and gave me what sounded like quite good advice, something I'd never considered before. Turns out, when all my mates compared notes afterwards, he'd suggested the same career to everyone- Air Traffic Controller. Must have been an easy job, Careers Adviser in the 70's - you only have to learn one speil and keep repeating it over and over. No Social Media to kick up a stink.
I wanted to be an astrobiologist; I love aliens and astronomy, so it sounded good on paper. Even though I managed to get on a course that was very vaguely related to that field, turns out there are no jobs for astrobiologists, because there is literally no actual astrobiology to study. So that was a waste of time.
Now, in my sixties, I'm in a job which is about as close to air traffic controller as you can get without involving airplanes.
 
Yes basically dumb kids who'd parents have the cash to put through University, now the future of the world is in these idiots hands. I can see a capitalistic future causing, all promotions not to be on natural talent, or because you are the most qualified to do the job. But because it was bought. This will have consequences through the fabric of society, it probably already has.
That's the way it always was. It changed in the 50's to say the early 80's precisely because of the Attlee government's reforms which gave everyone a route to the top table via the 11 plus and the grammar schools. It wasn't perfect but it was better than nothing.

Now we are back to the 30's where its not what you know but who you know - and the essence of getting to know the 'right people' is going to one of the 'Public' schools. Actually even they used to have ways in for poor scholars, but they have largely been abolished as well.

The really odd thing is that it is largely post-Attlee Labour governments that have destroyed the education opportunities for the normal or poor person, in the ludicrous expectation that everyone will benefit from the same level and type of education. They won't. Only some people are academic. For the others is just a waste of time when they could be discovering what they are actually good at.
 
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