Stream of Ry

I usually pep talk[1] younger Computer Science students when I get to talk to them. I ask them either one or both of these questions:

• “Anong bang plano mo pagkatapos mo grumaduate? (What are your plans after you graduate?)”
• “Bakit ka nag-CS? (Why did you decide to take CS?)”

I ask these questions because I want to know if they’re in the course because they like it and it’s something they’ve decided on and if they’ve thought about graduation as a new beginning rather than an end. (That last point probably merits its own blog post.)

Nonetheless, along the conversation on thinking about what you want to do in life as early as now, one of them asked:

“Paano kung go with the flow lang? (What if I’m just going with the flow?)”

and I replied:

“Yeah? But which flow? Someday, far in the future, you wake up and realize that you’ve been living a life that other people or your parents set for you and you question which decisions have I really made on my own?”

And that’s really an in-the-moment sort of reply. Having some time to think about it, I’m writing down my bigger thoughts about it.

I think people think of life as one big stream that you can just swim by with. I call this “The Formula” which is typically: you go to school, you graduate, you find a job, you save for marriage, you marry, you have kids, then your kids go to school and start that the formula, and then you retire and if you’re not yet dead, you die.

But life isn’t one homogeneous thing. Life is full of decisions. You decide what clothes to wear, what food to eat, what things to do, which friends to hang out with, who to marry, etc. We’re hard-wired to be able to make decisions. The ironic — and sad — thing is, when it comes to deciding on things that are really life changing, we seem not to want to decide. We suddenly delegate it to something else (i.e. “the flow”.) Sort of reminds me of the little green men in Toy Story, waiting for The Claw.

I ask the younger ones the hard questions that would make them think because I want to give them the opportunity to actually pause for a while and look back and think: “What the hell am I doing and do I still want to do this?”

When you think about it, things that I talk about are things that people already know. Sometimes, it just takes someone to ask them again to think about it again and hopefully, this time, they’ll do something about it. That’s why, as long as I can, I’ll say the same things because the message may be the same, but the audience aren’t and for some of them, it could be life changing. □

[1] Gerry calls it pep talk, I call it a sermon. Trust me, you’ll know it when I start talking to you about it.