Young & Stupid?

There is an overused phrase that tends to surface somewhat later in life, usually a couple of years after college. “Young and stupid,” people say, when describing the dumb things they did in their earlier days. Life is a learning process, of course, a slightly exponential curve of knowledge gained from birth until we are either dead or mostly incapacitated. Understandably, in our older years we tend to be more morally awake and aware of what is stupid and what isn’t, by the general consensus.

Being as petulant and critical as I admittedly am, I have a problem with that statement. Several problems, actually. Firstly, in the context it is usually used in, it treats stupidity as something that’s funny. In some cases, yes, stupidity can lead to doing things that are pretty funny, but I’m talking about doing things that are just downright brainless. Those of you who know me well know that I have a very, very low tolerance for stupidity. I guess I just don’t understand how wasting people’s time and resources could be funny in any way, especially when it involves doing something destructive or dangerous.

Secondly, I do not understand the concept of a stupidity threshold. That phrase suggests that at some point, people go from being imperceptive in exercising their free will to suddenly realizing that they’ve been acting like morons. It’s like the sonic boom of awareness—once people are beyond that barrier, they look back and start to laugh, like they just got a joke.

I’m sure that looking back I’ll have things I regret. I already regret some of the things I’ve done. But that doesn’t necessarily mean I was stupid. As of yet, I have a disciplinary record that is cleaner than Chris Brown’s image before he punched out Rhianna. There isn’t a thing on my traffic record, my police record, or my academic record—not even a single detention since my first day of preschool. This isn’t because I’m a perfect person, a goody-two-shoes white boy that’s totally full of himself. It’s because I look at each action as a choice, a possibility for different results. It seems that people only focus on the big decisions in life: college, marriage, career choices, and etcetera. But I think it’s more than that—life is affected just as much by the countless small and irreversible decisions we make on a daily basis as it is by those big choices. In order to keep yourself on track—to keep from letting yourself be “young and stupid”—it’s a good idea to calculate just a little more the consequences of your actions. I may sound like a chiding parent, but your image is in your own hands.

There will come a day when I’ll be sitting in a lawn chair having a cold one with some friends at a summer block party, or around a campfire out camping with some buddies, and they’ll start to talk about when they were young and stupid. They’ll talking about getting drunk and getting high, and everything they did when they were drunk and high, or at least the things they remember. And I will sit back in my chair and smile, because I will have nothing to say.

In order to prevent this from sounding totally egocentric, I will add a goal to this. I follow this goal, and I will pass it on to you: challenge yourself to raise your standards. Whenever you act, just use common sense. It shouldn’t be too much to ask. Am I saying to be more like me? No, I don’t like the sound of that. Be yourself. But make your youth something you can look back and be proud of, rather than something of a joke, parts of which you’d rather forget.

Current Mood: Calm

Listening To: "The Unforgiven II" by Metallica