I signed up for the Bloganuary Challenge to help get into the habit of posting more. The first prompt is what advice I would give my teenage self. I’m not sure I would give her any advice, because I think she did pretty good on her own and I wouldn’t want to throw her off. Many people say that they would tell their former self to not worry so much, but I see how her anxiety and ambition motivated her to do cool things when there was no guarantee that she would. That’s not to say that I did not make mistakes, learn, or have regrets. However, on the balance things have turned out more than ok so far.
I now have almost teenage kids of my own, so I can also talk about the advice I give to them. Today I was cuddling with my daughter watching the part of Dirty Dancing where Baby confronts the snobby waiter, Robby. He says that some people count and some people don’t and tries to give Baby his copy of the Fountainhead. I commented to my daughter that she should not date any boys in college who are really into Ayn Rand. A few minutes later, my husband, Rob, came in and we shared that we were discussing Ayn Rand. His reply was something like, “Oh yeah, I liked her stuff in college.” So apparently now I live in a sitcom. So maybe my best advice is to live with your own laugh track.
One reply on “Advice to my Teenage Self”
Now I want to read The Fountainhead again. It has been over 20 years, so I don’t remember too many details, but I don’t think that Ayn Rand actually wrote something to the effect of “some people count, others don’t”. I found an interesting article on the federalist which seems to agree. If I recall correctly, the main character of the Fountainhead actually starts out very poor, and at some point works in a rock quarry. I think that Ayn Rand’s philosophy is actually arguing against classism, and instead is one of the major supporters of the “pick yourself up from your bootstraps” philosophy – the idea that anyone can become a millionaire if they work hard enough. I really believed in this when I was young and idealistic. As I have aged, I have come to rather believe that “In Theory There Is No Difference Between Theory and Practice, While In Practice There Is”. In other words, rags to riches stories make great books and movies, but are really quite rare in the real world. We don’t start off equal at birth. That is why I now believe that it is fair for rich people to pay a higher proportion of taxes than poor people. In practice, most rich people started off at least a little bit rich as children.