Do you wish you could return to a moment in your past?

     Regret is an emotion that, by its own definition, we do not want to experience. To look back at your life and think that it could have been better had you done something different is both a useless but infuriating series of thoughts. Yet, as my life moves forward I can’t help but feel regret for my semi-intentional under-informedness.

    As I was growing up the question “What do you want to do when you grow up” was asked of me, a lot. Of course, such a question is unreasonable to ask, as children barely even have a concept of what work is, and making such an opinion is ultimately just guessing. Yet, as a child, I had made a decision, quite fervently even, about what I was going to be doing in the future, engineering.

    Did I know what engineering was? Kind of. Was I actually interested in the process of designing? Not really. Did I watch YouTubers like Mark Rober and play with Legos giving me the impression that engineering was my calling? Yes. The choice to pursue engineering rearranged my life with clubs, extracurriculars, and class selections. But the further along I got the more I realized, I wasn’t really all that interested in engineering itself. Most of the extracurriculars that I went to weren’t ones that I chose because they were something that I was actually interested in, instead, they were suggested by my parents to help me along my journey along the engineering path. Many such extracurriculars like Kumon or a robotics team are things that I actively grew to dislike because they weren’t interesting to me and were more like a chore.

    If not engineering though, what would I even be interested in doing in the future? Well, I didn’t know, I had somewhat intentionally and unintentionally left myself unaware of what other options. I had convinced myself that engineering was the only path that I had forward and to seek out other ideas was a fruitless idea that I should just avoid. My only other real interest was in gaming, and that didn’t pose a substantial threat as an alternate career. In essence, I kept myself intentionally under-informed to make myself stay the course and continue my life as had been planned out for engineering.

    Things however began to change as I got a computer and began to be more interested in World War 2 and its vehicles, a subject covered more deeply in my previous essay. Researching World War 2 was something that I would do in my free time, maybe even something that you could call a hobby. I hadn’t really realized it at the time, but a lot of my free time was spent learning more about history, and almost none of it was actually going to engineering. I still had the clubs I felt forced into, but in my true free time, it was all history and gaming. I hadn’t really begun to realize this until only fairly recently, however after experiencing some actual engineering my entire worldview was rocked. I realized that I didn’t really like engineering and that it was intentional narrow-mindedness and wanting to please my parents that had led me down this path. I informed my family, and everything began to shift again in my life as I began to realign to going into the area of study that I was actually interested in.

If I could go back in time and tell younger me just one piece of advice it would be that he shouldn’t just default to the easy position suggested by his parents and coast along in life, guided along as if on a train track. He should actively seek out his interests and try and figure out what it is he likes and do that instead.