| dc.description.abstract | On May 7th, 2022, I, Nick Sangalis, will graduate from college. I am 22 years old. I have held two corporate jobs in my life. I have been involved in a dozen or so student organizations on campus. I have volunteered over 240 hours of service since middle school. I have a side hustle where I do voiceovers for small businesses. I graduated high school as one of the top members of my class. I have won academic, athletic, and art awards, scholarships, national video contests, been featured on local news, and praised by peers and superiors alike. I am, by all measures, a successful young man with a bright future. But none of it seems to mean anything. As I sat in my bedroom applying for jobs for after that dreaded graduation date, I began to wonder. If I take that low-level finance job, where will I go from there? Middle-level finance, perhaps? Middle management? Maybe I impress enough people to get promoted to senior level management? Maybe I don't, and maybe I serve the distinct privilege of looking at Excel spreadsheets and the half-sullen faces and receding hairlines of my coworkers for fifty years until I retire, with medium wealth and medium social standing? Maybe I start a family, maybe I have grandkids, maybe they like to hear my stories of better days. This is, after all, what all promising young individuals should do, right? As it turns out, there is something worse than failure. It is dying unremarkable. I was mortified as I pictured this worthless life ahead of me. After all this, all the waking nights studying and planning and preparing for college and post-grad and beyond, all the disappointment and resilience, all the grueling hours of laborious regret, I would die just like everyone else. And what is the point of living drably if it results in the exact same thing as greatness? Mark Twain and Albert Einstein died, just as Chester Arthur and James A Garfield, and so too will Elon Musk, Joe Exotic, and you, and me. In the annals of modern life, everyone wants to be someone. This is human nature - we constantly, dogmatically, unrealistically fight against the tipping of the sand from the hourglass. If people remember us, then surely we were worthwhile. Surely we will not have to face the dark abyss that is the uncertainty of the beyond. And modern society has an answer for this - just follow the set path. Go to college. Work your way up the ladder. Get lucky. Get married, have a family. Then, only after all that, then you can be happy. I thought of what type of person I would become if fifty years from now I retired and reexamined my life only to find I had wasted it all on others' expectations of me, the standards set for success by people who don't even know I exist. I would be a cynic, a recluse; I would hate to know I had failed myself so greatly, and I would take it out on the rest. I suppose, in a sense, I would become Jacob Abernathy. But there is another answer. As we all strive to fight our mortality, to deny the painful reality that we only have one life and only one impression to make in front of the whole world, we can choose to live fruitfully. We can examine our souls, and we can find what makes them tick. We can bolster each other, we can live for something bigger than ourselves. Each of us, I believe, is destined for some calling. There is some job or otherwise some activity that will loft our hearts to high heaven. It will indelibly unite us with purpose, with happiness, and with greatness. Greatness, it turns out, is not having your name known for centuries - it is living in accordance with your will, and being satisfied with the results. Mortality will come, sure. But so too will the opportunity to do something worthwhile before you shake its hand. You have to search for such an internal peace. It does not just come to you over years of indifference. You have to examine yourself wholly. You have to be willing to know yourself, flaws and all. And, once you do, you have to be willing to pursue yourself. You have to be willing to put aside security in favor of this internal connection. You have to be willing to fail to succeed. You have to be willing to lose it all to gain life. You have to be willing to write, after 80-some-odd years of laborious nothing, knowing death will greet you whether you live or not. I hope it does not take a cancer diagnosis to awaken you, dear reader. | |
