Now that it’s been half a year since I was fresh out of college and found a fairly paid job, I constantly ponder what is it with education, career, marriage, family, growing up, growing old, bla bla bla. Is this what life is all about?

Education is supposed to immerse in favorable ambience, nurture wisdom in mind and mold integrity in soul. However, the reality is, most students hover around renowned universities both domestic and abroad merely to obtain a golden certificate, seek a decent job, purchase a luxurious house and build a happy family. The ultimate objective of getting educated is tremendously materialized, vocation-oriented and over realistic. Students just attend classes to jot down notes word by word, strive for better grades and higher academic rank, devoid of pure curiosity or sheer eagerness to learn genuinely. Not to mention the mundane textbooks, inflexible curriculum, and rigid assessment system. Mark Twain also said “I will never let schooling interfere with my education.”

Regarding marriage, I'm always pessimistic about it. As a philosopher once claimed, marriage is probably one of the worst inventions in human history, let alone monogyny. It’s so intuitional and irresistible to have a crush on and fall in love with someone, either at first sight or over a long time. Nevertheless, to walk down the aisle, take the vow and start a family together is a whole different story. Life is essentially a journey of solitude after all. We were born like this and are bound to decease in the same way. Like the alleged “lunatic” in Revolutionary Road puts it, in the end, all marriages are hopeless emptiness, except that most people only realize the emptiness part, but seldom the hopelessness. “After many a summer dies the swan.” It’s just as simple as that.

As for career and life, it is overwhelmingly helpless if you take a deep breath and really think about it. The daily routine, the quotidian life is repeated over and over again. Stuck in this well-paid but dead-end job, I’m really sick and tired of all the meaningless trivial tasks that I have to fulfill everyday and just mentally exhausted. As Frank in Revolutionary Road once described, when he was a child, what he despised most was to be a Knox man for 30 years like his dad whose name was not even remembered by the president of Knox Corp. Unfortunately, he winds up precisely like his dad, following his footsteps of being a Knox man, again. Despite abhorrence towards the job, he had to do it everyday and became a purposeless cog in the gigantic, merciless system in order to put food on table and provide for his family.

In some people’s eyes, perhaps I'm out of my mind to keep brooding over all this, belittling and attempting to abandon all the so-called “advantages” of a decent academic background and a privileged job position. But wealth, entitlement and social status are rather insignificant to me. What I want is a splendid natural landscape to live in comfortably, a favorite job that I could attain the sense of accomplishment, sufficient leisure time to carry out those aborted plans and realize all my unfilfilled dreams. Maybe I’m just as crazy as the guy in Revolutionary Road.

Just as the Radiohead lyric goes,

I’m a creep.

I’m a weirdo.

What the hell am I doing here?

When I don’t belong here!

After serious contemplation, I'm adamant that next year, I'm gonna resign from this job, move south to start a brand-new chapter, pursue my favorite type of work, live the most out of my life and actually make a difference in the world.