First Year in the Real World

So over the last four months I have graduated from college, acquired a full time job, and moved out of my parents house for good. I am approaching the one week mark of being on my own (with two roommates), and I gotta say doing all of this real life stuff makes you think about a whole lot of things.

I've always heard that the first couple years out of college are awkward, scary, overwhelming, and kind of depressing. I've always been confident enough to think that every year of my life is going to be fantastic and everything will just keep getting better and better and better until I die on top of the world. That sounds ridiculous but honestly I think that's how my mind has been working the last 22 years.

However tonight I come to this blog post to admit that I am starting to realize that I was wrong. It took me all of 4 months in the real world to be knocked off my soap box. Don't get me wrong, I still think I'm pretty great and I'm looking forward to where my life ends up, because I'm still pretty confident that it's going to be pretty great, but my morale curve has definitely been on a downward slope this year. It probably all started after I began working 40 hours a week doing something I really never wanted to do in the first place. Then the whole thing about not being around people as much (at least people in your same social classification) which means that you just have more time alone to start talking to yourself more than you talk to anyone else. That might be preferable to some people, but I really do think that's been the worst part about being out of school.

I've talked about this before, I honestly feel like I can put up with pretty much anything that life throws at me as long as I have people that I like around me all the time. And I'm not really even talking about just two or three people, I've always liked to have bigger groups of friends. Right now I'm living in Pittsburgh where I don't have that, and if I said it's not hard I'd be lying.

I also think that being in your mid 20's is tougher for single people, because it's really a challenge to meet a lot of different people when you're working full time. Plus it seems like 90% of the people you see out in public are way older than you. I guess that's not too far off from being true mathematically since I'm still in the first third of my life. I haven't had a girlfriend in almost three years now and I definitely think that's been the best way for me to go. There weren't more than a few days those last 3 years that I've even had the desire to have a girlfriend, but again, once you get out of college things start changing. I'm not saying I'm signing up for christianmingle.com or anything, but it's just another example of how weird things are right now. I suppose being this age isn't as strange for people that are engaged/married already, but I kind of think that they're at a disadvantage there. I've only seen one side of it, but being married right out of college still seems silly to me. I think everyone should have to be poor, confused, and borderline depressed for a bit of time in their life, just to get the gratification of getting out of it.

Anyways this was just a bunch of scrambled thoughts; probably one of my worst blog posts, but maybe it's a base for me to try and extrapolate in the future.