_Emmett Ferguson is a freshman journalism major at MU. He is an opinion columnist who writes about student life for The Maneater._
The word “future” is probably thrown at you constantly. Whether it’s from an adviser, guidance counselors or parents, you’re probably getting sick of it.
The word itself is quite ambiguous. It has somehow come to mean two entirely different things. The first and more colloquial of these two connotations is the very immediate future, as in, “You will see this in future tests.” The other, however, has strayed far from what you will find in a Merriam-Webster’s.
For example, when someone uses the word in the phrase, “What do you see in your future?” it immediately triggers a response that is as optimistic as it is rehearsed. When they ask you this, they don’t actually want to hear your future. They want to hear the last 15 minutes of the feel-good movie of the summer, starring you.
I’m not overly sure where this tendency stemmed from. This social tendency to think that you need to be perfect, or at the absolute bare minimum, you need to strive to be perfect, and that anything less is unacceptable in the eyes of society.
No one ever gives a negative response to this prompt, or even a realistic one. If every freshman journalism major who’s told me they are going to be a news anchor ends up as one, we’ll need more news stations than gas stations.
The honest fact of the matter is that most of us will not end up with our dream jobs. Many of us will have to spend some time in our parents’ basement. Some of us will end up running the rat race until the day we die. A realistic view of the “future” is not tolerated or socially acceptable when asked to describe it at this age. Your future has to be perfect when you are asked about it. Legitimate realism often only sets in after the bleak reality of the situation does.
My future after college contains a studio apartment, debt and ramen, with an existential crisis somewhere in there. A lot of our futures probably have one of those aspects.
While a future filled with low-income and high-sodium may at first appear depressing, it really isn’t. It is a realistic view of the future, and that’s okay. Everyone will struggle in life.
You may not get the job you want at first. You may get demoralized. You may spend nights eating Cheetos naked in a beanbag chair rewatching “Friends.” No one will have the perfect life and people realize this, and should accept it.
Asking someone about their future just triggers a go-to response that has been rehearsed endlessly for parents and employers, which no one fully believes. They are just playing along with the unspoken but universally understood stigma behind the word. No one really believes in or expects that they will achieve this future. It’s just social standard to display a burning hearth of ambition where in reality there’s just a flickering Bic lighter with goals akin to taking a nap and eating a snack.
