Today on my drive to spend $75 on a device (which turned into spending $300 for a lot of stuff I didn’t want or need), I had the classic thought of, what if you could start life over retaining all your current knowledge. That’s typically an exercise in recognizing life’s regrets and identifying what you’ve gained and learned in your life. One of the things I wanted to gain in my youth was the ability to be self sufficient. Like now, I’m able to diagnose problems and fix things and don’t have fear or worry about breaking things. When I was younger, I always took things apart, but never had any guidance, so I just ended up breaking them and never putting them back together. I didn’t even have any instruction for how to analyze what I was looking at. Of course, the internet didn’t exist back then, and while I did go to the library, I always saw the library as a bunch of books, not really a place to gain knowledge. Again, I was not taught how to best utilize resources that were available to me.
Anyway, that mental exercise led me down a particular path with a specific question: "What did your dad teach you?" The question was in the context of the nostalgic image of a father and son fixing or building something together – passing skills to a younger generation. In my recollection, I couldn’t think of anything. I had no memory of my dad sitting me down and explaining how something worked or how to do a task, or any life skills, or any special knowledge. I’ve lamented in my past how my dad was multilingual and never raised me to be. I suspect it might have been my mom’s influence that she didn’t want her kids to be "different" in that way.
So as I mulled on this, I became a little jealous of kids who had a handyman dad that could show them these life skills. And as I mulled even longer, I came to the realization that I didn’t have any mentors in my youth. I was completely self taught on everything. So oddly, my request for self-sufficiency was actually granted, it just didn’t have the end result I wanted.
I don’t want to paint my parents as bad, because what they did provide me was any tool I needed to help me figure things out, and professional training too, but most of that was wasted because I can’t learn in a structured fashion. Additionally, what my dad was was a good role model, if not a good instructor. He was well-mannered, respected, a stable provider, and technologically curious. I guess my upbringing was not "do as I say, not as I do", but more "do as I do, because I have nothing to say."
There’s a lot of stories and videos that talk about Gen X and how they grew up without supervision which became formative to how they grew up as adults. And now I find I really had nothing guiding me at all. It’s sort of a miracle I ended up how I did. And not really a surprise I would look back and wonder if it could have been done differently.
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