Thandie Brown
Contributing Writer
Those of us with resolutions may have encountered the consequences of our choices following the New Year. With deadlines, classes, jobs and the little space of free time available for Broward College’s students, the thought of having everything available to you all at once seems convenient – almost ideal, but if you change the application, you change the consequences.
Think about it like this: you’re back in high school with limited resources for food, less than $5 in hand and somehow a meal was missed during the day. Fundraiser snacks are all that are easily available and regardless of lifestyle changes or morals the urge to eat in order to survive has you trading a balanced diet for 280mg of sodium in a 2.62oz bag of air.
If outside of the school, or even outside of the classroom would the limits have been the same? The choices outside of what is immediately available are seemingly still not good enough.
Life sometimes looks like an endless exchange of consumers and product with a noticeable lack of satisfaction.
Miramar High School English/Creative Writing teacher, Veneisha Clarington notes that over the years, students made their own products, distributed their money and made their own profit. She states, “Miramar entrepreneurs find their own options, even when what they want isn’t here; brownies, cakes, puddings, chicken and waffles, each week there was another product being sold.” The efforts put out by students within the halls of their high school went against the grain of their institution but supported their ideals.
Even so, the push to create what you want may not be applied to what you currently have. The structures we live by have cycles and the pressure to understand the mold or even break apart from them are challenged seasonally whether that be in weight, academia, or lifestyle. The influx of business promotions and networking rise as we see the use of technology rise in our daily lives.
The application of creativity has evolved across many mediums of life – especially within the aspirations of how people apply their time. Clarington says that the students within her classes no longer, “want to trade their time for money; they want their money to make money for them.” She notes that the age of technology has people being set up as early as 6-years-old for retirement depending upon how they use their time – like Ryan on YouTube who does toy reviews and made $22 million in one year.
Sometimes, the start of a New Year means that what you want to do can’t only be framed by what is readily available within the year – it might be a plan that crosses years or decades. Where it seems like we, as young adults, have to decide what we want to be when we grow up before we even feel like grown-ups is a trial that I hear daily.
Clarington notes, “Sometimes the jobs or lifestyles we want may not exist yet, as most of the highest paying jobs to date didn’t exist 10 years ago.” Positions like Content Creators and Social Media Managers are newer amongst the job force, but even so, these people are going about living in an almost defying manner in this society’s evolution.
The emphasis on creative thinking across our education seems to be that much more vital now than before because we have available access to almost any career in any field anywhere in the world. The accountability of what we do about it is what makes having everything offered at one time so appealing, even if we’re not ready for it.
Our choices, as broad as they may be, are still selections of what we can choose from and the challenge to go outside of those things are more apparent now than ever before. Changing how you apply what you have now can also change how your maximize your satisfaction later. The choice to choose is independent, yet empowering, so as we experience the remainder of 2019, let us make an effort to go beyond what we know to experience all that we can.
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Photo courtesy of higheredgames.com