The Butt Ugly Weblog

Twenty years

It's been twenty years now that the first set of massive changes in my life started: that is, graduation from high school, moving from home to a whole new place to study in the university. So the past few months have been punctuated by a number of parties - the 20 year anniversary class reunion from high school; and the reunion from the class which started at the same time at the university.

It is interesting to see familiar faces and see how vastly different the life has become for them. But it's also interesting to see how more narrow the funnel becomes: the folks in my high school class ended up living all over the country and have all sorts of varying jobs from a farmer to nurse to doctor to engineer.

Then again, almost all the people from my university class work in middle management or R&D, live near Helsinki, and have two kids. The life story from almost everyone was eerily similar: studies, a bit of work abroad, back to Finland, get a couple of kids, get a stable job, and just do it. No artists, no farmers. Only a few had left Finland for good.

So we weren't really that different from each other. The passions that drove us to the same place in the beginning stayed with us and made us remarkably similar. It's as if we became who we were in the first 20 years, and after that we were unable or unwilling to change. Perhaps it just means that we figured out who we truly were and what we wanted to do.

But a part of me still feels as lost as on those early days as we walked through the corridors of the university, bright-eyed and full of ourselves. I didn't really know then what I wanted to be when I grew up. I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up.

I just have a lot less time to worry about it these days.