Vegetarian diet, abstinence from alcohol and smoking, and maybe most of all pretty strong (albeit also quite insular) communities. They seemed to be pretty well-off too, for the most part.
What I wasn't taught as a youth, is that 90% of the value of college is in friends and acquaintances you make while there. Guess what really helps with that: drinking, smoking, promiscuity. Conversely, do you know what actively hinders that? Yes - avoiding parties and socializing in general, because you don't want to engage in drinking, smoking and promiscuity.
Looking back, I really wish I wasn't so "conserving" about my "youth energy" back then.
If a person has a problem with your attending a party sober, then they're the one with the problem, my friend, and you're probably not going to be creating a healthy relationship as a result of that interaction, anyway.
The relationships I should have focused on in my college career were my professors, at least a couple of them; I literally had zero understanding of graduate school, even as I was in college. But if I wasn't partying every Fri and Sat night I would have been able to better take advantage of the incredible opportunity I had at the time. Unfortunately, I was ill-prepared to make the most of it, though I was lucky that my passion for programming drove me to become a skilled practitioner. It was crucial that I got a mainframe help desk job where I manned a phone that never rang, and I got to teach myself C and superscalar programming (vector-based on an IBM 3090) and early internet protocols and stuff, using brand-new RS/6000s and Sparcstations and the like. Writing an Asteroids clone for X-Windows (using XLib) and a couple of vi clones was pure fun but foundational in a way.
I say all this without regret, or blame for the people around me. I'm just a product of my society, and I find great wisdom in Tolkien's notion that Hobbits don't come of age until 33. Knowing that the frontal cortex doesn't mature until 25 should have been a guiding force for this 17yo idiot matriculating too early and with no guard rails. Especially with regards to binge drinking, but it is difficult to escape one's culture alone at such a young, inexperienced age. Luckily, I basically stopped drinking only a few years later, and having never drank daily, but I lived the life of a fool, sans mentor, for those college years.
My kids have the benefit of my experience, however, because I am very typically not American in many cultural ways, thank God. Life has been gracious to me to get to experience many different world cultures, not being so enamoured with my own, though I love many of my fellow Americans when they are kind and accepting of others, though they grow more rare by the day.
Peace be with you, friend. Thanks for helping me vent a bit this morning. I am at your service.
My wife's son is a recently-minted top-of-his-class doctor who said that he would not be a patient of 80-90% of his med school graduating class.
I chalk it up to their primary skill is to be a memorizer. As a problem solver, myself, I have more respect for people that can think through a problem, analyze it, and come up with creative solutions. I have never seen that in a doctor, but that's really because they're just a product of the system that produces them, and I've only known a few. My guess is that most of them are pursuing that career because it's lucrative and socially beneficial, not because they can make a difference in people's lives.
> I think doing well in college is probably more about factors like time management skills and social support network than about vices.
I agree, but the vices can certainly interfere with the rest of it, especially for us poors who don't have upper middle class parents to fall back upon, as you suggest. I think a lot of why we're not rich in the first place is that our parents didn't have the mentorship to succeed either.
But I'm not crying about it, not while I have breath and love and fighting spirit.
Yeah, it's difficult to find the middle path between too much and too little. Those little mental gremlins always try to push us too far in the opposite direction. It's the nature of our internal enemy, the enemy of both our inner peace and happiness and our outer peace and happiness with other people.
