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In school, I had a number of strict and unpleasant teachers (well, who doesn’t? It seems that they are all born that way). They made our lives hell during tests or submissions or just whenever they were having a bad day. They had favourites among students (or some might say, their snitches in the class to know who was gossiping behind their backs; to think they had so many concerns other than teaching) and students they despised. The favourites’ favourite teacher was the teacher whose favourites they were; the despised(s’?) ones’ most despised teacher was the teacher who despised them.

It didn’t affect me for many years as I was fairly average during my schooling life. But it was sometimes sad to see the despised ones getting yelled at the smallest mistake they did. And when they were being yelled at, I heard these words coming out of the teacher’s mouth:

“Study! Study, why don’t you study?! Suffer today, but you will enjoy tomorrow! Don’t you get it?!”

It seemed to make sense to me at that time. I mean think about it: you will put all your effort into preparing for a better lifestyle for tomorrow! What do you have to do? Just learn everything (that the most of us won’t need for the rest of our lives) and voilà! you have a wonderful life. Easy!

Obviously it’s a flawed premise. You can’t suffer today to be happy tomorrow. It just doesn’t work like that. Wasting a part of your life doing things that you absolutely hate to prepare for the other part. You need to enjoy every bit of your life! Every damn second that you can! Only then you can know what’s good for you and what you really, really like! You can’t let others decide what you want. Maybe you don’t want to become an engineer and become an artist? What’s good then it is to study physics, chemistry and math? It’s like they say it, “Don’t waste your time drawing, go study!”.

“Don’t waste your time doing something that you don’t want to, go enjoy!”

Come to think of it, people just haven’t thought things through. Neither parents nor teachers. It’s quite unpleasant to know that our “elders” don’t think for themselves and teach us not to do that too. Disgusting even, sometimes.

What can you do to change it? Well, you can’t change people who have been conditioned to believe what their elders tell them just on the basis of their experience (even if they are not successful or don’t enjoy what they currently do). What you can do is to think for yourself. Think what’s best for you. Enjoy what you like doing. Enjoy it to the last bit. Suck the goddamn nectar out of it! And remember, it’s no good being serious either (like they tell you to be). Life is supposed to be fun; not unpleasant.

Think about what makes you feel good and do it.