Etherised Patient

I recently bumped into an acquaintance who attended my high school, who I thought also attended my university. Upon questioning why I hadn’t seen him there before, I found out he had dropped out after the first few weeks, and now works a lot and wants to travel around Europe.

It got me thinking about different types of “thinkers”. This person, for example, I label as a “present thinker”. That is to say, he thinks about the present rather than the future. Although he wants to travel now, I think he will end up regretting his decision of dropping out of school, and I do not see him going back, to be honest.

This, in turn, made me think that perhaps what he was studying was not what he should’ve been studying. I generally consider myself a “present thinker” as well, as I’ll do what I want now, and deal with the consequences later. However, I greatly enjoy my major area of study at university (psychology), and learning more of it is exciting. This is how we should feel about it, isn’t it? And the fact that someone doesn’t like their course makes me think that it’s the wrong choice for them. But now that he’s out, he’ll never know what was right for him.

Anyway, I felt like such a parent being all disapproving and such (although I didn’t actually tell him I disapproved, of course), but it seemed like such a shame.

ETA: I did not mean for this post to sound as if I think everyone has to undertake tertiary education, I only wanted to point out that I believe the person I was talking about would regret dropping out later. I have no evidence that people who do not undertake tertiary education do regret it, and I’m sure many don’t, but I’m also sure that many do. In conclusion, I guess this post doesn’t have much of a “point”, except that “future thinking” is probably a more ideal method of thinking than “present thinking”.