this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
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There is a term for this, but I can't remember what it is.
It's a phenomenon where a person goes through their formative years in a given structure, where you are raised by your parents, go to school, and are given set goals for every year - do X and you'll get to Y. This goes all the way up to your early twenties if you go to university, possibly longer if you join a structured company with similar guardrails, or much longer when you join the armed forces and live in a regimented way.
Once people leave these guardrails, some really struggle with the freedom they are granted. No one has a goal to point you towards, no one cares if you fail, and ultimately your life has a degree of freedom you haven't experienced ever.
One thing we're terrible at as a society is either guiding people with no clear path, or supporting those that don't want a clear path and want to find one of their own. Some people really struggle with this, and the freedom of being able to do shit like overindulge on drugs/alcohol/food with no support or community support can ruin lives.
A lot of things are worth doing for the sake of challenging yourself, but then battling your own mind about if something is a wasted effort or not is the real war.
As a general rule, anything you have to repeatedly do you should master.
Or figure out how to do it less.
A few years ago I worked as a telecoms engineer. The role itself was pretty free-roaming and a large part of your working day was unsupervised and allowed you to make your own decisions and your day to day achievements were pretty much all down to you and/or the guys you were working with.
Anyway, the company had a spell where they hired a lot of ex armed forces personnel into various engineering roles, many of whom had done long stints in the military. Pretty much every veteran I worked with was smart, hard working, organised and a joy to work with. With one caveat, most of them needed an 'order' to do a particular thing, or pushing into thinking for themselves. They had spent their entire working life in a structured, order based environment, that left them unprepared when they were given the freedom to think for themselves.
I can totally get how homelessness and addiction problems can beset people when the structure they have spent their whole lives within, is suddenly not there any longer.
That's so interesting. Objectively, it's neither good nor bad. The indifferentness of the universe to our coping with freedom is wild and interesting, a rollercoaster on its own
I think this is the cause of a lot of veteran houselessness and suicide unfortunately.