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Are We Sheep, Snowflakes, or Both?

"Human beings are not like sheep, and even sheep are not indistinguishably alike" - Mill

I got lost on the way to adulthood. It is easy to get lost in this world. To drown in a sea of facts and statistics. To get beaten over the head with estranged opinions. To get into quarrels over our views on religion, violence, sex, education, morality, this and that, each person trying to prove that he is right, each person trying to demean the other because of their insatiable need for always being right. Although it would take some god to determine whether humanity is making the right decisions or not, one can always decide what is best for himself. 

But it's easy to get swayed.

I've wanted to be a teacher ever since I was in elementary school. But in university I panicked. I was told that the job market for teaching sucks, that English majors will never amount to anything, and that I am not actually as special or smart as thought I was because everyone is a unique snowflake in our liberal society; yet every snowflake looks the same when it has been trampled on and lost in a heap of snow. So there I was, suffering a quarter life crisis, asking questions about God and the universe when all I really needed to know was, can I be a good teacher?

I ended up striving to get into law school (because law= money and success?) but my heart was never truly in it. Maybe it will be one day. But not now. I then suffered a secondary, and more extreme, life crisis where I thought that I should switch my major to computer programming (which is insane considering I never took any interest in it, and I also hate reading text off of screens. Minor setbacks). But in the end, it is teaching that brings purpose to my life, and so I am now pursuing being an ESL teacher. While this does not sound glamorous, I could not care less, for society is constructed of individual beings with sheep-like mentality. I would rather be outside of the box than to be confined to a boxed pen.

It is the gift of free choice that makes life worth living. Leaving this gift unopened is a huge waste, for with each passing year we forget about that gift, and eventually opening the gift will seem more terrifying than living in perpetual blindness. Which is why we have the faculties to make individual choices that best serve our own purpose. Don't listen to the other sheep. The farmer, your parents, your god, statistics, books, philosophers, friends... they are not your masters and you are not their slave. You are your own master. Do what makes you happy, and believe that you are special, because even a heap of snow would not be able to shine in the sunlight if it was not constructed of unique snowflakes.


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