The Philosophy of Turning 18

And other pessimistic philosophical ramblings. 

I am drowning in bittersweet nostalgia while looking at these old pictures...

Eighteen years ago today I inhaled what was technically my first lungful of atmospheric oxygen (the same dull stuff I’m still on—no upgrades). My father tells me that instead of doing the standard red-faced, gooey squall expected of infants, I gave him a look of sophisticated confusion, and the family photos we have do support his claim that I was quite a thoughtful child with my short, Roman-esque hair. I also weighed ten pounds, which in the world of childbirth translates into extreme pain for my mother and my status as a certified chad in Preschool. 

Some things, against all odds, have remained stubbornly consistent: I continue to mainline oxygen on a roughly 12–15 breaths-per-minute basis; I remain, with upsetting regularity, confused by most situations involving either small talk with women or a teachers asking me if I am going to the bathroom to “trinkle” (like, sir, why must you ask); and I still irritate my mother, who has long maintained that I am “the most high maintenance person to ever live.” I also buzzed my hair and returned to that potato dumpling face I’ve always had. 

Me in my traditional Korean hanbok (clothing).

But other things have changed: I am no longer “big for my age.” At six feet tall and weighing in at something closer to the mass of PVC pipe than to a properly muscled human frame, I’ve attempted—and catastrophically failed—the annual “winter bulk” ritual—i.e., trying to gain twenty pounds of muscle by mixing a disgusting slurry of whey protein, peanut butter, and bitter anger. The result is always the same: come spring, I resemble not a tank or a beast but a lamp post—you know, the one on the corner of your street that all the dogs pee on during their respective evening walks. 

I used to lament the fact that my birthday was so far away. But now I lament the fact that it is here for the 18th iteration. I am not saying that I’m not glad to be here. In fact, I am so happy and lucky to still be alive. I think the only thing I don’t like about birthdays is the fact that I’m one step closer to the end. It’s my alarm clock that rings annually, reminding me to wake up or I’ll sleep through it all. And this 18th one; it’s loud and difficult to hit the snooze button. It’s more of a bittersweet feeling that I’m now technically an adult though I know barely anything about the world.

There seems to me to be a threshold of when your birthday transforms from a wildly good thing to an abysmally boring event you only care about because it means you’re one more year closer to the perpetually black screen. If I had to guess, I'd place it on the 14th birthday. At that point you no longer care about Pokemon or the newest Nintendo video game: it’s all unenjoyable, except for the cake and love you have with close family.

My wonderful Granddad, who passed 10 years ago. I’m sad that I can’t remember much about him.

Around that age, you realize that in four years, which seems like such a long time but really passes by in the blink of an eye, you will have to leave home; go to college; get a high paying job; and, if you take the safe route to “success,” spend the rest of your life in the small “memory” compartment of just a few family members and friends—your identity confined within a few cubic centimeters of mushy neurons that decay and will eventually be absorbed by the Earth, dragging your existence down into the dirt with them all, never to be heard of again. Just gone. Vaporized and used as farm soil 300 years down the line. 

But you ignore this terrible notion and shove it somewhere in the Public Storage locker at the back of that mushy ball of neurons, until it comes back four years later like the pendulum of a massive Grandfather Clock that’s been picking up speed exponentially and slams you in between the eyes like it’s a baseball bat, straight to the third eye, and rebounds and slams you again and again and again in exactly the same spot until you can’t take it anymore and you fall over, dazed and angry. You become Coyote chasing Roadrunner—being outsmarted, outran, outlived at every twist and turn; you slam into a wall while Roadrunner dashes forward at Prefontaine pace; you become cartoonishly concussed, except the orbiting stars are resumes and job interviews and people asking if you’ve figured out your life yet and what you want to major in. 

Roadrunner is like that jock all the 15 year olds in the manosphere strive to be: that guy that works for Jane Street as a quant, takes coke on the fifth floor, and parties till three a.m. on the daily, regardless if he has work the next day. And he makes more than your entire bloodline will, all while providing no real value to his fellow man (besides his firm) or home planet. And you? You're, well—you feel like Coyote, just chasing an elusive dream that’s been laid out so clearly for you: the prestigious path that will make your “friends” jealous and family proud. 

But Coyote sucks just as much as Roadrunner: He blindly follows the path that society wants him to take and not what he wants. Perhaps Roadrunner enjoys being a rich degenerate, a cog in the system. But Coyote? Surely he doubts whether his destiny is really just to chase Roadrunner until the day he slams into a wall or falls out of a balloon for the last time. I mean clearly he isn’t built to be Roadrunner given that he’s never caught him. My instinct is that Coyote does not even know what he wants. Maybe that’s the first step to getting what you want: knowing what you want. So how do you get what you want when you don’t know what you want to do with the rest of your life? Especially when there’s so much pressure to choose right here and now or there won’t be time to succeed? 

I’ve rambled a lot. But I now have a better idea of what I want to write about: the philosophy behind being remembered. It is a delicate act to balance your desires for solitude and for fame. They are not mutually exclusive, but the combination is like trying to mix oil and water: you must constantly mix them together or they will separate from each other completely. What I want is a certain type of fame—not the conventional kind; but the fame that overwhelms the listener’s brain with joy and love and a deep human appreciation for life as soon as the sound waves reach the inner workings of their ears.

For me, that fame is no better displayed than Emerson, whose literature gives me the will to live.

To do so—that is, to live indefinitely within the fickle minds of men—I must construct a story or an idea that uses the physical body merely as a means to spread its message. The idea must outlive man’s material belongings, his voice, his brain, his limbs. A lack of sleep taints my eyes with blood, and the soul that lays beneath them is no less disturbed. I am nothing but the physical host of a mental figure that represents my identity but outlives all physical decay. But those are thoughts for another day.

I’ve learned a lot about life in 18 years of breathing unupgraded oxygen. Mostly the hard way through thousands of mistakes. But the one lesson that annoyingly jabs me in the side everyday is this: confusion is constant, and living in a prolonged state of utter, unnavigable perplexity is just, well, living—it’s the human experience. Most things never make total sense. And if certainty is overrated and nonexistent, then “destiny” isn’t to arrive at an answer but to keep struggling, to keep writing, to keep slamming into cartoon walls until one of them finally opens; to keep questioning, asking, and experiencing; to suffer, to prosper. And, fortunately in all ways but one, to become 18.