Congratulations, you graduated!
You did it!
You're free!
Free from classes and studying and shitty dorm food.
Free to travel and work and
worry about paying the bills and the crushing responsibility
of complete control over your own decisions and happiness
with no deadlines or milestones to look forward to until you get married or have kids
or get divorced or die.
Wait what ?!
Yeah, it's been two and a half months now since I've graduated.
I know a lot of you guys are graduating soon or just have
Congratulations, by the way.
Welcome to the fucking mess that is life after graduation.
I mentioned this quite frequently
I've kind of been going through and on and off
existential crisis ever since I graduated.
So,
I thought today, I would just compile all of those thoughts and, I don't know.
Maybe you guys can relate
I probably just like need a therapist but
eh, putting your thoughts out to millions of strangers on the Internet is just as good ...
right?
Okay, number one thing that struck me right after I graduated
is the complete lack of milestones.
The thing that always keeps me going and
keeps me working really hard is that milestone.
Whether it's graduation, whether it's summer break
There's always something to look forward to.
But once we graduate, what the fuck are the milestones anymore ?
You have marriage,
buying a house,
having kids
dying?
Call me a cynic,
but I honestly think that is why so many people rush to get married
or have babies, even if it's just because they want another thing to like celebrate
and then they can measure their life by their baby's milestones.
As you can tell, I would be a very nurturing and kind mother.
Like, a part of me just wishes that as an adult,
every four years you could have like another adult graduation
I get a cap and a gown and a dumb piece of paper that says
"Congratulations,
you made it four more years in your adult life !!!
Good job !! "
I guess the main way that I get joy in my life
is just working myself so hard that I am proud that I am exhausted and tired
and that's like a big part of my identity
But now that I'm not working towards a particular goal
and just my entire foreseeable future is me working my ass off
It's kind of .. it's a little bit harder to stay motivated
I'm gonna be completely honest
The weirdest thing of having graduated is having to shift your mindset from
being goal-oriented , like
Just wait until graduation, wait until this class is over ,
wait until somebody gives me an A or a gold star
to actually enjoying your everyday life
and like, being satisfied with yourself and the things that you do every day
which I've never been good at.
By the way, I'm gonna come off like incredibly privileged and annoying
in this entire thing
I know that having an existential crisis is a privilege
because I'm not worried about like putting food on the table
And if I was, then I would not be thinking about the fucking purpose of life
I'm gonna call this second section
" the wonderful crushing infinite possibility of life"
Do you ever stop and think about the fact that adults are just like bumbling around the world?
Nobody's telling them what to do, where they have to be
what job they have to take, what apartment they have to live in
Like anything, it is up to me.
It's weird !!!
Part of me
romanticizes like, what if I could just be a 50s housewife?
Nothing would be expected of me, other than to look pretty
to like to suburbgatory (? sorry I coudn't hear the word)
Not to say that that work isn't hard,
but like back in the day
My life would have been decided for me.
And now the pressure is on me to make the most of my life
That's terrifying but empowering at the same time
Thing number three that freaks me out about life is dating
Okay
Here is how I see dating
you have a deck of cards
Say, there's, there's ten cards
and they all have a different number on them
You don't know how high the numbers could go
they could go up to like 100 200
10 could be the highest number that you ever did
this represents how many people you're gonna date in your life
Although I think, statistically people have like two or three relationships before they get married
Which is a scarily low number
because
I'm on relationship number three
Okay, so you have this deck of cards / guys or gals
they're shuffled
So you've no idea what order they're gonna come up in
as you jate throughout your life
You just flip over one card at a time
But before moving on to the rest of the cards
you have to decide whether you're gonna keep that card or let it go
like at any given point
a relationship is just a bet
that this is good enough for me
And this is as good as it's gonna get
arbitrarily, you have no idea
you have no idea if there's somebody better out there
like part of me wishes that I could just
boo-boo-boo flip over all the cards in my deck and know
about what I have for the future
But that's not really how life works.
I don't know that's probably a flawed mentality because people aren't numbers
It depends on whether you grow together ,whether you really nurture that relationship or not
but you guys get what I'm saying, right ?
I guess rom-coms and Disney movies have taught me since I was really young
that love is this grand fateful thing.
But really, it's just kind of
swiping on a dating app on somebody I thought was cute
and now seven months later
we know each other really well
and we've come to deal with all of each other's bullshit
and like each other for who we are
so I guess that's ...
I don't know. Maybe that's fucking love <3
I wanted to talk about workaholism
I guess it's what we can call this section
throughout the week
all I really think about is looking forward to the weekend
and saying "you're gonna work so that you can get this break"
and then on the weekend, when I do have a break
all I can think about is feeling guilty that I'm not working
and I'm stuck in this cycle in my own brain of
constantly feeling like I should be doing something else
or looking forward to something
Everything, from my mom, when I was younger,
who everyday she'd
wake me up on the weekend and ask
" What are you doing that's productive today, Ashley ? "
to my teachers in high school,
who were all about getting good grades and getting into a good college
and now,
people who look at my YouTube numbers
and they're like, "oh my god, 1.6 Mil, congratulations.
You're so successful."
I guess my entire life
It's been burned into my brain that
success is what will make me happy
and success is what defines me
but when I look back at my life
the happiest times and the times I have felt most alive
were times when I wasn't working
I have this weird thing where, throughout the week
I honestly sometimes feel like I don't exist
sometimes, my entire week
I just spend alone with my camera, in my apartment, editing a video
sometimes I feel like I'm just
pixels on a screen
The times that I feel the most alive and that I feel the most real is like
that feeling of a summer night,
meeting somebody new,
or hanging out with your friends in high school
or being with somebody you love
You know those nights of your time almost stops
because you don't care if you're tired
and you don't care if it's like 5:00 a.m.
Because you're just like in the moment
That's what life is but we don't get enough of it
because we're all just like
"we have to work more to buy more things that we don't really want"
so we can feel some
superficial level of status and achievement
and pat ourselves on the back and say
" good job, you're working yourself to death, Ashley "
That brings me to the last section of this video,
which is memory
What's to call it
It weirds me out how badly I remember my own life
Like I couldn't tell you what I did last week,
what I felt last week,
how much I slept last week or what I ate
Poof.
Just another week gone by
I don't really remember it
It also weird me out that I've met so many people in my life
who will never meet each other
and I've been to many places
where the people I know haven't been
Nobody really knows, like, the whole Ashley.
That reminds me of this one quote from "Heart of darkness" that goes
" We live as we dream,
alone. "
I've always loved that quote because I feel like, life is like a dream
when you try to describe it to other people
and you know, I try to tell David about my hometown now
and it's like describing a dream to him
where in my mind, I can recall it vividly and I think it's so exciting,
but David's just there like, yeah, okay
like he's doing his best to envision it but he could never have lived through it
same thing for all the random adventures I've gone on
and all the feelings I've felt throughout my life
I guess they're really just mine
and sometimes that makes me feel really lonely
because I'm just this little like capsule of
feelings and memories that nobody else can understand
like recently, I met up with my ex for the first time
in like two years
It felt really really good because I didn't have a single photo of us together.
He never met any of my friends
so I almost felt like that wasn't real
It was this weird part of my life that only I could remember
Who we are, is made up of our past experiences
but our perception of our past experiences is made up of memory
and memory isn't even something that's real.
So I think,
Who the fuck are we?
I don't know
Life is just how you perceive it, I guess.
Okay. Well, that's, I guess, all I have for you guys
I hope that you guys relate to some of these thoughts
Well, maybe I don't hope because most of them were kind of depressing
I wanted to make this video because
sometimes I feel so frustrated with,
I guess the constraints of my job as like,
make a cute video with cute handwriting and cute aesthetics
and make a couple liberal jokes that people find really edgy
and sometimes, like that's not what's on my mind
what's on my mind is like, life is weird
I'll see you guys next week with.. with a much more normal video
Bye ~