My curiosity got the better of me last night. I’ve been thinking about my former high school classmates and wondering what ever became of them.
My google searches turned up very little. So I created a Facebook account to see if I could find more.
I found more.
I didn’t “Friend” anyone because I have no intention of keeping Facebook – in fact after 2 hours, I had enough and deleted my account.
Most of the people I found on Facebook stayed in Pittsburgh. Our old neighborhood transformed from working class white to poor black families so most had migrated to nearby suburbs (Or as we used to call them, “the rich neighborhoods”).
Almost everyone looks fat and old. The jocks and the pretty girls now they look like their mothers and fathers. The unfortunate people who were ugly in high school got even uglier.
They are parents. A few are grandparents. There are lots of pictures of their spouses and kids.
A handful had decent jobs in nursing, technology or teaching. Several are now real estate agents. Only a few graduated from college. None appeared to be wealthy, famous or have high power careers. The rest work low wage jobs in labor, service and retail.
I was surprised to see how much their lives seemed unchanged.
They posted about the glory days of high school. They were still friends with the same people. They married classmates. They stayed close to the old neighborhoods.
After deleting my account, I thought about how different my life turned out compared to theirs.
We were all lower to middle class kids growing up in a lower/middle class neighborhood. We went to the same high school. We hung out together. Our parents were mostly blue collar or low level white collar workers.
Why did I have a lucrative career and they did not? What enabled me to move all over the country while they lived within 5 miles of where we grew up? Why did they marry each other while I moved away and married someone who was a complete foreigner?
Was it because I was so intelligent? After all, I was born smart, have a high IQ, was Valedictorian and voted “most likely to succeed” in high school. It was no secret that I was academically gifted and many of my classmates were not. Then I thought, what about my classmates who were smart? I didn’t see many of them on Facebook. I guess they moved away or found new friends or don’t do Facebook.
Was it because I made better choices? Definitely not. I selected my college because I wanted to stay near my girlfriend. I dropped out after two years and then spent a decade jumping from one crappy job to the next while sporadically attending night school.
Was it because I was luckier? I caught some lucky breaks, no doubt. But some of my classmates caught lucky breaks too.
Was it because I was driven and goal oriented? I think this has something to do with it. I was always striving for something better. Growing up, my life what was not what I wanted. Many of my friends might have been been poor, but they seemed to love their families and their lives.
I think the biggest reason is that I took a lot of risks and failed a lot. I took a full load of math and science honors courses at college and after blowing half my midterms, learned how to study and pull my grades up from C’s and F’s to A’s and B’s.
I made the Division I wrestling team as a walk-on with no prior wrestling experience and no athletic skill. Somehow I managed to juggle twice a day practices that started at 6AM and ended at 7PM with a full-time honors course load, a two plus hour bus commute, and a girlfriend.
When I met the woman of my dreams, I jumped right into her world, abandoning everything I knew up to that point.
After dropping out, I didn’t settle for the low paying jobs I could get. I taught myself to repair and install computers. I lobbied for a promotion into sales – which I was terrified of doing – because it offered potential for higher pay. I left secure, comfortable jobs for riskier startups that might give me a shot to be successful. Some of these job moves turned out to be bad. Others turned out well.
When my classmates voted me “Most Likely To Succeed”, we all thought I would breeze through college. I fully expected to become a brain surgeon, cure cancer, transplant eyeballs or at minimum be a high-powered, extremely wealthy attorney.
I planned to have 2-3 kids, a hot wife, a dog, a big house in the suburbs, a long driveway and a Mercedes.
And although almost none of that happened, I feel like I’ve lived a good life so far and am content.
I suspect many of my old friends feel exactly the same way about their lives.