Ah, experience is the best teacher!! We all know that or at least we should. If only we always made the best decisions at the right time. Wouldn’t life be carefree? Yet, we wouldn’t learn a thing at all. Life would be smooth sailing. And when the rough times come, and they will, we wouldn’t know how to handle them and learn from them.
When you are seventeen, you just don’t realize that the rash decisions you make on a whim can affect your future in a profound way. Back in the 1970’s, my heyday, you could do crazy, ridiculous pranks and the whole world wouldn’t know. Sure, your close friends would know you rode on the hood of a car while your best friend drove you over the golf course. You were kind of applauded for your fearlessness or stupidity, depending on how you look at these things.
In today’s world, it would be captured on a cellphone camera and go viral and haunt you for the rest of your life. Even when you apply for a job at thirty-five, the human resources manager will Google your name and yep, there you are, riding on the hood of an Oldsmobile station wagon dashing over the golf course.
Of course, your parents found out and you were grounded. You had to help the golf course repair the ruined grass and you were bummed out about it for about two months. However, with experience you would have learned this was a once in a lifetime stupid trick and would never do it again.
If you lived in today’s world, the video of you riding on a car hood on a golf course would become viral! This silly, juvenile prank would be able to be seen forever on social media. It could ruin your chances of getting into a good college, finding a job, and would make you look really foolish to the world!!!
This is where experience comes in to save us from ourselves. Thank goodness videos on social media didn’t exist. We could make stupid mistakes and hopefully learn from them and never do such things again.
Today’s viral world doesn’t allow you to experience a misadventure. Heck, you would be so naive that you would probably proudly post it yourself on Facebook or Instagram and brand yourself ever.
So, learn from my teenage experience and think before you make a fool of yourself and post it for all of the world to see your silliness, forever!!!
