Where Are They Now? Two Years Later: Tom DaSilva

Author: Tom DaSilva

Two years since graduation… wow. The day I graduated, I didn’t feel a huge sense of accomplishment. It was 20,000 other people getting the same blanket recognition. And we weren’t celebrating achievement… We were celebrating that we had “survived” something that we our parents had paid $50,000 a year for us to participate in. Come on.

What was my mindset then? I was an idiot. Why? Because throughout all of college I had somehow failed to pick on life’s ultimate lesson: everything is about money. I say this a lot: If something in the world appears to make no sense (apart from string theory), then you haven’t considered how said enigma makes people money.

So anyway… Money aside – the biggest thing I’ve learned since I’ve been in the “real world” (hardly) is that most people NEVER consider other people’s ideas. It’s important to stand for what you believe in, but LISTEN TO PEOPLE. Everyone is coming from somewhere different. Even if there IS an actual truth, you’re not going to get anywhere by shutting out people’s ideas. If people don’t talk and listen and offer reasonable arguments and respectful criticism, we aren’t a fucking society at all. And it sure looks like it’s becoming that way…

…thanks in part to our friends at FOX, MSNBC, and all our media buddies who make a fortune dividing people into thought camps so as to make us think there are only two possible paths in life: lazy/free or evil/successful.

This sure sounds like an angry rant… But in fact, I’m not at an angry point in my life. Actually, things are great. I have a lot of great stuff going on. A little more than I can handle at one time, though, hence a bit of my grumpy mood. Stress… what power you have. But I’ve learned that positive thinking is more powerful than stress, so long as you can fixate on an image of the day (or the hour) when it all pays off.

The saying, “the journey is the destination,” is only partially true. Or rather, it’s an extremely misleading statement. What it implies is that every moment you’re working toward a goal, you feel just fabulous. WRONNNNNNNGGG!!! Because some journeys are filled with dragons and thorn bushes. That’s no destination. The heroism you feel when you slay the dragon is, but you’re still not to the castle yet. And you don’t feel fabulous when you’re partially impaled on a thorn bush.

Anyway… Where am I? About to move out in a few months. Scared? A little. Excited? A lot. Work? Good. Play? Could have more of it, to be honest. Girls? The journey is the destination. But if there’s one thing that has kept me sane this whole time, it’s my family. Always supportive. Never gives up on me. It’s really unbelievable how lucky I am. You take away my college education, my job, my activities, my talents, and I still have the greatest family on earth. And really, they are the reason I have everything I have now. Just… love what you have, and if it really is all about money than get some and still love what you have.