Yesterday was my birthday. I turned 20. I’ve never been more terrified in my life.

I’m terrified because I now find myself described by yet another term that doesn’t suit me. When I was but a wee ‘un, 20 seemed the epitome of sophisticated young-adulthood. A dozen years have passed but the realm of the 20-year-old still seems just as distant, still the green-striped Nanny legs to my Muppet Babies world.

More than that, I’m terrified because this birthday means I’m another year closer to graduating from college, and I have no idea what I want to do with my life. Logically, I know this isn’t a huge deal; plenty of people don’t know what they want to do when they graduate, and plenty more make career changes in their thirties or forties. But as a college student — and especially as a college student whose parents are laying down a cool hundred grand for her education — I am expected to have planned out every single moment of my life from the second I step off stage with my bachelor’s degree in hand to the day I retire. And apparently marrying Captain Jack Sparrow and selling abstract looseleaf-paper sculptures is not a legitimate gameplan.
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Brains: they just don’t make ‘em like they used to. Two and a half centuries ago, the Enlightenment took Europe by storm; the salons of 18th-century France were the stomping ground of some of the greatest theoretical minds in history. John-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume and Voltaire were just a few of the famous philosophes who gathered at these soirees to discuss and debate religion, government and metaphysics. Cornell frat parties seem slightly pedestrian in comparison. If the Enlightenment was the start of modern thought, the Wireless Age has been the end of it.

We live in a time when we can be constantly connected to those we know. Cell phones, only a few years ago considered an indulgence, are now ubiquitous on any college campus. Essentially every Cornell student has an Internet connection in his room, and many of us leave ourselves constantly logged on to AIM, displaying a parade of away messages declaring our exact locations and precisely when we’ll be back.
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