Admit it, you get envious when you see your friends traveling in Europe or anywhere outside the city. You see their adventures and a part of you hates liking their pictures just because. While they run around beautiful places and eat the most delicious international meals, here you are – feeling terribly stuck.
In a millennial society where your Instagram feed matters, staying low-key and staying put in one place make you feel less successful compared to those who are living the sweet life. For most engineers, that’s how our lives are as we start our engineering careers. We are stuck either with an office job or a job inside a plant. Either way, as we start our careers, we’re offered with jobs that don’t really allow us to go to beautiful places.
Lucky are those who get jobs that have travel perks but there really are only a few of them.
So here’s a message to every engineer who feels bad because they’re not doing what their peers are doing: It’s okay.
You may not get to have your pictures taken in Paris or eat the best ramen in Japan but you are still doing something with your life. You are working hard and doing your best to provide a good life for your future. You may not have the same amount of likes compared to the popular girl on Facebook but slowly (and surely), you are starting to achieve new accomplishments that you can proudly call your own.
We want to believe that there’s a quick way to be successful and live the good life but it takes a lot of hard work and discipline to do so. Having patience is important as well. This is what our early 20s is about. Establishing ourselves in our careers.
Forget about chilling by the pool and taking a selfie with your friends. You have to focus on the job at hand and make sacrifices for now. As we start our careers, we need to focus on how to be better engineers instead of feeling bad about not traveling every weekend.
While visiting a foreign land is always a good idea, you don’t have to be obsessed about spending all your money just to be seen as someone with “wanderlust”. Yes, we’re young and it’s the best time to travel but if you don’t have the money for it, it’s okay. Stop comparing yourself to those people who have the privilege to travel anytime they want. Life can be unfair but take it as an opportunity to challenge yourself, to save and invest and to be successful in the field you’re in. Eventually, all the hard will pay off and you will be able to afford to travel anywhere you want.
Just have patience. You’ll get there eventually.
