Page 149 - Your Guide to University Life

products are released and more new trends arise. It’s as if you are walking down a hallway packed on each side with crowds of people shouting, everyone calling to you to check out their product, their idea etc. everyone is marketing something, and they want you to buy. In such a world it is easy to get lost in all these advertisements, checking each one out. It is hard to keep ones focus on themselves and their goals. Yuval Noah Harari gave some remarks about this challenge in his book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century:
“To succeed in such a daunting task (of telling the difference between your self and the chaos all around you), you will need to work very hard on getting to know your operating system better. To know what you are, and what you want from life. This is, of course, the oldest advice in the book: know thyself. For thousands of years philosophers and prophets have urged people to know themselves. But this advice was never more urgent than in the twenty-first century..... You might have heard that we are living in an era of hacking computers, but that’s hardly half the truth. In fact, we are living in the era of hacking humans.”
In the end, I go back to where I started: when you land in campus you land in a place of unlimited choices, but you also land on a platform of people hackers. If you are not careful, you will get hacked. If you don’t know yourself, you will get hacked.
As a parting shot, my simple distilled advice for those stepping into campus life is that you should become obsessed with your identity.
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