#i'm gonna put the fate of my future in this poll
Explore tagged Tumblr posts
souvlakic · 6 months ago
Text
1 note · View note
nohoperadio · 6 months ago
Text
Huh I only just looked at these results and: interesting! If anyone's willing to explain their reasoning on whichever answer they chose I'd be super interested to hear it. Gonna put some of my thoughts under a thing, with results spoilers fwiw:
I was pretty surprised that the majority is in that direction honestly! I know this isn't a huge sample but even so.
So the most basic level one way to think about this is, if your most embarrassing moment is equally likely to happen at any time in your life, then you should vote "still to come" if you expect that you probably haven't lived more than half of your eventual lifespan yet. I do think the respondents to this poll probably mostly are younger than half their expected lifespan, so maybe that's as far as some of the future-voters reasoned.
But I don't think that first "if" is true because (and I'd expect most people to agree with this, but maybe not?) it seems obvious to me that teenagers (young adults to some extent also) are on average much more vulnerable to embarrassment than any other age group: adolescence is an inherently embarrassment-prone process you're going through, school is an inherently embarrassment-prone environment to exist in (both peers and authority figures are generally more likely to be out to actively try to humiliate you than at any other time; also you probably have almost no control over who either of those groups of people are, whereas later you usually have at least a little); you also presumably pick up at least some know-how wrt dodging or at least reacting gracefully to awkward situations later in life, when you're very young you don't have any of that yet. There's a lot more rakes to step on and you're a lot more likely to step on them!
I guess people will disagree about how much this moves the needle on the question. For me that kind of consideration made me vote "already happened" even though I still make a fool of myself constantly, I just don't realistically think I can do it on quite so enormous a scale as I could when I was 15 or even 20 (possibly I'm underestimating myself). Maybe for others it feels like a smaller effect. I guess I also don't know how many of the respondents are themselves currently youths, most of the people I actually interact with on here are closer to 30 than 15 so I've been imagining that as representative of the main demographic but I guess I don't actually know much about most of my followers. (Fwiw it's only after making this poll that I really processed that I was far enough away from my peak awkward years to semi-confidently say "already happened" to this, I think just a few years ago I would have been more 50/50).
I wonder if anyone voted "still to come" because they have some specific reason to expect specific embarrassments in their future rather than just abstract probabilistic reasoning? I can imagine that if someone is e.g. planning on coming out as something or other and doesn't anticipate getting a supportive and understanding reception from people in their life this might be a reason to vote future.
I wonder if anyone voted "still to come" just because it would feel like tempting fate not to?
20 notes · View notes