We're No Longer Living Like Chia Pets

Announcement:
I have started a new blog at that is focused on Personal and Career Development for Young Professionals. It can be found at www.MarcosSalazar.com. As opposed to straight out career blogs that cover resumes, the job search, or interviewing skills, I will taking a psychology approach to not only these parts of your career but also will be covering the personal, social, and workforce challenges that college graduates and young professionals are facing in the 21st century. As I did in The Turbulent Twenties Survival Guide, I utilize a psychological approach to covering these topics and will be integrating important research within real life situations to provide practical advice for people's personal and professional development (if you have read The Turbulent Twenties Survival Guide you know what I mean).

Some of the topics I will be covering are:

• learning how to find and follow what you love doing
• practical steps on how to get into Flow at work
• understanding the psychology of happiness and affective forecasting
• managing the tyranny of choice
• learning how to cultivate your emotional and cultural intelligence
• networking in the internet age
• learning how to brand yourself professionally
• discovering how to use blogging as a professional tool (it is the new resume of our generation)
• how to become more of an entrepreneur
• using social-networking for professional advancement
• getting over post-college depression
• helping to answer all those questions that we work through during our 20s and 30s such as: Who am I? Who do I want to become? Where am I going? What are my passions in life? Am I making the right decisions?

So I hope you take a look at the site, subscribe, and share it with friends.

Take care!

- Marcos Salazar
www.marcossalazar.com

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I was chatting with a friend at a bar a while ago and we started talking about how meeting people after college was so much different compared to our twenties. He told me, “I definitely think that it’s more difficult finding new friends now, compared to college. DC may not be as bad as other places, but after graduation it’s a much more diverse world than college was. It takes much more time and effort to find someone who’s on the same page as you, whereas in college you would find yourself in the same classes, or going to the same parties, or going to sporting events with people who had similar interests. There are bars and things like that that attract similar types of people, but it’s just not quite as conducive to meeting people as it was in college.”

If you’re a twentysomething, you know exactly what I’m talking about. After the endless opportunities to meet people in classes that changed each semester, in tons of organizations and clubs, or in the dining hall and dorms where you could talk for hours on end fades away after graduation, it can become damn hard to meet people you make a connection with. You know, this whole thing reminds me of me of a Chia Pet.

You’ve all seen the commercials—Cha, Cha, Cha, Chia!—and getting your Chia Pet to grow is pretty easy. All you have to do is get the right ingredients, mix them up, spread them over the surface of your favorite ceramic animal, add some nourishing water and sunlight, and watch it grow. Well, a similar thing happens during college, where you gather the proper students, mix them up, spread them around campus, add some nourishing classes, organizations, social events, and alcohol, let some time pass, and boom—watch all the friendships and casual relationships blossom. One of the major reasons why Chia Pets and campus relationships seem to bloom so effortlessly is because all the right ingredients necessary for their growth are put together by some external entity. Now, in the case of the Chia Pet, what would happen if you didn’t have the right ingredients? What if you didn’t mix the ingredients properly and put them in the right environment to grow but, rather, spread them around haphazardly? What if the proper nourishment was not given to them?

You would see little or no growth. Well, after graduation twentysomethings are scattered about amongst countless other people in the working world, with the old classroom, organizations, and dining halls quickly replaced by bars and clubs. In this new world, there is no longer an outside entity to make sure that you’re surround by the right people or are comfortable in your new social environments. This is not to say that the types of people you knew simply disappeared after college. Rather, all these individuals are thrown into a sea of people who are different ages, have different goals and purposes, and may not fit too well with you on a number of levels.

Many twentysomethings I talk to say it’s cool to be in a world with a wide variety of people however, they also said that it can often be difficult to find common ground because people living in the real world have various careers, different social and personal interests, and many times are at different stages in their lives. As a result, it can be a challenge to make a connection similar to the ones you made in college, where everyone’s life centered on the common pursuit of getting an education.

What do you think? Has it been hard meeting people since you left college? Why do you think that is the case?

Comments

[Shannon]

I TOTALLY relate to this one. My boyfriend and I went to the same college in Upstate NY, and after graduation he moved to CT with his brother, while I moved in with my parents in MA (not my hometown - they'd moved). I only made one new friend during the year after graduation, but my hometown was an hour away and lots of family was nearby, so it wasn't so bad. But after a year, I decided to follow my bf down to CT, where he and his brother became the only people I knew. Since then, it's been really difficult and the fact that neither of us knows many people besides each other has become a strain on our relationship - I don't know what to do with myself when he's not around because I don't know many other people. Slowly I've begun to get closer to a few people at work, and we hang out every once in a while, which hopefully will continue. It's just been a bit depressing, this feeling of having almost no friends for the first time in my life, and of being almost dependent on my boyfriend because of that. Not exactly the glamourous adult I'd pictured myself becoming!
That being said, things are SLOWLY starting to get better. In the fall we're moving to a neighborhood where several of my closer friends from work live, so hopefully I'll get back the sense of community that I lost after graduating college/leaving home.
I think that making friends after college is definitely possible, it's just a shock how much longer it takes for these friendships to develop than they did when we were in school.
It's good to know others are in the same boat, though - probably something to keep in mind when you DO meet new people our age!