Before I explain my point, I want to tell you all a story. It’s about a six-year-old that loved going to summer camp (as most Jewish children do). He loved the games of dodgeball, the bug juice and the climbing wall. But what he loved most of all was his counselors. His counselors were so knowledgeable and funny and could always stop a fight between kindergarteners. This child loved his counselors so much that he went back to camp the next summer, and the next and the next until he turned 16. The next two summers he got jobs bagging groceries (because that is what teenagers do).
By the time this teenager turned 18 and was ready to go off to college, he once again debated what he should do for a summer job; should he become a waiter, or another year at the grocery store? He thought about it for a while, and then he found out that many of his friends were becoming counselors. Counselors at the same camp that he once attended. “But,” he thought, “they’ve never worked with children, they won’t know what to do.” However, he was tempted to spend the summer with his friends and in the sun so he applied and was hired to be a summer camp counselor.
What this young man found out was that he had no idea how to be a camp counselor. Not only that, he realized that none of his coworkers had any idea what they were doing either. They were just coming in, day after day, lifting kids above their shoulder and telling people to quiet down during announcements. And although he had no idea what he was doing, the campers were enjoying him and camp as much as he did when he was a child.
This is what I call the counselor theory: The fact that everyone we meet is faking it in some way, but we don’t realize it until we’re in the same position.
Trust me, this applies to everything in life. Raise your hand if you’re a first-born child (put your hand down, you’re reading an article, not trying to answer a question in Anthro 104), that means that you got the first-run with your parents. No amount of babysitting or taking care of a sack of flour can help you raise a real-life human being. But if you weren’t the eldest child, your parents treated you differently, for better or worse (pros: more gifts, cons: tougher parenting, hand-me-downs, comparisons to elder siblings... okay it sucks to be the youngest).
Now this doesn’t mean you should yell at your parents for that one time where you almost died (which undoubtedly happened, just ask them), you should realize that they’ve gotten better over time. The nice thing about starting something new is that soon enough you’ll be good at it. Like my hero Jake the Dog (you all need to watch “Adventure Time”) once said, “sucking at something is the first step to being sorta good at something.” Researchers have said that if you do something for seven years (or 1000 hours) you become an expert at that. Start faking some recipes for chicken parmesan and soon enough you’ll be a master Italian chef, start faking drawing and soon enough you’ll be an artist, start faking orgasms and soon enough you’ll be a porn star (or something).
So you still have no idea what to do at a house party? Fake it. You don’t know how to finish your paper? Fake it. You can’t remember the band that sings “All Star”? Fake it and say it was Nickelback, no one will ever know. Because the truth is that no one in this world knows exactly what they’re doing. We as humans go through the motions and hope that something sticks on the wall like spaghetti.
But what should I know? I faked this whole article.
