If your childhood was anything like mine, you got yelled at. A lot. For me, yelling became the barometer of whether I was doing the right thing. No yelling was better than yelling, thus no yelling = good, or at least okay. You may not have had as much yelling in your life as I did, but you were corralled, controlled, and directed at nearly all times. You got used to being told things, from when to get up to when to go to bed. Your inner sense of what to do and when to do it was constantly overruled by people with power over you. In time you became conditioned to, then dependent upon, those Other People telling you what needed to be done. But then they did something terrible, something you were not prepared for: They stopped telling you what to do.
“Freedom!”, you shouted, as you threw someone into a pit. Sweet freedom. Freedom to eat whatever crap you wanted. Freedom to stay up till sunrise. Freedom to blow off your schedule for that day if you wanted. Freedom . . . to destroy your life.
That’s what I did, and what many of you are doing too. Here’s the thing about all that unstructured freedom: No one will tell you that you are fucking up until it’s too late. If you want to wake and bake, throw on a sort-of-clean Spiderman T shirt and go to the coffee house blazed and unkempt, you can do that. And destroy your chances with the sweet girl with the pink hair at the next table who maybe could have been your wife. If you want to pile into your beater and “Woo! Road trip!”, you can do that. No one will tell you that you have zero chance of making it to your destination and back without major problems. No one will warn you when you are about to be the subject of an episode of Seconds From Disaster.
Several times I have fallen ass-backwards into a relationship with a valuable mentor. For some reason they saw enough in me to offer guidance, which I sort of halfassedly followed, thus dooming the relationship and my own life. No one will tell you, “Listen: What I am about to say will save your life”. You have to be smart enough, aware enough, attuned enough to realize that you may be getting a huge opportunity that will never come again. You can pick a useless major or work a dead-end job if you want — no one will tell you not to. You can hang out with losers and miscreants if you want and no one will tell you that your friends might well steal from you to buy meth. No one will tell you that if you don’t plan a career/life path wisely you will wake up at 40 having achieved nothing of substance and broke as hell.
What you have been programmed to do for 20 years — to do that and only that which you are told — will destroy you. You have to go get the information you need yourself. You can’t bet your life on being lucky enough to have the right people to guide you. So there it is — you can’t say no one told you.