This is the first post of what should act as a development blog for The American Template, a project intending to list if not detail the inevitable necessities of life in the order they’re likely to appear. This unassumingly monstrous task took form over the last few years, but has been in the making for at least the last decade. Seeing as it’s my voice you’ll mostly be reading, I figure I’d also sprinkle in a little about me into this introduction.

As an elder Gen Z(er?) in a growing town, I was a guinea pig for a lot of the newer ideas and technologies implemented in school. Some things stayed, a lot didn’t, and while the mixed experience left subtle differences between myself and the years before me, there was a missing link between us and protozoa coming after. This conundrum was one of the guiding factors that led me to get my degree in neuroscience. I had a straightforward plan to get in, find my answers, and have fun along the way.

However, as anyone who has gone to college with a plan knows, straightforward is not the name of the game. Your timetable is at the mercy of a Frankenstein mash of different professorial styles and administrative requirements. While collecting credits and jumping hoops, it can be hard to sift out the knowledge you actually need to progress further in your chosen field. At certain times the admin’s effort felt personal as circumstances conspired to keep me for an extra year unplanned and overbudget.

And if that’s not a metaphor for life, I don’t know what is. The epiphany hit me late one evening as a colleague and I walked home. The bell tower in the center of campus was illuminated, reaching high into the picturesque sunset. Majestic yellow light emanated from windows of the library inside, evoking the splendor, the mystery of the secret knowledge within the ivory tower-

And I laughed, because I knew that place was as desolate as the nearest salad bar.

“Can you believe that used to be full of people cramming for finals twenty years ago?” I asked my friend.

“So?” she responded as she looked at her phone, the library’s replacement.

In that moment, her incurious response perfectly exemplified the issues I was experiencing. This isn’t to drag my friend, she was part of the epiphany. She understood the college’s administrative maze and helped me navigate it to graduate on my schedule. It made me wonder, how many problems could my peers and I have avoided if we at least knew where to look like she did? Could this apply to other parts of life?

Seeing as my peers at the time were sleep deprived med school undergraduates who found my discipline to regularly cook and budget money akin to sorcery, the answers to those questions were, “a lot”, and “yes, a lot”.

We enjoy a lot of new opportunities in this generation, as the generation has before us and before them. I think the difference today is that as innovations become more frequent, those new opportunities are more delicately stacked on one another, leading to lifestyles that end up neglecting the basics. Thus, empty libraries, and students that are clueless in the face of a power outage.

I could be wrong, but either way, a map showing when and how to expect certain universal life challenges to arise could help us all stand a little firmer in the face of adversity or misfortune.

Now, if like me you are a simple person at heart, I wouldn’t recommend biology. I would, however, recommend scientific literature. Every paper I’ve read and written comes beautifully packaged with an introduction and summary that will tell you everything you need to know about the subject beforehand. And if you’re still confused, you have the finest list of keywords to put in a search engine and go from there.

I also find that when you do consult the internet on lifestyle choices, the guides you find generally stand on their own with little context as to how they fit in with other parts of your life. A great corollary would be a professor who tends to sprinkle tangents throughout his lecture. Inspired by the “learning goal” that was tried on us in school, my peers and I made a simple method for keeping track of what we needed to know. The stoplight method:

• Green – facts or principles you will be tested on in a subject
• Yellow – information that explains why green material is relevant to the subject
• Red – interesting or in-depth information that can change how you view the subject, but not necessary to understand it

And thus the American Template was born, split into three segments:

• Checklist – This segment is meant to give a name to life’s most basic financial obligations, describing what they are and the most generic methods and tools used to handle them. While I will create a bibliography or index for helpful sources, my hope is that the keywords are enough to launch anyone searching for context in the right direction.
• Comprehension – The comprehension segment carries more supporting context like historical information or explaining how a particular system works to affect people generally. These will mainly be hard facts with links embedded.
• Curiosity – Interesting stories or detailed anecdotes that exemplify how a system works, what can go right or wrong, and how different topics intersect. You can expect a lot of biological metaphors.

Aside from that, this development blog should keep readers abreast on what’s to come (like pictures). The checklist for the first four chapters cover starting materials for those venturing to live autonomously. Similarly, this project has to step out if its ever going to help anyone.

There are things in life we can’t avoid. Let’s make a list.
– Scribe