I'm trying to look at this information dispassionately, to study it fairly and not let my own stubbornness trick me into denying the pattern staring me in the face. I gather more and more information to disprove the pattern i see emerging, but every article presents new facts that support the pattern's existence.
The world is changing.
The people who want to help us are not the people who can help us. We can no longer look to the people around us, those who have succeeded and want to advise us in following the paths they forged to success. Our mentors, our advisors, our parents, our teachers - all grew up in a world that has very few similarities to ours. And, because of how effectively their generation has manipulated the government and other national institutions, they will spend the rest of their lives in a kind of parallel existence; they may walk the same land we walk, they may stand beside us, but their world is not ours.
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/young-people-in-the-recession-0412#ixzz1qiYIY7Xl
This is new. Not new, maybe, but not the experience of the generation that preceded us. It is therefore time to abandon the paths of our parents, to move beyond traditional paths that lead to traditional definitions of success.
The steps taken by your father to elevate himself to the level of his aspirations have crumbled. They're gone. You cannot climb them.
We must re-consider our dreams and our goals.
I do not aspire to wealth. I do not want fame. The fact that this is a revolutionary statement is appalling.
We have twisted the interconnectedness of modernity from a tool for self-improvement, education, and growth to one for self-amplification, for accumulating notoriety, for lifting ourselves not to the upper-boundaries of our potential but onto the table of celebrity.
Why? Why our obsession with fame? I won't attempt to answer that question, but I believe that our preoccupation with credentials and the need of today's individual to hold himself above his peers is tied into the perversion of higher education and the inability of highly-qualified young people to find satisfying work.
We know a college degree is no longer the ticket to a career, but we continue to promise our young adults fulfilling and satisfying high-pay employment if they only graduate. Even if a degree could earn me those things, that is not the life I want. I've had nice things, I've been taken care of, I've had access to the best since I was a child. As I debate shouldering the overwhelming burden of student debt I have to ask myself: why would I do this? What am I buying, with all this money I don't have?
I started pursuing my half-finished ivy league degree because I wanted access to the world such a degree opens. I wanted to distinguish myself - I wanted to have proof that I am better than the people who surrounded me while I was growing up.
Beyond that, I also wanted the job security. I wanted the magical piece of paper that would guarantee me a career or open the doors of the best post-graduate schools. I envisioned my future fairly traditionally. I would graduate from Columbia with my liberal arts degree, I would attend law school either at another ivy league school or go overseas, I would get married, I would practice law, I would have children, I would send my children to even better schools than I attended, I would save for a comfortable retirement with my husband, I would put my children through college so that they could follow the path I had taken. I remember now how comfortable this time of my life was, how safe and warm and inevitable my future looked. I knew what I wanted, and I knew how to get it.
I left school and returned it to it several times, and each time my initial enthusiasm for my classes burned out within weeks and flew up from it's own ashes a new, angrier bird. Ultimately I learned that college is not about learning. This was a profound disappointment. I'd waited my whole life to be allowed the privilege of studying whatever interests me, in an environment that encouraged independent thought and fostered creativity - but that isn't college. Maybe it used to be, maybe it is elsewhere in the world, but not here, not now. I found the subjects of the classes to be irrelevant; study whatever you want, what matters is that you learn how to succeed, how to placate professors and deans with flattery, how to manipulate your peers to ensure your own participation credit, how to navigate bureaucracy, how to follow classical formulas when writing, how to win discussions and conversations by silencing opposition. The subject matter doesn't matter. You're not there to break new intellectual ground, but to follow the same lines of thought to the same conclusions that students have found in universities since Aristotle. No professor wants to be challenged - they are increasingly elderly people, who, from the heights of their age, could never believe that a person without a single grey hair may have an equally valid perspective.
Real learning, then, must occur someplace else, some secret place that popular culture is very interested in keeping hidden. That real education is what I'm interested in. I do not care where I work. I'm not interested in work because I'm not interested in an income. I want to learn.
My only option then seems to be to remove myself from the world of useless academia and pursue my interests independently. I'll take classes as I can, but never for credit. I'm not interested in accumulating credits because I don't want a degree. I will read books, I will have conversations with people who know more than I do, I will chase new experiences. I will endeavor to elevate my mind every day. I will live on very little.
I will read and write.
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