pretending...
The best years of your life, isn't in University. What with the deadlines and the constant exams. No; the best years of your life in my opinion is the first year after you graduate. When your first employed and your paid a salary that feels amazing. What do you know; you've been a poor student all these years. You don't know they're paying you
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Two days later, I'm still thinking about this entry. It's fascinating on several levels.
- It also feeds a suspicion of mine, that I need not regret too keenly not getting a college degree when it would have mattered, because the result would have merely been a higher-octane version of what happened anyway: “No matter where you go, there you are,” and life in an office cubicle would seem as petty and meaningless as the semi-and unskilled labor jobs I've drudged through all these years of apathetic depression. I'd have been making more money, but I would still be in “the workforce,” with all that implies - and very likely I'd still be sitting here alone.
[Perhaps worse - if all these years I'd been living where I want to be, amid people I'd want to know and function socially among, I might now be living at about the same income I have anyway, after the divorce settlement. How it is in England I don't know, but in America marriage is a grave, life-wrecking mistake second only to felony driving under the influence. My life may not be worth much, but there are people who would kill to have my problems in place of their own, and I know it.]
My other problem was, there was nothing realistically available to me that I really wanted to do.
If that degree was in something you felt passionately about, such that you didn't care if you got paid for it - if you'd been stargazing since you were a child, or felt the thrill of ancient history, of holding in your very hands the legacies of the past, or if you'd been designing and building since your first frantic scribbles of the ideas boiling in your head - then you could become a professional astronomer or archeologist or architect and not really CARE that nobody gets rich at those endeavors (except the last, sometimes). That was my dream, but I didn't have the effective intelligence for it. So I ended up driving a taxi - in effect, and in reality also at one point (see below).
Just so, your purpose in going to University, then, was essentially vocational, mercenary. To get the goodies, you must have the salary, which comes from the job, which comes from the degree, which comes from uni. So you march through that entire process, deadlines and exams, get your degree “and a ticket to the front row in life,” and now… what? Sure, you've got the goodies, all the consumer products you desire, but are you happy?
http://baron-waste.livejournal.com/2165715.html
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