pretending...

[evasearchin]

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

Comments

[baron_waste]

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

Part II

[baron_waste]

It wasn't always this way.

https://farm3.staticflickr.com/2583/4222959752_1cefe4f477_b.jpg

Even if you didn't go to college for an 'MRS degree' - which, for the record, I'd have had trouble with as a concept, were I female or her father; what a colossal misuse of effort and money! - the network contacts the student made in a fraternity or sorority would come in handy throughout life, and the fellowship, the camaraderie of those days would only burnish brighter as the years passed (i e The Good Old Days).

You didn't have any of that.  (Neither did I.)  You stomped through the syllabus, passed the courses, they handed you the diploma (“Congrats.”  “Thanx.”) or laser-printed it and mailed it to you (!), and somehow the traditional hi-jinks at the groves of academe just didn't make the trip.

So again - now, what

Re: Part II

[evasearchin]

I agree to an extent about how much a college degree does matter. Those who want to travel the world and have the mental resilience to not succumb to the same feelings of apathy, cynicism and depression do it on a shoestring. Do it via making friends and being happy and not thinking everyone else is out to get something from me. Or being less cautious then I am. Or see the point. So the college degree and the money doesn't matter so much (though the argument for being rich and miserable over poor and miserable continues; and I suppose I'm neither rich or poor), rather some internal "wholeness" (for lack of a better term) is not there anymore. Possibly our upbringing. I'm sure the psychologists would have a field day debating why.

[baron_waste]

… Besides, travel broadens your horizons.

http://baron-waste.livejournal.com/2147483.html?thread=2808731