July 30, 2025 - 6:42 PM
I feel like I was expected to go to college. My life has had a simple pathway laid out for me since I was a kid. Elementary school to middle school, middle school to high school, and high school to college. After that, you'll get a job and that'll be that. It was a fact of life, just the way that things were going to go. But is there nothing else? Is that the end of my life, when I get a job and enter the workforce "for real"? As I get older, as I get closer and closer to that endpoint, things have started to feel more complicated. I remember considering my options out of high school. There was so much that I could have done. Go to a trade school. Just get a job. I could have left home and gone wherever I wanted. I didn't though. Those weren't real options. And so I picked a major based on a club I was a part of, and I went to college.
What is the purpose of school? It feels a lot like I've been a part on an assembly line, being put together over the years just to pop out the other side as a new part in some corporate machine. I've been groomed since birth for this. So I can design bombs or drones or some even more evil third thing, so the government can blow up brown people on the other side of the globe. It's disgusting, but what can I do about it? It's so ingrained in me. The only rebellion I get is just to specialize in something that might kill people a little less directly. At least I'll be making money, right?
And the money. And the fucking money. I get money for what? So I can buy things. Things I realy do care about. So other people can look at me and say "oh, what a successful guy". I don't want that. But what can I do. No matter what I have to participate in this system where we're pitted against each other and I help people even wealthier than I am make truckloads of money, all while I hear about people who have it worse than me on the news. People that aren't different than me. And it's a goddamn privilege to be where I am? This is probably the best it's gonna get? It's totally fucked.
I don't know why I can't just be happy where I am. It sucks. I see what I wish I could be, the things I wish I could do but I have been