I refuse to believe this adulthood thing we all heard so much about is supposed to be so… unfulfilling. We obtain these expensive pieces of paper to show employers that we’re “smart,” but they really don’t prove anything in terms of ability, skill, or talent. Most degrees aren’t even relevant to the jobs we ultimately find ourselves in. Yet, we’ve been told that in order to be successful, get that high paying job and ultimately, find fulfillment, these are the steps we have to take.

So why does it all feel so blah?

Me to high school me: “You’re the captain now.”

It’s a bit of flawed system to take a 17 year old fresh out of sitting in their parents’ home, eating food they haven’t paid for, living with the sole responsibility of making it to school and back in one piece, and say, “Here. Pick a career and go to college. Remember, this decision will dictate the next 40-50 years of your life! Have fun! :)”

I don’t think I’m alone when I say I’m not the same person I was when I was 17 and the fact that version of me called such an important shot for future me is scary in retrospect. I wasn’t old enough to be trusted to be part of communal decision making for America’s future via voting, but my own future? Fuck it up, sis!

We’re taught college is the next step in building our futures once we’re done with high school, but is it? We see so many successful people these days who didn’t even go to college and are doing just fine in life. Hell, I even know people that haven’t finished college and they haven’t been negatively impacted by not having a piece of paper that no one actually even checks to see if you have.

Is it all a sham?

Our societal constructs of “how to life” are trash.

The pressure we put on kids to figure out their lives at such a young age is why a lot of people end up miserable and simply going through the motions. We’ve been taught life is about getting a high-paying job so you can pay off those expensive loans you were told you needed for college which would lead to that aforementioned high-paying job, which you probably hate because the highest paying jobs are usually not the most fulfilling and/or required even more expensive schooling. Then, when you finally get it together right around 55 and those loans are just about paid off you get to start over with your own kids and put them in the little hamster wheel of life.

Fun.

I often think about what I would change if I did have the chance to go back and I would have bypassed college. Unless you’re going for a career in a field that requires technical knowledge such as a medicine or law, what do you really need to attend college for? There isn’t much I took from college that could be applied to jobs or even *gasp* learned on my own!

Don’t get me wrong. I love learning and if college was free and essentially a place where one could go to learn interesting and different things without the pressures of taking tests and passing a course in order to advance, I’d probably still be in college. However, from the perspective of “come here, pay us thousands of dollars, take some tests, and we’ll give you this paper that says you’re qualified for better jobs than your counterparts who didn’t go to as prestigious schools as ours so you can make lots of money to pay us back,” yeah, I definitely would have passed on that opportunity.

When was the last time you were presented with a challenge and said, “oh, I learned this in college”?

We go to school to learn how to memorize things for tests so we can get “good” grades and then go to a “good” college to prove we’re “smart” when we’re really just repeating the cycle of memorizing things. Then, we’re released into the wild with our intelligence certificates to take on jobs where we should know how to do things, but the whole time all we’ve done are exercises in memorization without applying anything. Panic sets in as we frantically try to learn how to actually do stuff. Eventually, we figure it out and realize this isn’t what we wanted to do at all. It’s stressful.

Never mind teaching how to apply those learnings, think critically, and test students on their ability to apply what they’ve learned to the real world or even teach subjects that would be practical in life such as taxes. The recorder though? We need to learn that so we have a talent to impress people when we’re begging for money on the street. Are our earnings there tax free?

We’re not set up to win, we’re set up to work. That’s got to change.

There aren’t easy answers here because if there were, I certainly wouldn’t be writing this piece, but I do think this is something we have to start talking about. Why are we ignoring the flaws of our education system and then looking on with shock when the kids that have gone through our system fail to be adequately prepared? I don’t know entirely how to improve the system, but I think it’s worth it to be another voice out there saying:

The system is flawed.

This fucking sucks.

Let’s fix it.