Letter to the disaffected youth
You have immense human potential and your radiance is blinding
You are 18-to-twenty-something years old. You don’t know quite what to do with yourself. You grew up on the internet, we call it, although that’s just to say the internet distracted you from growing up, and now you’re an adult, and you don't know quite what to do with yourself.
You don't want to participate in the “system”, in the world you were born into. You can’t necessarily articulate why, or even as much as this, at least not in any way that feels satisfactory. Attempting to, leaves you drained and morose – what’s the point. Doing so would be, in a way, participating, in the very thing you wish to avoid.
The system is rigged to exploit you and you recognize this on an intuitive level. You have felt it every time you interacted with a school teacher, a bureaucrat, or any kind of authority. Maybe even your parents. Insincere, fake, lying, manipulating, belittling. Back then you didn't even have words to describe it. You just felt it as a nameless eerie discomfort. You wish you could explain this nameless dread to them, in a way that would make them embrace you in understanding. When you have tried, not only did it feel like they couldn’t – not only did it feel like they wouldn’t. It felt like they just blankly didn't care.
You’re thinking about going to university. You like philosophy, because reading it feels like someone respects you. It feels like being talked to like you're a thinking feeling rational human being. It feels like being talked to like you're a person. An adult. It’s taking you seriously. It’s dignified. There’s a relief there.
The ancient authors do. Moderns don't. University doesn't. They are explicitly assuming you're dumb and want to trick you. They are seeking to exploit that thing you are getting from the ancients, for their own material benefit.
You think that you could go to university, if nothing else, to find yourself, to “find out what you want to do”.
Your entire life you have felt humiliated, belittled, demeaned, as a matter of course. The good news is you're not mentally ill. That's just true, that's just what happened. It’s just so everyday to you, it’s so ever present, it’s the soup you grew up in, that other than the per-linguistic baby stage of life, you have literally never known anything else to compare it to. From the moment you sprang into human consciousness, your every living memory, you have lived in this fog of indignity that you can’t point to or identify, and it seems like no one else is even noticing it. Except the philosophers you like reading, and a couple of insane schizoids you have encountered online.
You worry about your own sanity. If no one else can see it – maybe you’re the one who’s crazy and they know something you don’t. Maybe they have access to something you are blind to, just like it seems like you have access to something (albeit, terrible), which they are completely blind to. Perhaps you have been radicalized online, like they warned you about. Well, not you. What they warn each other about.
When you think about education, you are not actually thinking about your future. When people ask you what you want to do, or be, you say “i don’t know”, but the truth is the answer is “I don’t want to be anything”. You have just learned that you can’t say that without causing alarm. You aren't really driven by a passion for the subject matter. You are bored, or don't know what else to do, or you're trying to do what's expected of you. You're just looking for the path of least resistance, from all the bullshit of that world, and right now, going to university seems like it would be something like that. A vacation almost.
Tapping out like this however is not actually tapping out. It's just another way of the thing you hate, exploiting you. Even if you live in a country where its "free", it is 4 years of lost wages. Unless you have a plan to make up for that, a concrete plan for making a return on that time investment, it's not an investment.
In insurance there is a concept called "reduced earning capacity", applying to payouts for bodily injury. The idea is putting a more or less arbitrary percentage estimation on how much of the “total amount of money you would ever earn in your life”, and how much that number has decreased, from the result of an (insured) injury. I call it arbitrary because it’s estimates of estimates, that the companies pull out of their ass. it’s all a racket.
As a little exercise, lets say you live to 80. you start working at 20. you have 60 years of earning money. At some point, you lose a finger in a tragic keyboard accident at your office job. An insurance agent estimates that the loss of that finger makes you work 10% less effective at punching in numbers. (the different fingers actually have different going rates, but that’s digression). He does a bunch of mumbo jumbo that’s supposed to look like math, and offers you a 5% reduced earning capacity payout. That’s an estimate that the injury has cost you 5% of the total amount you would have earned over 60 years. The payout is supposed to reflect the money you would have earned otherwise, your years of lost wages.
If you go to higher education without a goal or purpose, you are trading 4 years of earning potential for nothing. On a dollar for dollar basis, the system designed to exploit you considers you going to university for 4 years equivalent to losing a finger. Getting a masters degree, losing a hand.
Life is not a role playing game. Life is a strategy game. Specifically, a resource management game. RPG game mechanics are literally occult satanic mind control. “Role playing game” mechanics are the result of a process, fine tuned over decades, of adopting the lessons of human psychology learned from MMO’s, cookie clicker, etc, to “gamify” the world. Or rather, it’s gamifying it’s users. It’s a layer of control. We all already live in virtual reality. We already live in the metaverse. We have been since at least 1950.
Why did all video games adopt “progression mechanics” of “unlocking” content? Why are all video games today connected to the internet, why do they require constant internet access? Why are your save files uploaded to “the cloud”? For your convenience? To prevent piracy?
They are subsidized by DARPA and are selling the data back to them for meta analysis. Every “stealth archer with romance options” you play, you are helping/being exploited/an unwitting test subject of the future global social credit system. They are data mining your soul.
As a man you don't have a personality or an identity. Life is not about becoming a certain person. Or a certain “character”. Life is about resource management. And the other shit is just them scrambling to keep you busy in an accidental post scarcity environment. Well, post scarcity is over now.
You have maybe 60 years of earning potential. Those are your starting resources. Time. You have to exchange those 60 years for as much as you can get. Every single point wasted, you are never going to get back. The system considers every year wasted the equivalent of a permanent physical handicap. It is.
You don’t have to worry about not wanting to participate in the system that you grew up in. You are worried about acquiescing to it, because it would feel humiliating, after all that time, all those years of dread and discomfort, to bend your knee to it. You are not bending your knee to it. You are actively fighting against it. The system wants you broke and stupid, ideally dead. Wasting your time is acquiescing to it.
Most higher education is a complete scam, especially in the age where you can still get every book for free online, and just, read it. You could get a fuller education finding some bullshit manual labour job where you can listen to audio-books all day, and spend 4 years doing that. But instead of losing 4 years of wages, you earn 4 years of wages.
The thing most people practically get out of having an education, is emotional validation by an authority. You get social connections and nepotism options. That’s about it. But – you also get those everywhere and anywhere. Mostly, people just want an authority to give them permission. To do whatever it is they want to do. University is just an earlier iteration of the twitch streamer economic model. "Professors" are just titty streamers and fake dad/friendship simulations.
You do not have to spend 4 years and 4 years of lost wages on listening to people who are NOT smarter than you, pretend they are smarter than you or have some kind of insight or hidden knowledge. You are literally better than them, you are just insecure, because you have grown up in an evil inhuman system designed to break you and humiliate you.
Most people wait their whole lives for someone to tell them "go". Traditional universities, education, etc, is paying someone who you deem to be an authority, to tell you "go". That's it. Paying for pseudo-initiation.
Brother, it's going to be pseudo-initiation either way, the price you pay for it doesn't change anything, there is no difference in quality - it's all pseudo initiation. One's as good as the next. The price point changes nothing.
I give you permission. you hereby have permission. I hereby declare you an adult capable of running a business, of writing, of making music, of starting an organization. Whatever you want. By the power vested in me by the state of conventional status hierarchies, I grant you this.
Go.
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A lot of the relatable stuff at the top wrt internal mental state (especially the part about “what do you want to do with your life”: “nothing lol you just arent allowed to say it”) really didnt apply to me, so I was wondering if I would get anything out of this, but damn if the conclusion didn’t diagnose my exact life condition & hangup. Waiting for someone to tell me “go”, shying away from just starting the things i want to do--I’ve been journaling about this for a week or two now but you just nailed it. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised since you’re one of the most psychologically savvy posters out there, but you really nailed this one. Thanks Randy/Lasagna/Egg (?) maybe now I will “go”
Really good post, encapsulated my thoughts in a way I haven’t been able to verbalize to anyone, my parents especially. It seems as if it’s almost better (for your mental state at least) to live life unaware of the shit conditions of modern post-secondary education, but we’re here now and there’s no turning back. Hypothetically, if one had to go to college and get a degree if it guaranteed they could takeover the family business, would you recommend missing out on 4 prime earning years for it? Asking for a friend.