more thoughts re: yesterday afternoon's post

[lauralh]

So let's move forward to the premise that college is bad, because it encourages a culture of excess. Either you meet and fuck a shitton of people, or you drink too much, or drop too much acid, or just overdose on drama. And if you ain't doing any of that, you're probably working way too fucking hard on classes. There are very few careers where you have to pull all-nighters, ever.

But then again, it probably goes back to high school. The reason people explode in college is because their whole life up to that point, they've had to fucking ask permission to go to the fucking bathroom. Freedom is fun! and scary.

Something needs to be done. But not for me, I'm over it, I work for a living.

Comments

it's not like I offered a "solution"

[herbaliser.livejournal.com]

Wait. If work is not independence, but every single person has to work to live, then what is the point of "learning independence" just to have it taken away?

Re: it's not like I offered a "solution"

[bewing.livejournal.com]

It doesn't get taken away. You voluntarily relinquish it for 8 hours a day, for pay -- for 45 years. Maybe.
But that still leaves you the rest of your life.
And you have to have an understanding of what you are striving for -- with all that damned work.

Re: it's not like I offered a "solution"

[chris.livejournal.com]

you have to present the carrot before you can take it away. people (at least those with potential, and some amount of wealth and privilige) get a taste of relativeley freewheeling, carefree life in college, and then think that if they work long enough and hard enough they can achieve that again someday. but generally they never get there.

as people have pointed out, there's a lot of need for basic labor and not very much for creative, critical thinking. everyone not going to college gets dropped straight into the workforce and is probably miserable their whole life. in both cases they probably puncuate their work weeks with excessive partying, spend a day recovering, and repeat the process until they are too old to be useful.

I suspect this is why people get so upset about classism. its not just the material differences, but the fact that you and millions of others will slave your whole life away so that a few people don't have to, and your reward for it is that they will screw you every chance they get.

basically, the system is setup the way it is for a reason, and its not for our benefit.