Do not be taken by surprise by a Dark Eldar Raid imperium,
Know there next move before they make it.
Brick Wall
I feel as if I’ve hit a brick wall in my life. Long, tall and opaque, I’m not sure where to go from here. All I know is that I have to keep moving forward, or risk growing rusty and stopping altogether. Why I’m moving, or to where, I am unsure. I am sure, however, that I have to keep going. Survive, college tells me, or die. Fight through the pain to be the best, college says, or you will be the worst.
I am not the best. I am not the brightest. I am not the most creative. I am not the most logical. I am in the middle, and I am surrounded on all sides. I see the world, and I am simply confused. Nothing makes sense, and I have no way of moving forward. I am stuck in place, and I know deep in my heart that any further delay will lay me down as a victim of life instead of it’s master. The conquered instead of the conqueror. I feel as if all roads which I could take lead to mediocrity. I have a snowball’s chance unless someone can help me…help me.
Happy birthday to me
Congratulations to me: I have now been breathing the air for two whole decades and a year. I was going to celebrate, but apparently school is still going on and I have to deal with that. So, I welcomed my birthday in with all the glory that reading a philosophy paper quietly in a study lounge can bring. Which brings me to my main point: I’ve been sitting around outside the womb for over two decades, and I’m still waiting around for something exciting to happen. And the worst part is, I know that even with this realization, I’m still not going to do anything of merit any time soon (if at all). Sometimes I sit in disgust for my life; not in the sense that I want to end it, but instead in the sense that I feel as if I never started living. Here I sit, grinding down my brain against some obscure play on words which the forces that be find fit to call “metaphysics”, and take just as seriously if not more seriously than the cure for cancer or the advancement of space travel. The more I learn, the more I think that the ultimate possible achievement for “metaphysics” would be a coincidentally coherent theory which legitimizes the “logic” of a happenstance language. What we now call philosophy has (in my own opinion at least) long since stopped being a search for truth, and has instead become a search for complexity without meaning or practical application. When I entered Philosophy at the end of my freshman year, I expected moral and political theory. At my current university (I transferred this year) there is only one available ethics course, an “intro to ethics”. Even in “Modern Philosophy”, which covers 17th-early 19th century philosophy, moral and political theorists are completely ignored. There is no Mill, no Bentham, no Hobbes, and they ignore Kant’s moral theory. Anything which I could take out into the world, anything which I could hold up high and say, “Look, world! The field of philosophy is here to help, and I’m here to make it happen!” is completely ignored in favor of endless inconclusive arguments trying to decide whether we know that we know what we know, and whether the property of Gertrude being Hamlet’s mother means that “Hamlet” doesn’t exist. WHO CARES IF HAMLET EXISTS WHEN THERE ARE MILLIONS OF PEOPLE STARVING ALL OVER THE WORLD, AND RAMPANT CRIME BUBBLING OVER INTO WANTON VIOLENCE EVERYWHERE WE LOOK.
When I signed up for the major, I thought that philosophers had their sights set on the future. Now I know that they don’t have their sights set on the future or the past. Their “sights” are stuck up their own asses, where they sit staring into the darkness and wondering pointless thoughts. If I knew I was going to spend the rest of my life doing nothing of value, I might as well have been a vagrant and at least had fun with it.
Upon reflection, however, I’m not quite sure that many other majors would go much differently. There are, of course, the “practical” majors. One could be a business major, or go pre-med, or even engineering. For them, a lot of the modern college academic landscape makes sense: You buckle down, you do the grunt work, you crunch the numbers, you learn the terms, you get the answers and you graduate to a job where (a lot of the time) you have to buckle down, do the grunt work, crunch the numbers, learn the terms and get the answers. It’s rigid. It makes sense. It has laws, and can be made universal.
Ah, but the liberal arts and humanities, things are not quite the same. Tell me, if you can, how to teach philosophy with tests and lectures. Explain to me how to learn wildlife conservation by staring at books in well-kept study lounges. What part of international relations and policy making can you do with a multiple choice scantron? Each of these take unique experiences. Philosophy must be done through dialogue, environmental science outdoors. Politics is between people, not pages. Maybe it isn’t all colleges; in fact, saying that would be a gross and unforgivable generalization. But the colleges in my personal experiences have become such money-grubbing whores that nearly any possibility of actual growth and advancement comes down to one’s ability to play within the bounds of the contrived system meant to broadly apply to as many potential students wallets as possible. Where the open-minded, rule-defying think tanks which I was promised went, I do not know. Perhaps they were never here, and all I was told was an idealistic pipe dream. If it was, however, I wish somebody had the dignity and humility to tell me so before I got mired in this mess of an educational system. I can feel it in my bones: i’m being trained to conform to social norms and averages, and to the convoluted image of success which society thinks that I need to be; I’m being turned into an office drone, with no future and no self, and only a need to swim hard enough to keep my head above water, because i’m too afraid of going under and I’ve forgotten how to fly.
Please, someone, give me the gift of life, because i’m dying of mediocrity and banality.
Happy birthday to me.
