University Life and Life as a Free Man

I've been having a bit of a rough time at university actually. It's unrelentingly tedious and the material whizzes by at such a speed that you have no chance of properly digesting it. It becomes a game of memorization and survival tactics, learning just enough to not sound completely stupid in tutorials and to get passing grades. Though I fudged together an essay for one of my classes the other week and even took a late penalty and still got a 70, I felt that it was an utter waste of time. I didn't really learn anything and the knowledge of the time and money I am wasting for a degree that won't be very helpful in getting higher pay once I've completed it is extremely disheartening. I no longer dream of being a professor, in fact I loath the idea now. I feel like a child back at school again, servile, dependent and intellectually stifled. While I know I could mold my personality to that environment and get incredible marks like I did in highschool, I am no longer that person, too lucid to return to that plac
e, it would quite possibly end in the same disastrous way and I see no value in doing it.

I have two years left if I choose to continue, though I spent three years there I am less than halfway completed and my grades are terrible bar some 90s in logic classes (classes I find very easy but completely useless). I've done 60 units out of the required 144 needed to graduate. I emailed academic advisors for advice and perhaps consolation (I've seen a few in the past for help with degree planning) but they said they could only help with degree planning and referred me to the uni psychologists. I'm not mentally ill and I know exactly where my stress is coming from, I don't want to learn how to cope with a stifling situation by changing myself, I want to know how to change the stifling environment to one that is healthy. I don't think that's possible for who I am and the state of modern academia. I'm sure it is suitable for some people but I cannot imagine myself seeing out the next two years in that place. I also can't see myself changing majors. Though it might be better, I most certainly wouldn't be a
ble to continue tolerating that environment.

The facts are that I am not getting out of it what I want. I am not learning and it is costing me a lot of money (especially with the recent tuition rises). It makes me depressed and stressed and unable to think properly. When teaching/talking to sisyphus about philosophy I realized last year that despite having essentially completed a whole philosophy major (I did almost all philosophy classes, the ones left for me to do are from my second major: English) I knew less than him after he had read with great earnestness and dedication five or so of the great texts I had recommended him.

The other reason I wanted to go was to meet people but I have realized that the people there are not the kind of people that interest me. I see far less passion and dedication to intellectual inquiry than one would expect of university students (I'll probably have an even harder time finding people willing to discuss intellectual things in the regular world, but the regular world is the real world and one genuine person is better than a thousand dilettantes and charlatans). I think that the environment discourages it and makes people focus more on the appearance of it rather than the genuine thing itself. They are timid and lack self esteem, they far less genuine than the working people I made acquaintance with in my years at a dead end job.

Of course this could all be my accidental experience, perhaps I have chanced upon the worst of the lot and the great and passionate and interesting people are just around the corner, but after three years of trudging away looking for the rose atop the giant mound of shit, I have to make a decision and three years is a great deal of experience to base judgment on. I have always had one foot in the water and one out but I am a man now and can no longer do things tentatively and furtively. I'm going to drop out (I've already failed one assignment via nonsubmission) and get a job (a bartender or a rare book dealer for the time being perhaps?) and write fiction. We'll see where to go from there. The wondrous world is out there right before my very eyes, beyond the ivory tower. 

tags: university, personal-development