Quote: The Last Psychiatrist: Hipsters On Food Stamps, Part 1

«I have a degree.» No one assumes you’re smart because of it, so what was the point? You were tricked, your parents were tricked, your peers were tricked, your employers were not tricked at all. «There’s more to a college education than employability.» No there isn’t. I am not anti-liberal arts, I am all in on a classical education, I just don’t think there’s any possibility at all, zero, none, that you will get it at college, and anyway every single college course from MIT and Yale are on Youtube. Is that any worse than paying $15k to cut the equivalent class at State? Name me one contemporary fiction writer who required his college training to be a writer, and if you say David Foster Wallace I swear to god I’m going to pumpkin your house. I think the only reason The New Yorker keeps shoving him down my throat is because he– the guy, not his work– is an academic’s aspirational fantasy, a compromise between two worlds: mild mannered writing professor by day, brooding and non-balding antihero by night, a last chance at «I can be cool, too» for the late 30s associate professor who thinks that intelligence alone is insufficient reason to be labeled a man. My university is full of them, all reasonably smart, all pretending at cool through the hiding in plain site of cultural irony and political cynicism and pretend alcoholism. «I may be drunk, but why was my polling station filled with rednecks trying to take away a female’s somatic autonomy?» says the endocrinology patient wearing a blazer with jeans as he nurses his second microbrew, trying to impress me with what kind of a man he could be in the Matrix. Come on, stop breathing. Obviously I’m not telling you to become an alcoholic, but don’t tell me you are one and then go home at 10:30 because otherwise your wife will cheat on you. Man up or stand down, I don’t care which, just don’t backwash into a perfectly good beer if I’m going to have to finish half of it.

III.

Fact: college is a waste, but we haven’t yet hit that point in society where we can bypass it. So we have to pass through another generation of massive college debt. How to pull in the suckers in? Answer: these articles. By getting you to say, «these hipsters should be able to get jobs because they are college graduates!» you are saying, «college is worth something.» It isn’t. But by directing your hate towards hipsters, you are protecting the system against change.

via The Last Psychiatrist: Hipsters On Food Stamps, Part 1.