When we’re born we’re put on a course based on our parents or lack of them and where we are on this ball of life hurtling around the sun as the sun pierces it’s way through space as… well, you get the idea. We don’t know a lot. It takes us a few years to master being bipeds, and then while our brain is soaking in all around us we become influenced by it. It’s neither good nor bad, but it can be either or both.
From there, we’re subscribed to whatever education system there is, with all it’s flaws, but we’re not told about the flaws because nobody likes talking about them. Allegedly, it works for most people based on what the education system says about itself.
Having seen many ‘successful’ products of education systems over the years in the real world, it remains a mystery to me that a system of education can grade itself in that regard. It’s sort of like a politician investigating himself and finding himself awesome all the time, and no one calls that out except the muffled voices of some in academia who slowly get strangled by the administration that says does what any bureaucratic institution does: It protects itself.
Religion? Same thing. In a way, education has become a religion, sainthoods being handed out as awards, certifications, degrees and smiley faces. It generally starts with smiley faces.
Generally speaking, based on whatever ‘level’ of education one attains, one goes about this business of life in a direction that has been per-ordained by the bureaucracy itself. At this point, we get jobs of some sort and go about the business of the maze of the snakes and ladders of whatever field we’re in. Maybe we find someone to procreate with. Maybe we don’t. Maybe we do some traveling and expand our perspective of the world, maybe we stay in one place and grow deep roots. Maybe you lose a job, maybe you find a new job, maybe…
Life is this huge ‘maybe’. In our youth, we place our backs against a sense of certainty that our childhood gave us, be it a real certainty or a contrived certainty. Life, though, is uncertain, and eventually we figure that out. Nothing in education prepares people for that uncertainty, and many people simply stop learning once they get their academic achievements because of reasons ranging from simply hating to do the work to thinking that they know enough for a lifetime. They don’t, generally.
We are told by many institutions that life is certain. We are told if we do certain things in certain ways we will attain certain goals, and this is not necessarily true. It’s the white lie that snowballs. Uncertainty is real. Life is uncertainty of varying degrees.
Our lives are just coddiwomples. We purposefully stride into the unknown based on what we’ve been told and it never quite ends up the way we were told.
That’s ok, if we accept it. The truth of the matter is that we’re all just bumbling through life, as our parents did, and our ancestors did. You’re here based on the coddiwomples of those before you.