Let’s Just Stop With This Stupid, But Popular Game

There’s a popular game out there that grows very tiresome to me—in fact it has been tiresome for a long time.

There are variations on this game.

One of the narratives is about how people who go to college or get advanced degrees may be some kind of worthless-ass book smart, but somehow, dumber’n hell in all practical matters. The inference is often that such education is a waste of time, and a waste of money, and only served to make fundamentally dumb people not only dumber, but broker. “They got no street smarts. I got a PhD in Hard Knocks.”

Yeah, whatever.

Another variation is that all the philosophy and liberal arts majors in the world are working as Baristas, and boy, aren’t they just the stupidest things, wasting all that time and money. Dumbasses. Losers.

A popular meme going around is about just such a philosophy major who owes $90,000 in educational loans, and another guy, who did NOT go to college, but became an electrician, and makes like $75K and is coming to disconnect the philosophy major’s television. The point is made that the philosophy guy could not find a job in philosophy (I guarantee you that was not the guy’s aim, with a BA in Philosophy), and is an idiot, and the guy who went into the trades made a genius move. Somehow, in the meme, it was not enough to leave it at that—you need to punish the first guy by turning off his TV, making him look like an even greater loser and jackass. That make you feel better about yourself, Meme-Maker?

Never mind that this is a meme. Not real. Something somebody made up with the purpose of making somebody else look like an asshole. Plain and simple.

You know, here’s the thing—if you have never gone through an experience (Getting a BA, an MA, a PhD, an MD, whatever), you really probably do not know what it was like, or how valuable it might be in somebody’s life, or how the value of it will play out over the decades of that person’s life. Why one would act as if they DO know the value of the experience, when they actually have no idea, is a sign of something, and that something is nothing good. It says a lot.

I never see people with advanced degrees who are making a whole hell of a lot of money design memes that talk about the dumbass electrician who makes 1/3 or 1/10^th the advanced degree person’s income being punished by having to come to their house and connect their new seven thousand inch television. For a crappy $95 an hour. “Like, who would work for THAT?!?  Loser!”  Yeah, that meme does not exist.

And by the way—here’s some information you can easily Google:

“The expected lifetime earnings for someone without a high school degree is $973,000; with a high school diploma, $1.3 million; with a bachelor’s degree, $2.3 million; with a master’s degree, $2.7 million; and with a doctoral degree (excluding professional degrees), $3.3 million.”

“How does education affect life satisfaction?

Most researchers believe that college education is positively associated with happiness, and individuals that received college education usually have a higher level of happiness than those who did not (Liu et al., 2012; Hu, 2015; Hu and Gao, 2019; FitzRoy and Nolan, 2020; Yang et al., 2022).Aug 1, 2022”

“Adults with higher educational attainment live healthier and longer lives compared to their less educated peers. The disparities are large and widening. We posit that understanding the educational and macro-level contexts in which this association occurs is key to reducing health disparities and improving population health. In this paper, we briefly review and critically assess the current state of research on the relationship between education and health in the United States.”

“Do rich people have more education?

Research has found that 88% of millionaires graduated from college, and 52% have a master’s or doctoral degree. Education is linked to wealth, but there are also other contributing factors at play that aren’t caused by education, such as family background.”

And on and on and on.

But Here Is The Thing—

I totally admire tradespersons, seriously. I hate how this culture over-values preparing kids for college who have no interest in college, no motivation for college, and have loads of other skills that the world wants, needs, and will pay for. Germany, my wife’s country of origin, handles this MUCH better. I wish the USA handled it much better, because there are tons of good jobs out there that require no formal college, though they may require trade school or some other such training.

And I hate when people try to make higher education look like the biggest waste in the world. I hate it worse when they find one poor soul’s story that is heartbreaking, and beat the hell out of that person for being stupid. Are there such stories? Of course. There probably are PhD Baristas.

Are there people with no college education, and no wealthy family background who do really well? Of course. And I am related to one. Are there people with degrees and/or advanced degrees who act like dumbasses?  Of course. And I am related to one. Are there people from very wealthy families who make it to the top of the money heap through no merit of their own? Of course. Are there people born into wealth who blow the whole thing and end up with nothing? Of course. Are there people who are born into great wealth who really make the family business even better and create much greater success than the family business achieved before them? Of course. I am related to one of them too.

So let’s just be kind. And applaud successes of all kinds, however each of us defines success for ourselves. I was an English major, and I guarantee you at that time I was not in it to make a lot of money—that was not how I was defining what I hoped would be my future success at all.

The old “I wanna make me feel like more by making you seem like less” is a primitive psychological maneuver. Let’s just not go there anymore.

Deal?

Hope you are doing GREAT in whatever you do!!!

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