I won’t use the coefficient of friction again. I don’t need to know when the War of the Roses happened. No one needs to summarize Macbeth on the job. I’ll never use calculus, so why do I have to take this class? I don’t remember the French I took. Why should I learn the saxophone? I’m never going pro. I’ll never play badminton again or remember the rules. How will I ever use quantified predicate logic out in the Real World™? Why should I learn the Krebs cycle when I’m going to forget it two days after the final? F=ma? F= your mom for all that will ever matter to me. E=mc²? E= MC Hammer (I’m on a roll here) as far as I am concerned.
Who needs to know how to calculate by hand? We’ve invented calculators for a reason, people. Why should I rawdog a term paper by myself when AI can write it for me in a minute? Someone wants a term paper, boom, here ya go. Who needs to learn how to research in the library when my phone contains all human knowledge? Read Nietzsche or Plato or Faulkner? Is this a joke? Aren’t they just dead white guys anyway? Who cares. I don’t know why I need to read books at all. AI can just give me the summary. Really, who even needs that information? What does that have to do with anything? Reading is for chumps.
I don’t see why I need to listen to some boring guy prattle on about ethics. Objections to ethical egoism? What a waste of time. I’m just going to do what I want anyway. You can just do things. Learn about climate change or the Holocaust? Why? Just… why? I can’t do anything about either one of them, so what’s the point?
Father Guido Sarducci’s Five Minute University has got it right. Five years after graduation you’ll forget everything you learned in college except that economics is just supply and demand, theology is “God is everywhere,” and business is you buy something and you sell it for more. All you need to know about Spanish is if someone asks you “¿como esta usted?” you should reply “muy bien.” Since that’s all you’ll remember, quit spending tens of thousands of dollars to walk across the stage. Just spend $20 for a diploma and a Polaroid of you holding it. Congratulations, graduate!
So I’m just gonna speedrun college. Fast forward through the boring parts, and it is all boring.
Life should be as smooth as Teflon. Why should I learn to cook? DoorDash everything, baby. Or I’ll order up one of those Grubhub robots to serve me.
You know what else I’m not going to bother to do? Take up hobbies. Honestly that sounds so cringe. Why should I sit at a table making half-assed paintings? For who? I can get AI to make anything I want, better, faster, and free. Or exercise. There’s millions of people better than I will ever be at jogging, judo, or tennis, so why should I even bother? Plus, those things look hard and I already have a closet of guitars, skateboards, and other dumb things I gave up on. If I’m not great at something right away, forget it. What’s the point?
Plus, don’t people know how difficult life is right now? Honestly, it’s never been this tough. That’s why I steal. Really, it’s not even stealing—it’s political protest. Having to pay for things only gets in the way of becoming the person I am entitled to be. Don’t kid yourself, anyone not scamming is getting scammed. Have you learned nothing from Trump?
Go ahead, be a Tryhard if you want to. Not this guy. I’ll tell you something for free that I’ve learned the hard way: friends don’t last forever either. Someone who once meant the world to you will one day fade and disappear from memory. People come and go. The girlfriend you had back in the day who dumped you for that bartender? You slowly lose pieces of her. First you struggle to recall her face, then you forget her smell. Eventually her laugh disappears and even the sense of her altogether. Finally she is a coin with its embossing worn away by time and use and has now become a meaningless piece of metal. Just a name. Stat rosa pristina nomine; nomina nuda tenemus.
What was even the point? Best just to stick with sex dolls and OnlyFans. Having kids? A family? Oh. My. God. That sounds like so much work and money I don’t have. Changing diapers? Trying to get them to finish their homework so they can learn the same useless crap they tried to make me learn? Saving up so they can go to some asinine college? No thank you.
One day I’ll be in a no-name nursing home drooling with dementia, and will have forgotten everything. I won’t even remember that economics is supply and demand, or when to say “muy bien.” For sure I’ll never use any of that again. And why should I care when I ultimately forgot it in the end? I never learned anything new, did anything hard, pushed myself, or became anyone interesting. I played life on easy mode with every cheat code I could find. That’s why I’m so much smarter and better than all those honest strivers. The one thing I do know is that it doesn’t matter, because we’re all forgotten in time. So why bother to start with?
Why should I live at all?
Very well done. I thought the internal monologue was the setup for an answer, not that it would devolve into an answer.
I run into some of this style of whining with my young teen, who has little patience with abstract thought. She’s quick to leap on others when they do “stupid” things, however… which is good, because then I can ask, “why do you think they did that?” Followed up by, “did they choose to be stupid?” which then leads to either, hm, maybe I should be kinder to people, or hm, they chose to be stupid by not learning how abstract things work….
Perhaps old hat for some parents, but I’ve found it’s crucial to let the kiddo figure out at least one essential step in the argument without filling it in - because if it’s entirely “daddy’s” argument, it’s somewhere between suspect and worthless, whereas if they fill in one essential part (not noticing all the scaffolding you just put up) they own it.
Maybe true with adults, too.
What frightens me is that I’m afraid it’s borderline satire in that you may have encountered students who have expressed similar or perhaps even these exact sentiments. Oh my. By the way these kinds of students are not new. I remember speaking with a student from Berkeley in the early 70’s about History. His retort? “Who cares what all those dead dudes did.”