[This post is from a previous blog]

Roughly once a month I have to explain why I don’t have a degree so I’ve decided to make a post I can send to those who bring it up. This may be of some use to those in a similar position that can’t find the exact words. Use what you need, comrades. I know how difficult it is to live in a culture that tells you you’re stupid if you don’t have a degree. I work in academia and I can tell you, having a degree is absolutely no guarantee of intelligence or sophistication of thought.
I tried to make a list from biggest reason to smallest reason but they interrelate, so, instead they’re in order from immediate problems (everyday problems with University) to the more existential issues.

1.I have the attention span of a gnat on speed. This makes paying attention in class damn near impossible. Lectures are vital so this is a fairly large problem. I could record the lectures and listen to/transcribe later except for my third point. If I’m truly interested in a subject, I have fewer problems paying attention. This is of no real use also because of point three.

2.I’m allergic to strangers. The chief reason I quit high school at 15 was because I could no longer take being forced to be around my peers for eight hours a day. I missed as many days as I could and rarely did my homework (or anything else) because all of my energy was spent on getting to school five hours before I was awake and then coping with enforced socialization with complete arseholes. Combined with the next point, every day was an exercise in psychological torture. I completely understand the students who shoot up their schools. I never considered doing that, but I did try to kill myself at thirteen because I couldn’t take it anymore.

3.I don’t care about most of what is required. In the U.S. universities require something called Basic Studies. The goal is to make college graduates well-rounded people by making them pass courses completely unrelated to their area of interest. This also prepares graduates for doing loads of rubbish they don’t want to after joining the workforce. The key integer here is being paid. I don’t mind doing random, useless things if I’m being paid for it, but once you ask me to pay you to do those things I just can’t seem to find the motivation. Funny that.

4.I have no life goals. Admitting that is a big taboo because every person is supposed to want to do something with his or her life. Well, here I am saying it: the only goal I have is to be as free of stress as possible. Considering that I can have psychotic episodes if I get too stressed out (not that those aren’t fuuu-UUUN!) this is an excellent goal, to my mind. If I really wanted to do something in particular I could possibly, mayhap, find the wherewithal to plow through the higher education system. One should keep in mind that schizoids don’t often have over-arching goals before deciding to hold one’s breath while waiting for me to get inspired. Also, if I did manage to get me one of them there DAY-grees I wouldn’t want to do anything with it-I like my life just as it is. I’d go into academia, except I’d have to teach and I couldn’t stand students when I was one. I can’t imagine having to deal with them year in, year out for thirty years. My dream job is low stress/responsibility, requiring a relatively low amount of thinking-not mindless, but not taxing-livable pay, sane co-workers and health care insurance. I have that so I’m not inspired to change my situation.

5.I’m not interested in anything for any length of time. In points one and three I said that if I’m really interested in a subject I’m more able to concentrate and get somewhere. If the U.S. system were like the U.K. system, where you solely focus on what you’re studying and Basic Studies don’t exist I may have some hope of getting a degree, but probably not, as I lose interest in most things relatively quickly.

6.I can do my current job without a load of student debt. Until I got a job in academia, I knew more people with Master’s degrees that didn’t use their degrees than those who did. Most of them had jobs very similar to mine. The difference between the two of us was that I didn’t have tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars in student loans to pay off. As I said, I like my current job quite a bit and wouldn’t want to try to pay off loans of that size.

When I asked people why they didn’t use their degree the answer was something like: I realised I didn’t like my subject. They’d started university and by the time they got through two years of basic studies and started studying their actual major they didn’t care about it anymore, but they’d gone too far and didn’t want to partially start over and switch majors. Then it was time to enter the RealWorld™ or go to grad school… Flash forward a few years and they have a mountain of debt and a shiny degree in something they care nothing for.

I would be just like those people if it weren’t for my apathy and deficit of an attention span, as it was always presented to me that I was going to college and probably further. I was 29 before I realised I no longer needed to feel stupid for not following a path that I’d neither chosen nor been interested in. I spent the first three decades of my life feeling like a loser because I hadn’t done what other people thought would make me happy. Obviously, organised education doesn’t make me happy. It makes me anxious and depressed.

These things do not mean that I don’t enjoy learning. I read a lot and I’m growing less and less tolerant of ‘lighter’ literature. I’ve lately taken a more structured approach to teaching myself how to think more analytically, as discussed in my next post.

I would like to end this post by saying that I’m ticked off that no one told me it was possible to have a decent job without a degree. From the time I was moved to the ‘academically gifted’ class when I was eight, it was assumed I was one day going to uni. When I was thirteen I told one of my teachers that I was going to quit school as soon as I could do and she said that was fine if I wanted a menial job. It was always presented to me that if I didn’t have a degree I would wind up doing jobs that were ‘beneath’ me.

Now I’m offended of the implicit classism in that sort of statement and I’m pissed right off that no one told me I could have a decent job without a degree. It took ten years of being miserable and falling into my current job before I discovered that not having a degree wasn’t a prison sentence. Way to wreck someone’s self-esteem, Western Culture.