Many of the topics and articles posted on Don’tASQ are somewhat controversial. Maybe you think that only new-age nutcases believe in the power of intuition. Maybe you think the “sit down, shut up, and take notes” system of education is highly effective. Or maybe you feel that the world is fine just the way it is — why should we bother changing it?

One thing I love about gratitude is that we can feel it and express it regardless of our stances or beliefs on any other issue. Gratitude crosses all boundaries and permeates all barriers between religions, cultures, and political parties. We don’t have to make a certain salary or belong to a certain group in order to show our appreciation for the people/things/ideas in our lives. In fact, we don’t even need the ability to speak — all that’s required is a pinch of humility.

I write these words not in an attempt to get you to list everything for which you’re thankful (that’s been overdone to the extreme), but simply to ask that we all become thankful. I ask that we live humbly and take absolutely nothing for granted. I ask that we loosen the grip on our own egos by a mere smidgen. I ask that we focus on what we have that others don’t rather than what we wish we could “one-up.” Heaven knows that if every person in the world even attempted to adopt this mindset, we’d all be much better off.

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting started right now. Happy Thanksgiving.

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Imagine a scenario in which we have a five-person Mini-Congress which votes on various issues. The issue at hand is one of great importance — we must decide on our national fruit. The vote is to be decided by simple majority; it takes three votes to win the selection. Unfortunately, it looks like you and I are currently in the minority. The Stooge Party, consisting of Senators Larry, Curly, and Moe, plan to stay within party lines and make the Sillyfruit our new national symbol. You and I, as respected members of the Ape Party and fans of the Banana, can do little but watch this– err… silliness unfold.

So, what exactly is the problem with political parties? Suppose that neither Larry nor Curly actually wanted to vote for the Sillyfruit, but did it merely to remain in good favor with Moe (the Majority Leader). Suppose that Larry was in favor of the Cashew (he always was a little nutty), while Curly wished to nominate the Snozberry. Since they would obviously have a hard time rallying support for either of those fruits, both of them would have considered voting for the Banana as a second choice. However, doing so would have signaled weaknesses in the party line… and possibly cost them the next election. Thus, the Sillyfruit, an option disliked by four of the five Senators, wins the vote.

It doesn’t take a political pundit to see how the elimination of parties could have ensured a better choice for everyone involved (except maybe Moe). Instead, “silliness” prevailed — and the same thing happens in the real world, probably more often than we’d like to believe. Rather than letting the Congressmen think for themselves, the political world forces them to choose between two sets of ideas, deciding which set most closely matches their beliefs, and basing their entire career around a set of ideas of which they may only agree with a few. Of course, the general public is no less guilty; anyone who dares to challenge the two-party system has only a small chance of even appearing on the mainstream radar, much less getting elected.

Form camps around issues, not stereotypes.

Changing the world is no small task. Every day, many people engage in “world-changing” activities such as performing community service or preaching an inspirational message to a church — the little things. These things can have an immediate and powerful positive effect on those nearby. Unfortunately, “nearby” is the key word in that sentence. As much effort as you may put into organizing a community cleanup day or serving at a soup kitchen, and as beneficial as those projects may be to your area, they do little to help the oppressed citizens of China or the starving children of Africa.

Any truly world-changing movement would require some level of service to local communities — you can’t do everything from Washington, D.C., as some say. However, you certainly can’t do everything from the comfort of your own home, either. In short, the philanthropic activities in which we most commonly engage are necessary but not sufficient to achieve the goals to which we aspire… or at least those to which Don’tASQ aspires.

Thinking big requires more than just an expansion of our current thoughts into new real estate. We can’t use the same strategies to affect one million lives that we use to affect one life. Let’s say, for example, that we’re strolling through an African desert on a camel (call it a low-budget safari). We come across a starving homeless man who begs us for something to eat. There’s no sign of civilization anywhere (we decide not to ask how he got here in the first place). The first solution which comes to mind is probably to give him some food and wish him well, right? But upon further consideration, we realize that we don’t have enough food to keep him alive indefinitely, and it’s pretty unlikely that any other low-budget safari adventurers will be traveling this way anytime soon. We have no choice but to take him back to our camp and point him in the direction of the nearest town.

Looking at the real world, we see a similar scenario for millions of Africans as well as people on other continents. Logically, if we extend our solution to the one starving man, we come to the conclusion that we must migrate every starving family to a different part of the world. It doesn’t take much thought to point out the reasons why that would go terribly wrong.

Our current solution to the large-scale case seems to be to throw food and money in their general direction and pat ourselves on the back for being altruistic. (Disclaimer: This is a very simplistic and only partially-realistic example. I have no idea how large the actual “feed the world” efforts are nor what methods are being undertaken.) This doesn’t work for the same reason why we wouldn’t have given our homeless man food and left him alone — we can’t give enough for an indefinite period of sustainability. Our starving beneficiaries will become dependent on our aid while we work doubly hard to generate enough food to feed them as well as ourselves.

As kind as that is for us to indefinitely provide for the rest of the world, it’s not exactly efficient. The best solution for long-term sustainability of any system is for that system to sustain itself with no reliance on outside effects. In other words, we need to teach these impoverished nations to fend for themselves.

In the case of our starving children in Africa, it may be difficult to teach desert agriculture if we ourselves don’t know anything about it. To solve this problem, we could invest more money into the research of arid-zone agriculture, and provide a solution to Africans once we’ve discovered something feasible. Hey, that’s simple enough, right? Just funnel millions of dollars into R&D, wait a few months, and watch the solution hatch!

Unfortunately, as we all know, it’s not nearly that trivial — hence providing us with another “opportunity” to think outside of the box. To feed Africa, we need research. To do research, we need money. To get money, we need a miracle- I mean, uhh… help from the government. To get help from the government, we need to convince some very stubborn people that our cause is worthwhile. And to do that requires a bit of charisma, a bit of word-twisting, and a lot of luck. Of course, any step in this process could be circumvented by a sufficiently altruistic person (e.g. the researchers could work for free), but then we’d still have to worry about convincing someone to personally invest in that manner. Who’d have thought that feeding a starving man could be so complicated?

Regardless of the specifics, any world-changing movement requires a fundamental shift of thought if it is to succeed. We cannot scale the solutions for a small region to the entire world, just as we cannot feed one million people in the same way that we can feed one. One of my reasons for launching Don’tASQ was to instigate major changes in thought, such as thinking from a global perspective rather than a local one. This will likely be a topic about which we write consistently (”we” meaning either myself or other writers), because I feel that it’s an important one.

Until next time… think big!

Imagine (if necessary) that you’re a student at a major four-year university. You roll out of bed at 8:45am on a typical Monday morning, pick up some mismatched articles of clothing from the floor and throw them on before leaving your dorm. As you walk at a faster-than-normal pace toward your 9:00am class on the opposite side of campus, you briefly stop to chat with a couple of your friends. You leave them alone after finding out that they haven’t slept in two nights - apparently, they have a killer Bio exam tomorrow. You continue on, grumbling about the reminder that you’ve got your own exam to study for. You wistfully wave to acquaintances as you space out, wondering who the professor will embarrass today… oops! (You duck behind a tree to avoid being spotted by your ex.)

A few minutes later, you spot another acquaintance, one you’ve barely ever spoken with. He’s always seemed a bit withdrawn, and exhibits some of the symptoms of one of those antisocial disorders you remember studying in Psychology. You almost pass by without acknowledging him, just like everyone else usually does. But then, something inexplicably changes your mind. You turn toward him, smile, give a brief greeting, and ask how his weekend went. He appears startled, but you listen intently as he tells you about his grand adventures in… World of Warcraft. “Sounds… interesting?” you say, but he actually doesn’t seem to feel the same way. You tell him about a choir concert that you’ll be in this weekend, and suggest that he go - just for something to do, since it’s free for students. And for the first time ever, you see him smile. You part ways and sprint toward your class (which has already started).

If you happened to be a student at Virginia Tech, you may have just saved 33 lives.

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me!” We all heard that line as kids. Unfortunately, it’s the second biggest lie that’s ever been told. (The biggest one, if you’re curious, has to do with a certain “War on Terrorism”…) Words do hurt, and they can cause people to do unimaginably horrible things - but the good news is that words can also cause people to do unimaginably fantastic things.

The shooter at Virginia Tech was a 23-year-old Korean student, a permanent resident by the name of Cho Seung-hui. He was described as a “loner”, and was actually referred to a school counselor at least once. Seung-hui was not a typical “work hard, play hard” college student. He was not heavily involved in campus activities, he was not a star athlete, and he had very few friends, if any at all. The most violent people in American society are not your small-time burglars, your drug addicts or your drunken frat boys. The most violent people in American society are those whom everyone else has forgotten. They’re the ones we’ve left out, be it intentionally or not. They are the people who hide in the shadows, observing everything else going on around them - and despising it.

Fortunately, these folks do have to come into the light sometime, and it’s our job to make sure that they don’t regret doing so. Please, for the sake of… well, everyone, never hesitate to speak a few kind words to these social “outcasts”. You probably don’t even have to go out of your way - if you’ve put a smile on their face, you’ve succeeded. And that smile may be the difference between life and death.

The topic of global warming is a political hot button, but it really shouldn’t be. If global warming wasn’t already the subject of heated debates, Friday’s release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Report has brought it even more clearly into the public eye. For those who don’t know, the IPCC report apparently painted a very gloom picture of the earth’s future - a picture which was even more gloom before its “watering down” by various governments. Check the IPCC’s website for more information.

You’d think global warming would be a pretty easy topic to debate, right? Either it’s happening or it isn’t. Either it’s our fault or it isn’t. Either we should do something about it or we shouldn’t. I don’t see any reason why this topic should be political at all, nor why it should even be trusted to politicians to begin with. (Let politicians deal with trivial issues like file sharing, and leave the future of our planet to people with some intelligence.) What’s even more baffling is that, somehow, Democrats and Republicans have managed to camp on opposite sides of the line yet again. It’s almost as if the people we’ve elected into leadership would rather spend their time arguing with one another than, ya know, making progress. Oh, wait…

I’m not going to argue for either side, because I’m not educated enough on this issue and jumping to conclusions rarely solves anything. However, there’s one point that I think we can all agree on - Our planet is not expendable. Until the day comes when we can colonize other planets and freely transport billions of people between them, we will always have to be keeping an eye on the state of Earth’s environment. Claiming that we can pollute our planet without consequence is like claiming that you can let rodents and termites into your house and pour corrosive acid down the drains. You may not notice any damage right away, but sooner or later, you will have to deal with your negligence. Think of Earth as a really big house with six billion bedrooms. Maybe the problems haven’t surfaced yet, and maybe they won’t surface for another 100 years. Maybe they won’t surface for another million years, but if our rate of pollution continues, they will surface eventually. And when they do, we’d better hope that there are other houses on the market.

Assuming you haven’t lived under a rock for the last five years and have wasted a reasonable amount of time surfing the Internet, you’ve almost certainly run across a blog or two. You know, blogs - short for “weblogs”, kind of like journals or diaries, but in a digital format. They often remain personal in content, but rarely in audience. So, if you don’t mind my asking, what did you think?

Were any of them particularly enlightening? Were any of them good enough to bookmark and share with your friends? Did they inspire you to change careers, or to propose to your sweetheart, or to give away all of your belongings and devote your life to priesthood in Fiji?

If you could honestly answer “yes” to any of the above questions, please tell me where these blogs are. Blogs, while highly conversational, are usually devoid of meaningful content. In other words, they’re easy and often pleasurable to read, but don’t provide their readers with much value… kind of like Cosmo. Blogs come in several flavors: News/Politics (they’re almost indistinguishable nowadays), irrelevant personal anecdotes, collections of numbered lists…

Yes, that’s right - I said collections of numbered lists. Anyone who’s ever surfed the Internet for websites about a personal development topic (such as health or personal finance) has undoubtedly come across a few of these. You know what I’m referring to: “Shed 50 Pounds Before Summer With These Five Great Tips!” As an example, I’m currently looking at one of my RSS feeds (name of the blog omitted to protect the guilty), showing the titles of the latest nine posts. Of those nine titles, seven contain numbers: “Ten Commandments”, “22 Tips”, “Four Profound Agreements”, “44 Longevity Tips”, “9 Easy Ways”, “10 Timeless Lessons”, and “207 Great Tips”. Collections of numbered lists aren’t inherently bad, but they can make the wrong impression - that following these “Five Great Tips” will result in a painless overnight transformation. They won’t, nor will anything else.

How many blogs have truly changed your life in some positive way? It doesn’t even have to be a major change (like giving away all of your belongings and devoting your life to priesthood in Fiji); something as simple as learning to cook would be great. My count is probably hovering around the 3-4 range - and I’ve spent a lot of time on the Internet. Most blogs seem to exist primarily to waste our time. Don’t get me wrong, they do a great job of that, but if we’re already spending all of that time reading other peoples’ scrawlings, wouldn’t it be best if we could acquire long-term benefits from them?

Any blog worth reading should provide some value beyond the text. In other words, if it’s not changing the way you think, feel or act, or inspiring you to go change the way someone else thinks, feels or acts, drop it. The idea seems harsh (and probably is), but I can guarantee that it will be a huge time saver, if nothing else. As a personal example, I started this website with a clear mission in mind - to change the world, first in thought, then in action. I’m barely just getting started on the thought changes, but you might think of this website as Phase I of Scott’s Master Plan (for World Domination). Jokes aside, my point is that this website has a purpose beyond simply making money or being an outlet for mental turbulence.

With that said, it should be obvious by now that most blogs aren’t worth reading! Stop wasting your time with them; you should be able to tell within a couple of minutes whether you’ll ever return. And shedding 50 pounds in six weeks isn’t healthy, so you can stop Googling for that, too. Get out of that comfy chair and go contribute something to the world. If you’re not sure where to start, try discovering your purpose first. (FYI, Steve Pavlina’s blog, the one I just linked to, would probably be one of my “worth reading” choices. Spend some time there; it might become one of yours, also.) Remember the old adage, “One reaps what one sows.” For a less kindly-worded motivator, read my Thoughts on Apathy post. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to catch a one-way flight to Fiji.

One morning, during my junior year of high school, I was sitting in class (a web design class, interestingly enough) finishing up an assignment and conversing with a classmate. I don’t remember what the conversation was about, nor whether it was even so much a conversation as a one-sided rant, but one comment in particular from him stuck out, and I remember it to this day. I don’t even remember the exact quote, but the general idea is this:

Our planet wouldn’t be so jacked up if people were content to be just as good as everyone else. The problem is that everybody wants to be better than everyone else, and they end up screwing each other over.

American culture encourages greatness. It encourages us to be the best, to be champions, to be stars. American culture wants us to be #1. Not tied for #1 - no, that’s not good enough. When’s the last time you saw two competing countries share a gold medal in an Olympic sport? When’s the last time you heard of a tie for a Grammy award? Not a chance; in the Olympics, a second-place contestant will get a silver medal and a bit of recognition to encourage them to come back in four years. Second-place Hollywood stars don’t even get that.

Greatness in itself is not problematic at all; there’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting to be the best, right? Of course not - the problem comes in when we forget about a very simple concept: Every “best” implies that there is a “worst”. And people don’t like being the worst. People don’t like putting in time and effort only to earn very little, if any, return. In short, we have two competing ideas:

1) We invest large amounts of time and effort into becoming the “best”, and we expect to be compensated for this investment.
2) Others invest large amounts of time and effort into becoming the “best”, and also expect to be compensated for this investment.

Let’s use an example to make this a bit more concrete. We’ll say that Company A and Company B (creative names, huh?) are competing for sales among a group of consumers. To do this, they spend a certain amount of money on advertising, in hopes of making the largest positive return that they can. Company A spends $300 on advertising but sells only $200 of product, for a $100 net loss. Company B, meanwhile, spends $400 and sells $600, for a $200 profit. In this scenario, Company B grows, squashes Company A out of business, etc. etc. We’ll assume that Company B keeps its advertising budget and steals the sales from Company A, resulting in a $400 profit. Somebody wins, somebody else loses.

Let’s say now that Company A and Company B merge… into Company AB. (Never mind that it will eventually be broken up by anti-monopoly laws.) With proper cooperation, the combined brains of the two marketing departments are able to come up with a campaign costing only $300, but which nets $1000 in sales, resulting in a $700 profit. You might argue that, because the two companies merged, each company’s profit is actually around $350 - and you would be correct. On a very small (and very simplified) scale, competition doesn’t seem all that bad. It’s not until we step out and look from a global perspective that cooperation really starts to make sense…

The problem with competition (we’re talking broadly, not from the business perspective) is very simple, yet often overlooked: Someone’s effort ends up being wasted. While in some cases - the business world being one - competition appears beneficial, from the perspective of global progress, competition is simply too inefficient.

The Cold War is an excellent example of pointless competition. The United States and the USSR were developing state-of-the-art space and weaponry technology… yet much of that development was geared toward threatening each other. Where would we be today if the two countries had put that time and money into jointly improving a worldwide space exploration program?

When we focus our efforts in one direction instead of wasting our time competing with one another, no matter what the project, we’re bound to make much greater progress. Instead of thinking, “How can I do better?” try thinking…

“How can we do better?”

Of all the traits one might try to ascribe to the human race as a whole, very few of them are completely universal. We vary greatly in physical features and in personalities. We vary in our likes and dislikes, our values and beliefs, our habits and our tolerances. There’s even a level of variation in our basic needs. One trait, however, stands out amongst all others - and it’s not a positive one. The disappointing truth is that human beings are very good at not getting things done.

So prevalent is the illness known as apathy that some people are able to form careers around it. What, exactly, is the purpose of settling a court case by deciding who has the best lawyer? Congress is even worse - The U.S. Senate just spent weeks debating about whether to have a debate about whether we should send more troops to Iraq. And don’t get me started on the entertainment industry…

College students, however, are by far the worst of all. Not only do we employ apathy, but we wield it like a sword… and we’re very adept at disguising it. You failed that exam not because you couldn’t understand the material, but because you never wanted to understand it? That’s not rebellion - that’s apathy. You didn’t ask that girl out even when you knew she was going to say yes? Not shyness - that’s also apathy. You decided to spend your Spring Break in Cancun, relaxing under the sun, instead of in New Orleans, helping to rebuild and still having a great time exploring the city? (Blah blah, shameless plug, blah blah blah.) Apathy. You didn’t write in your blog for eight days because you thought you were too busy? (You didn’t think I was going to exclude myself, did you?) Yep, that’s apathy, too.

I have no magical words of motivation that will change the world - but believe me, I wish I did. What I have is as simple as this: Quit giving excuses. Think of each and every excuse as exactly that - an excuse. Some of them have a trace of validity, but they all mask apathy in one form or another. Get off your butt and do what you know you have to do; no more excuses. It really is that simple.

We’ve all heard that (in)famous phrase, “You learn something new every day!” For the most part, I agree with it. We watch the news. We pick up gossip. We discover that we’re out of toilet paper at just the wrong moment. Unfortunately, many of us seem to stop there. We become complacent living our lives in a way that (we think) makes us happy, and neglect to pick up knowledge at the speeds our minds are capable of.

Surely, no matter how stressful our lives are, most of us get bored on occasion. And what do we do in those cases? Flip on the TV, of course! (Or see who’s on AIM, read Cosmo, or go drinking.) The next time you’re bored, hold off that temptation, and instead just ask yourself a simple question. One question, that’s it; preferably one that you don’t know the answer to, about a topic that interests you. Here are some examples:

• Where did that phrase, “You learn something new every day” originate?
• How much do American students really learn compared to students in other countries? Why the differences?
• How do people in other countries perceive America?
• How do Americans perceive people in other countries?
• Just how serious is global warming?
• Are we ever going back to the Moon?
• How fast would college students, not held back by government bureaucracy, be able to plan a mission to Mars?
• It can’t be that hard to build a space shuttle… right?
• Seriously, why are most buildings square and boring? Don’t we have more creative architects?
• How often do square buildings collapse compared to, say, spherical ones? (Rolling away doesn’t count.)
• If a spherical building rolled away, would the people inside be able to run around like hamsters?
• How many calories would you burn by running in a hamster ball for one hour? How many more would it be if you were chased by an extremely large and hungry cat?
• Okay, I want a final verdict on caffeine: Healthy, unhealthy, or neutral?
• What’s all the hype about green tea?
• What’s the best way to sleep less and feel better? (By now, I think you all know the answer to this…)
• Why do we need sleep, anyway?
• What happens when a computer hibernates?
• What is this thing called Linux, and why is it ten million times better than Windows? (Sorry, just an opinion. From a Computer Engineering major. )
• Why is Windows Vista such a disappointment? (Okay, I’ll stop with the opinions. But they’re true, ya know.)
• What is DRM, and why are all the entertainment companies touting it while the tech gurus denounce it?
• How can I get a blog as cool as this one?

As you can see, there are basically no restrictions on the type of questions you could ask. If you’re in a silly mood, ask a silly question - it’s that simple. Then try to answer it! If your question was good, you shouldn’t be able to answer it immediately and will have to do a little digging, hence stirring up your curiosity, and (*gasp*) causing you to learn something new! You’ll be amazed at how deep you can dig on a topic that really interests you. I can’t tell you how many times a simple inquiry has lead me to do hours of research (polyphasic sleep is a prime example). Yes, it’s pretty nerdy, but I believe that by challenging ourselves and developing ourselves mentally when we aren’t obligated to, we’ll be much more prepared to use our noggins when it really counts.

So what are you waiting for? Go learn something!

This entry was originally written as a Facebook “note” on October 23, 2006. With my own permission, I have reproduced it here. Enjoy.

So instead of studying for a midterm which I’m taking in approximately 15 hours, I’m rambling about the meaning of life and pointless stuff like that. What else is new?

Let’s take a look at what the Average American™ might experience in his or her lifetime:

-The Average American child is raised by Average American parents and attends an Average American public school where he or she learns very much about rules and regulations and very little about anything pertaining to how the world actually operates (i.e. it’s not what you know, but who you know - and in Above-Average America, who you can pay off).

-The Average American teenager is taught by Average American educators and parents not to experiment with drugs and alcohol. The Average American teenager experiments anyway simply because it’s what “everyone else” does. The Average American educators and parents also experimented when they were teenagers, but Average Americans don’t talk about that.

-The Average American college student cares very much about alcohol and very little about the state of the world outside of Average America. The Average American student learns more outside of class than inside it, yet somehow manages to graduate anyway. The Average American graduate earns a piece of paper which proves to Average American employers that he or she has jumped through the hoops required for an Average American (i.e. overworked and underpaid) job.

Cynical enough for you?

As someone who would consider himself to be a non-Average American, I find this system absurd. I came from a small town high school which was basically known for two things - its girls’ basketball program and its teen pregnancy rate.

I was fortunate enough to be an “honor student” enrolled in “honors classes”, so I wasn’t exposed to as much ugliness as some of my friends, but what I did see was often sickening. During my Senior year, I took an Electronics course… I have never learned less about electronics in my entire life. In doing a house wiring project, the teacher seemed more concerned about the coloring of my wires than whether I actually had the wiring correct - probably because he wasn’t skilled enough to discern it otherwise. Not to mention that, on most days, class only lasted half as long as it was supposed to; the last half of the class was “break time”. It reminded me of Kindergarten.

At GHS, discipline was simple - the teacher/administrator was always right. If you were in the hallway during class, you were automatically a suspect. It didn’t matter if you were called by a counselor or whatnot. If you were the poor shaggy kid who got hit in the face by the captain of the football team (who just happened to have a rich daddy), and you retaliated… I think you see what I’m getting at. If you looked “suspicious” or someone thought you “posed a threat”, guess what? You were suspended, possibly with no questions asked. Just ask one of my friends who had to see a shrink before he could return.

Sometimes, my friends and I would refer to this high school as a prison. In retrospect, that’s exactly what it was, and I wouldn’t be surprised if yours was the same way.

But enough about high school. What about college? I left the previously mentioned craphole in hopes of something new, a place where I would experience true freedom. That’s exactly what I got… sort of.

This freedom came with a price, a price that I’m not sure I was ready to pay at that time - nor am I sure I’m ready to pay even now. No, I’m not talking about the $40,000+ a year; I’m talking about the price of my time - every last drop of it. As awful as my high school was in comparison to Wash U, one thing I wish I could recover was the time and ability I had to explore topics of interest which the school didn’t offer. As you can probably guess, technology was a major interest of mine. Though GHS had only a very limited computer curriculum (and it wasn’t even a curriculum itself; it was lumped into “Business”), the classes I took were just enough to whet my appetite to the point where I would come home and install and test new software on the family computer (much to the chagrin of my parents). I can’t say that about History. Were it not for those experiences, I’d probably be majoring in Psychology.

I can hear you saying, “But Scott, now you have so many more resources to work with! What’s stopping you from devoting even more of your time to interests?” The answer: Classes!

It’s not that I don’t like Computer Engineering, because for the most part, I do. Unless you’re talking about the workload. When I’m finishing with a ridiculous programming lab on the Friday night of Fall Break when I should be relaxing after an extremely rough MONTH, the last thing on my mind is, “Ooooh, I want to rewrite this C++ program in COBOL!” Or, for you non-geeks, “Ooooh, I want to read War and Peace in Swahili!” No, no, no, no, and most definitely no. In short, part of the reason I can’t delve into my interests further is because I’m simply too burnt out by them. (The other part, of course, is lack of time… but I figure now is a bad time to argue that since I’ve just spent close to an hour writing this ginormous note.)

The Purpose of Education: Education is a tool developed by the Above-Average Americans to brainwash Average Americans into doing their work for them.

I don’t want to be an Average American.