IT'S POINTLESS
‘It’s pointless!’, he exclaimed when I asked why he hates going to school so much.
‘It’s fucking pointless!’, he continued.
The struggle to get my son out of bed and on to school is real and has only gotten worse. But more than that is the realisation that he is right, to some extent. That it is pointless.
Yesterday, after repeated attempts at knocking at his door and calling out to him to get up, he ended up sleeping most of the day. Later in the evening when I told him I tried to wake him, he remembered nothing of it.
In my childhood, I got the impression that everything would be ‘okay’. We had hope, and so we continued with our lives. With the dream of owning a home one day and living the ‘American dream’. Only later, did we realise it was all an illusion. That it is actually the American nightmare, as most of us are unable to afford a house and struggle to pay the monthly bills.
In this age of social media and online presence, children and adults get a somewhat unrealistic view of life as well. The many social ‘influencers’ showing off their lives and portraying the illusion that everything is ‘perfect’, does more harm than good for all of us. The perfectly dressed influencers making perfect meals in their spotless kitchens with their perfect spouse and well-behaved children at their side. Others show off their immaculate homes, always decorated perfectly for every season. We find ourselves depressed that our lives are not the way everyone else’s is. That we have somehow failed to achieve this dream of a perfect life. It’s no wonder that many of us today struggle with depression and anxiety, later becoming dependent on drugs to get by.
Life is not perfect. It comes with many struggles and challenges. We wake up to go to school to learn useless facts that we will never use in real life. Then we graduate high school and get told that we need to go to college for a better opportunity in life. In the US, that means getting into much debt for those college years for which we end up paying for years to come once we start to work. After all of those college years, we are then thrust into an unknown world where we struggle to find a job.
The cycle continues into adulthood as we drag ourselves out of bed and to a job with which we are not satisfied. It’s not our dream job, but we simply need to pay the bills. And so, we wait for that glorious day when the paycheck hits our bank account, only to see it disappear into the abyss of bills. The never-ending black hole of debt we manage to get ourselves into just in order to survive.
Unless you somehow have managed to inherit money or come from a wealthy family, you will continue this cycle until your death. You will have to work until you no longer can work, only to retire to a system which doesn’t care to support you. You wait all of your life to retire so you can travel, only to be too tired to do so. Or you die before you retire, as was the case with my father when he died at the age of 59. So, yes, I can see why school and life seem pretty pointless.
Some people outside of the United States believe this is the ‘Land of Freedom’. A place of endless opportunities. For the wealthy, that might be the case. For the rest of us, it is more of a minimum-security prison that we live day in and day out. When we do manage to leave our homes, it’s for work or to spend hours buying food and supplies for our families. It’s rarely to spend time with our families in nature, or to simply walk to the nearby food shop. There is no such thing in most places in the US. We rely heavily on having to drive everywhere, as we do not have an advanced public transportation system as Europe and the other places outside the US.
But what can we do? Perhaps we need to return to an age without social media. Where we stop showing off our ‘perfect’ lives to the generation of tomorrow. Perhaps we can look into ways to adapt a more meaningful learning environment as many schools in Europe. Maybe then this might eventually lead at least some of today’s youth to see that there might be a point to all of this. That there might be hope for a better tomorrow. Or perhaps, we simply make the move to a land where there is a higher quality of life.
