The Perils of Being A Smart Kid (Relationships of Command)
Written in a pressurized tube on a Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago
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Smart people run the world. They also have bizarre inferiority complexes and an unstoppable, not-so-hidden need to differentiate themselves from everyone around them by appearing better in some, if not all, ways. In a world of dumb people, smart people think they need to continually outrun everyone around them in order to continue existing.
That's just stupid. Who are you, and who do you become, if you only define yourself as better, smarter, or faster than average? If your life is defined by praise from those you choose to obey?
If you subscribe selectively but exclusively to externally manufactured qualifications for "achievement," you must fall between these extremes:
a)happy, successful, anesthetized, unconscious worker bee
b)miserable, hardworking, conscious individual, who needs to obtain some self-made goals FAST
Right at the midpoint of a and b is the person I call a hack, he or she who knows better but decides to plug away within the system. Ninety-plus percent of Americans may be hacks.
I can't see beyond point b yet.
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After a few uncomfortable-making encounters with some other 20-somethings, I felt a creeping sense that this issue of Achievement Beyond Boundaries was still silently affecting me. One friend spoke of being "addicted to achievement." Another wrote the following string of quotes in a much bigger, better quote that I don't want to replicate here:
Um, it sort of sounds like schooling has gotten in the way of our educations. We graft the praise structure we learned in elementary school onto the corporate framework and wait for someone to tell us that we're better than everyone else. Often, we work very hard and conspicuously towards gaining that specific reward. I now realize that this is incredibly immature. It negates or destroys one's critical and artistic abilities; it is fantastically dehumanizing.
Along the lines of dehumanization, blind ambition (inferiority complex) leaves the door wide open for exploitation. A manager who's spent a career hiring dozens of doe-eyed, self-enslaving, overeducated, underpaid, and mentally underdeveloped smart kids knows full well what she or he can inflict upon and expect from another falsely meek praise-seeker.
All this is to say that I am no longer satisfied with the praise system, though some may be. Praise addiction could be a generational thing (we are each a special snowflake), or it could simply be the mark of masochism.
You might be sick of struggling toward the carrot dangling in front of your eyes in search of praise for your struggling. I am. Let's stop being smart kids and become the intelligent, creative adults we deserve to be.
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Smart people run the world. They also have bizarre inferiority complexes and an unstoppable, not-so-hidden need to differentiate themselves from everyone around them by appearing better in some, if not all, ways. In a world of dumb people, smart people think they need to continually outrun everyone around them in order to continue existing.
That's just stupid. Who are you, and who do you become, if you only define yourself as better, smarter, or faster than average? If your life is defined by praise from those you choose to obey?
If you subscribe selectively but exclusively to externally manufactured qualifications for "achievement," you must fall between these extremes:
a)happy, successful, anesthetized, unconscious worker bee
b)miserable, hardworking, conscious individual, who needs to obtain some self-made goals FAST
Right at the midpoint of a and b is the person I call a hack, he or she who knows better but decides to plug away within the system. Ninety-plus percent of Americans may be hacks.
I can't see beyond point b yet.
--------------------------------------------
After a few uncomfortable-making encounters with some other 20-somethings, I felt a creeping sense that this issue of Achievement Beyond Boundaries was still silently affecting me. One friend spoke of being "addicted to achievement." Another wrote the following string of quotes in a much bigger, better quote that I don't want to replicate here:
"a real problem with needing not only acceptance but praise...not good enough for me to be pleased with the job I've done; I want others to recognize it too...unhealthy to put so much stock in what others think...has always underlined my work in school and in my job."
Um, it sort of sounds like schooling has gotten in the way of our educations. We graft the praise structure we learned in elementary school onto the corporate framework and wait for someone to tell us that we're better than everyone else. Often, we work very hard and conspicuously towards gaining that specific reward. I now realize that this is incredibly immature. It negates or destroys one's critical and artistic abilities; it is fantastically dehumanizing.
Along the lines of dehumanization, blind ambition (inferiority complex) leaves the door wide open for exploitation. A manager who's spent a career hiring dozens of doe-eyed, self-enslaving, overeducated, underpaid, and mentally underdeveloped smart kids knows full well what she or he can inflict upon and expect from another falsely meek praise-seeker.
All this is to say that I am no longer satisfied with the praise system, though some may be. Praise addiction could be a generational thing (we are each a special snowflake), or it could simply be the mark of masochism.
You might be sick of struggling toward the carrot dangling in front of your eyes in search of praise for your struggling. I am. Let's stop being smart kids and become the intelligent, creative adults we deserve to be.
Labels: nerve-hitting
posted by Rob at 4:54 PM
6 Comments:
We graft the praise structure we learned in elementary school onto the corporate framework
For my money, it's almost impossible to underestimate the extent to which schooling produces the kinds of individuals you're talking about. Your deadlines, your grades, your groupwork, the stark lines between the kinds of knowledge you acquire (science, math, language, leisure time)...kids are taught to be good little capitalists from age 5 to 22.
Me? I might persue the carrot, but it's the beating with the stick I really crave.
pat
I admire your capacity for dissonance, Pat. With you, the divisisons are clear (academic vs corporate), and you seem to hate each equally as you view one from within the other! I wish you would stop deleting your blogs.
Ha! I know all too well that academics are just people doing the corporate thing, but worse.
I like praise, who doesn't? But I prefer peer praise over authority. And in the outside world of work/school (vs. friends, family, and recreation) I've come to enjoy the Smirk of Self Knowledge of Achievement/Betterment over blind praise and grades.
It's kinda like Homer's I Am So Smart dance, s-m-r-t, but in my head.
And Pat, just call you blog something like Brittney4Eva.blogspot.com and leave out proper nouns. You should be safe from googlers who might be out to fire or sue you.
Hey Rob-- You know I am ever gunning for you to push yourself off that cliff. Take it from someone who's moving to Minneapolis to probably work at Whole Foods *by choice* and potentially enter acupuncture school. Just fucking DO IT already!
Don't you ever get sick of being in school?
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