Overworked and Underpaid
Our society has managed to find itself jammed in a monumental paper shredder. We have found ourselves within all of the other scraps of”good ideas gone bad”. Our system is swirling down a toilet that never seems to flush. We are trapped in a repetitive cycle of hate, work, and more hate. We all start school at a young age, maybe to give our over worked parents a more than deserved break.
We then spend a minimum of thirteen years of our life in school, depending on if you choose to go to college or not. School is preparation for work, not life, but work. We sit in neat rows, similar to labor or factory workers. We show up at the same time everyday, leave at the same time everyday, and are scolded for truancies. We get a short break for lunch and then we are required to return to our work. After six hours of school, we are unlucky enough to have teaches who assign hours of homework and fail to realize we have other classes, with other teachers, who also assign additional hours of homework.
Here, socializing is discouraged and a difference of opinion is punished. Teachers then have the audacity to inform us that children in other countries aren’t fortunate enough to have education. And i agree. Education is a beautiful thing and should be embarrassed, yet our current system is doing it wrong. We are fed information and we try to pack it into our busy skulls until a test is due. Only then, are we able to release the compact words and quickly vomit them onto our paper, before the information rolls off the desk and is lost forever.
We don’t learn for the love of education. Our only motivation to learn a subject, is the hope of a good grade. A stupid letter that is able to define you as a person. A flimsy, frail letter that is able to determine where you stand in the future. GPAs, SAT scores, and class rankings are all just numbers that reconstitute a face- a personality. ultimately, at the end of these gray years, when you are finally able to graduate, you are greeted by the realization that you have apparently been preparing for this your whole life, yet you know nothing.
we are then shoved into some sort of occupation. our life is no longer an aspiration to reach the perfect career, it is choosing to settle in order to support ourselves. Life is a boundless battle to keep our heads above water. In the midst of school and work, it is now evident that we are never truly able to enjoy ourselves. We are thrown into school too young and we never have the extra time to be with our short-lived family.
We don’t have the time to travel. We never have time to enjoy the blissful ignorance of being a child. Being a naive child, oblivious to what the world truly is and, for some reason, trying much too hard to grow up. Growing up is a trap. The only jobs available don’t pay nearly enough to provide for basic necessities, considering the expenses of gas, endless bills, taxes, and food. A college education doesn’t get you very far anymore.
Even if you are aspiring to become a highly paid surgeon or lawyer, you’ll never get to enjoy your earnings because your money is constantly being given back to the providers of student loans. It is no longer uncommon for people to work on holidays, rather than tis’ing the season with their loved ones. Managers of large companies don’t have spouses or children because said people would only interfere with their work. With all work and no play, there is no time to even consider the fact that precious, nonrefundable minutes are withering away in an office cubical. Years from now when I am able to retire after seemingly endless decades of tests, projects, reports, work, and meetings, I will truly be able to rest. My mind will have the time to slow down and process my decisions over the course of a lifetime.
I will be a lonely, withered, overworked, elderly person with nothing but patchy gray hair, callused hands, and office supplies. I will have watched the entirety of my life crumble within my now nimble fingers. Aren’t I glad I spent years in school, college, and ultimately the work force? Aren’t I proud of all those weekends I stayed in the house to study? Or of all those hours I put in over time? Success would have been my only goal. Success would have been the reasoning for all of my actions. Yet I will have never found success, because in the whole time I thought I was getting closer to it, I would have failed to comprehend the meaning of the word. I have only pulled myself farther into the dark.
I would have worked myself to death. And all for what?
