With graduation around the corner (December), it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the read world. As a student, living in the world as opposed to being of the world was something I took a certain degree of pride in, evening wearing it on my sleeve. Yes, I have spent the last four years cultivating a taste for esoteric literary bullshit, but I make up for it with my pretentious airs and aversion for all things practical, namely, the labor market.
Nevertheless, this aversion has transformed into something more akin to desperate loathing with the added sensation of fear. While in school, despising the real world was a thoroughly enjoyable experience, for it allowed one to be both condescending and lazy, the psychological equivalent of being drunk and stoned. Condescending because we didn't have to work; lazy because we didn't want to. Graduation is going to mess this all up. I find myself at the crossroads of two closely related social ideologies. On the one hand, I have my beloved upper middle-class adolescent sense of entitlement, which has allowed me to accept indecently large sums of money from my parents with only the slightest twinges of white guilt occasionally pricking me in the back of my mind. On the other hand, graduation from university has essentially pulled this ideological rug out from under me. Now, as a more or less full-fledged member of society, I am being smacked in the face with a harsh American reality: the Judeo-Christian work ethic.
"It's what America was built on!" my father tells me. "Yeah," I reply. "If it wasn't for the white man's astounding work ethic, he probably wouldn't have profited as much from the 12 million slaves he brought over from Africa, huh?"
"Precisely!" was his response.
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