14: june 17th: grade culture
Author: Tommy Fawcett
Dear Larry,
I've been in my feels lately. I've had a lot of opportunity to think about things. I've mostly just come to the realization that there's greatness and authenticity in imperfection. And I know that that probably sounds shallow and recycled to you without context but to me it's carried so much depth and it's changed the way I live my life.
There's this whole paradox that comes with being a modern-day young person with a fucking brain. You know that education is important and you need to be grateful for it because there are 57 million kids in this world who can't go to school and your school shows you all these videos of African girls who smile at the camera while they carry Ernest Hemingway and say "Without Oprah I would have been sold into marriage by now" and it makes you so damn sad but not really because we're all just a bunch of self-loving cunts who pretend to have empathy when we literally masturbate at least eight times a week.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that everything is artifice. I feel so violated by this fantastic fucking education system. I feel like this beautiful world-changing poverty-eradicating thing has created and controlled me and taught me what to say and how to act and rates the important things in my life for me.
What I'm trying to say is, what if we just stopped fucking rating ourselves. What if we stopped comparing our marks with each other. There's something called 'grade culture' in schools and it's this crazy phenomenon where kids cry and cut themselves because they're 12% below average at being a robot and it's fucking everything up. And I'm so fucking tired of it.