Knowing one's station in life

Teaching kids to see manual work as something less did so much damage to so many of us when growing up and choosing school in my generation. Here, every parent wanted their kid to study at "gymnasium" which is a school that is supposed to provide broad theoretical knowledge about many subjects and prepare them for further studies at university. Because it was prestigious, because in past it was far harder to get to a college if someone studied at a trade school and because most kids couldn't pick their future career path at 15 and because it was a sort of a promise that it will lead to a much better paid job of some sort, as opposed to the expectation of kids who finish a trade school to become the work force right after high school without a need for any further education (but also with low pay). That was the lie sold to me when I was 15: a trade school is a dead end, a gymnasium gives you time to decide what you want to do in your life. So I picked a gymnasium but it just meant 4 years of studying with nothing real in hands, unemployable and the college was the only option. While people from a trade school had basically both an option to get employed and go to a college because all that mattered was if you passed the entrance exam.

Anyway, knowing myself better now, I often feel like I would do better if I just learned some useful craft really well quite soon in my life and followed that path. I ended up with a master's degree in fine arts but what for? I saw too late that this kind of environment isn't for me, I don't entirely understand the values of people in it. It's too abstract, too subjective and too self-centered for me. As you said, none of that is real work. Now I mean the abstract and theoretical part of it, not real craftmanship. The older I am the less I value bloviating in flowery speech and more I appreciate when people are straight to the point. And the more I'm annoyed by people trying to present their opinions as facts, sell something that isn't really important as the most important thing in the world just because their livelihood depends on it because they have nothing else to offer or refuse to acquire a skill useful to broader public because they only want to do something that is fun to them. Again, I don't mean artists as creators of an art piece who rely on the will of general public to spend their money on their art, I mean the theorists, critics and people in the academic field, often paid by the state, who often try to push their subjective opinions as the universal truth and think we should accept it just because they used a bunch of foreign-sounding words and quoted some Renaissance painter in their publication. I mean, come on, this is not natural science where you have undeniable facts, where you mix two substances and everyone sees the reaction the same way.


And of course, this isn't just about abstract stuff and theory. This happens with skills too and it annoys me to no end when some company decides to redesign some app or website just because someone needs a job. If it works well, leave it alone. But no..IT teams and graphic designers need to be paid for something so why shouldn't they redo something already existing instead of trying to invent something new?

Sorry, this was long. 😅