How to Make College More Tolerable

[Scope: Although this is about college, it really applies to school in general, and I’m sure it applies to work as well.]

So you’re in college, a place where people force you to do things.  How do you do the things you care about when you are being forced to do other things?  The most obvious answer to this is to drop out.  This is also the most effective answer.  But suppose you don’t want to drop out for some reason, or you can’t.  You don’t have to suppress yourself just because you’re in college.  You can still do the things you care about, it’s just a lot harder.

The two approaches to college

In most cases, you have some control over which things you are forced to do:  you can pick your classes.  You don’t have much control, because you are not going to find a class that forces you to do exactly what you care about, and you wouldn’t even know this ahead of time anyway.  There are two approaches in this situation.

Approach 1: Pick classes that align as closely as possible with what you care about.  Figure out how they fulfill the requirements as an afterthought.  You can even ask sympathetic professors and administrators to bend the requirements for you. Then do what you care about, and try to fit it into the requirements of these classes.

Approach 2: Fulfill the requirements with classes that are as non-demanding as possible.  Then do the absolute minimum for them and spend the bulk of your time on what you care about.

These approaches differ in how they distribute the bullshit.  In approach 1, everything you do has a dilute concentration of bullshit.  In approach 2, you take the bullshit in one concentrated dose.  They also differ in how you go about your assignments.  In approach 1, you try to ignore the dilute bullshit and do your assignments thoughtfully, as if they were something you were choosing to do.  In approach 2, you try to get them out of the way as fast as possible and you don’t make any effort to learn from them.

Although they seem opposite, both of these approaches are subversive.

Approach 1 flouts what is expected of students in school.  Regardless of what particular people in school say, the system of school does not expect students to do thoughtful projects that they care about; it is perfectly happy to reward students who simply follow directions and do what they are told.  In fact, the system cares so much about students following directions that it often penalizes students following approach 1, who deviate from the directions in order to do something more important to them.

Approach 2 also flouts expectations.  Even though success in school is determined by requirements, grades, and exams, the students are still expected to uphold the pretense that school is about education.  Students following approach 2 disregard this pretense by working directly towards satisfying their requirements, rather than working towards learning the material and hoping the requirements will accurately reflect their prowess.

In short, approach 1 flouts the actual expectation and approach 2 flouts the pretended expectation.  School would have students in the No Man’s Land between the approaches, where they chase grades and requirements while convincing themselves that what they are doing is actually learning.  This is a toxic land to be in, but it is perfect training for work, where you again chase requirements and ratings while convincing yourself that you are “contributing to society” (see this video).  This is exactly where you don’t want to be if you are trying to make school tolerable, and do the things you care about in spite of being there.  Hence…

Whatever you do, DO NOT MIX UP THESE APPROACHES.

Decide once and for all whether you are using approach 1 or approach 2.  If you mix them up, you will start to become confused between what you care about and what you are being forced to do.  You will start caring about bullshit and getting things you care about done as fast as possible.  Don’t mix them up.  If you are going to do something, either do it well and don’t waste your time, or do it fast and waste as little of your time as possible.

A good way to not mix up these two approaches is to just choose one and use it for everything.  However, this may be impractical if certain classes or assignments are more suited to one approach than the other.  If you do the other extreme and choose between the approaches on an assignment-by-assignment basis, it may be difficult to keep them apart.  So you need to find a balance.  Just make sure that the approach you are using at a given time is clearly defined.  There should never be any ambiguity.

The difficulty of approach 1 is to remind yourself that you do indeed care about what you are doing, and to do it authentically, without taking shortcuts just to fulfill requirements.  In other words, the difficulty of approach 1 is to avoid falling into approach 2.

The difficulty of approach 2 is to remind yourself that you are just doing it for the grade, and to not get duped into thinking that it has any meaning.  In other words, the difficulty of approach 2 is to avoid falling into approach 1.

Note: Another commonality between these two approaches is that they both prioritize things that are actually important over grades.

Always Put Yourself First

If done correctly, both of the above approaches let you do what you really care about.  If you start prioritizing school requirements over what is really important to you, you know something is wrong.  School has gotten to you, and it has started to affect your priorities.

If there’s something important to you that you feel inspired to do, but you have schoolwork to do, do the important thing instead, or at least first!  Your schoolwork will always be there, but your inspiration won’t.  You are more important than school, and you don’t need to feel guilty for putting yourself first.

Also, if studying for a test is really stressing you out, instead of procrastinating for hours, simply choose that you’re not going to study for it until the hour before.  Odds are you wouldn’t have done any better on the test if you had been studying a lot, and you will save yourself a lot of mental anguish.

Eliminate Guilt

School-related guilt is pervasive in the minds of people in school.  The guilt that we’re not working hard enough for school, we are procrastinating too much, we are really behind in classes, we’re missing homework, we’re missing class, etc.  You can’t relax, because when you do, you feel guilty that you are not doing work.  You can’t do work either without getting repeatedly interrupted by distracting thoughts about work for other classes you’re not doing right now, and wow you’re so behind in those classes what are you doing not working on them.  You certainly can’t do things you care about, because it feels SO irresponsible to put that much energy into a non-school thing when you have so many school things that need to get done.

The way to counter school-related guilt is to decide ahead of time what work you are going to do and which classes you are going to attend, and set reasonable expectations for yourself.  On Sunday, before the week starts, write down all the homework you have to do, including late homework.  Make a plan for which homework you are going to do, and which day.  You don’t have to catch up completely in classes you are behind in.  You don’t have to do everything you are assigned.  You don’t even have to attend every lecture.  Pick just a few school-related things you are going to do each day, and give yourself room to work on things that are not related to school.

This works because you won’t feel guilty for not doing a homework that you never intended to do, or missing a class that you planned to miss.  You will probably end up doing what you were doing anyway, but with more control and less guilt.

Even at times of heaviest workload, the schoolwork allotted for a given day should be beneath your capacity.  You need some time every day to do things that are not related to school, and if you don’t schedule such time it will happen by accident in the form of procrastination, and not be as rewarding.

Take a “Sabbath” from School

School has an insidious tendency to bleed out of the time allotted for it and permeate your entire life.  Even when you are not doing schoolwork, you are probably still feeling like you should be doing it.  The way to counter this is to precisely define school’s allotment, and not permit it to go outside this allotment.  In other words, decide which times you are allowed to do homework and which times you are not.

One such policy is to take a “Sabbath” from homework.  Decide that, say, on Fridays, you are not allowed to do homework, or anything directly related to schoolwork.  You might not have done homework on a Friday anyway, but now that you are not allowed to, it’s not your fault anymore.  Even if you wanted to do homework, you couldn’t.  In other words, you get to do the same thing you might have done anyway, except without guilt.

This doesn’t have to be weekly.  You could decide that you are not allowed to do homework before midnight, or perhaps anytime during the weekend.  You could even decide that there is only one day per week that you are PERMITTED to do homework.  Just figure out a rule, and make it precise.

Why School is Still Intolerable For Me

First of all, I haven’t mastered the above techniques.  I mix up approaches 1 and 2, I miss classes by accident and feel guilty, etc.  Second of all, the above techniques can only make school more tolerable, they can’t actually make it tolerable.  School is inherently intolerable, just as is any authoritarian system.  I only have so much time in my life, and school steals it.  Not just the time that I’m in class, not just the time that I’m doing homework, but all my time.  This is one the one hand because of the guilt feelings I already mentioned, which prevent me from doing non-schoolwork when I have schoolwork to do (which is always).  On the other hand, this is because any big projects I might try to do in my free time get interrupted by school, so I refrain from even starting them.  Hopefully there’s a way to get around this latter problem, because even though I may be ending school soon, the problem will recur in other forms later in my life.  More on these points in later posts.