I Am Conscious and I Am Hurting
&gt; “School is just like work,” they say.<p>&gt;(...)<p>&gt; No. If you don’t work, you lose your job, and you get no money. But you are never forced to work.<p>I think the guy who goes to work because otherwise we won&#x27;t be able to pay his bills, his children&#x27;s tuition, food, elderly parents rents, medicine etc. is much more &quot;forced&quot; to work than teenagers are forced to go to school.<p>Social and external obligations to actively participate in a 8 to 10 hour mental and physical activity that requires interaction to other people are much more severe than someone physically dragging you to a place where you can, pardon the simplification, sit down and space out whenever the subject has absolutely no interest to you and essentially &quot;fail forward&quot; until you get out on the other end.<p>I sympathize with the author and really don&#x27;t envy them. But school is not supposed to be this victimizing, even at its worst - author might very seriously be just mentally unwell and requiring treatment. The worst case scenario would be for them to leave school and find out that they are just as &#x27;unfit&#x27; for participating in most, if not all, of our world&#x27;s systems.<p>Again - huge oversimplification but typically the only options are to at least somewhat adapt to them or to die alone in the wilderness.