Why We Write (Part 2)

Why am I here? What does college mean to me? I know it’s supposed to educate me more, I know it’s necessary for me to get a high-paying job in the future, I know it’s something my parents want me to do. But why? It wasn’t always like that. A long time ago (not really that long ago), it wasn’t necessary to go to college, but rather most people didn’t have more than a high school education. They worked in businesses and ran companies and shops without the higher education that is so standard today. So why is there so much pressure on teenagers now to go to college, rather than a vocational school or apprenticeship or carry on the family business? What has changed so drastically in the last hundred or so years? What makes higher education not only necessary, but even the standard? Will this perpetuate in the future? Will everybody be expected to go to graduate schools, and obtain Masters and Doctorates before they can get a decent job? Or will the cycle reverse itself, and higher education will become something elitist, only for the children of the rich?

I can’t say that much historically, since I really don’t know that much about all of this. Unless I’m mistaken, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the percentage of working Americans with a college degree was significantly lower than it is today (maybe under 50%). Sometime in the course of the century, probably after the Great Depression and WWII, or maybe during Korea and Vietnam, when the draftees could get deferment by enrolling in college, higher education became more and more standard. Anyway, something changed. Standards were raised and more people began applying and going to college. Was it the same then as it is now? Was it as expected as it is now? College seems to be the new high school--just as obligatory as high school is after middle school. So what happened? Quite honestly I have no idea.

So what makes a college education necessary in modern society? I know that high school just got that much worse, and now we’re learning all the stuff they used to learn in high school in college. I’m also pretty sure that there haven’t been so many new discoveries in the last century that it requires another four years to learn them (and just the ones pertinent to your major). I don’t think that jobs or economics have changed so drastically that it requires an entirely new skills set to execute them to a satisfactory degree. Let’s see what I think about college, from my brief experiences at the prestigious university I fondly call Stanford.

College is the transition between childhood and adulthood. It’s about learning new things, not necessarily academic, and not necessarily that important, but things one should know. It’s like learning the ropes of living on your own, separated from parents, more responsible than ever before for your own choices, actions, and their results. It’s not the real world, but it’s not the mother’s nest you knew and loved for the eighteen-ish years prior. You meet new people, you learn new things, and you go about the metamorphosis from caterpillar to a functioning part of society. In our oh-so-dangerous world, it has become a necessary step to be a functioning individual, educated in the ways things work and how to go about your daily business without encountering any major pitfalls or committing any major errors. That’s totally not true, but I’m going to go with that until I come up with a better explanation for the phenomena we call higher education.

On Dorm Living

Dormitories are awesome. It’s like an apartment, but with you live with a bunch your friends and everybody’s pretty chill. And you don’t have to cook, which is kind of nice sometimes but also a major pain in the ass when the food is lousy. Also the rooms are kind of small and you have to share a bathroom with hella other people. So maybe what I want is to live in an apartment complex with a bunch of other friends where I can go somewhere and there’ll be food already made. Paying for all of this becomes an issue, but it’s okay because right now my parents are paying for it and they think it’s valuable for me. Anyway I’m generally enjoying it.

On Writing This

So I’m trying to figure out what I’m writing about. I had some decent thoughts about college educations, I think, but I’ve kind of left that path and am now wandering aimlessly through the musings of my nineteen year old brain. Where is this leading me? I’m looking for something that I can write a significant amount, but it has to be focused on a relatively narrow aspect of it. Ideally it’s going to be something I’m really interested in and passionate about, and something that’s fun to research, or if it’s not fun, at least easy to research.

The thought that just popped into my head would be my writing process as an example of the epic journey. It sounds pretty cheesy, and I must admit, I don’t think it would fly, but I feel like I could probably get a reasonable amount of work done on it. Passing over the threshold and overcoming obstacles seems pretty typical of my writing process. On epic journeys, I feel like there could be a strong argument made for the Pokémon games as an epic journey. Ash has somewhat comparable experiences to Odysseus, faced with hardships and such.

What am I writing about? Just for me to write it, it has to be not a totally dry subject. I’m not going to write about body image or the political ramifications of homosexuality or something that has been thoroughly explored. I want something cool. Something fun. Something that isn’t what you expect. I want to write about something that doesn’t strike you (or me) as something academic. It should come off as almost spontaneous, but incorporate academic research to help its case. That part sucks. I could totally write about why research sucks, or why PWR is a stupid idea, but it would not work. Any argument I would come up with that would be super subjective, and thus be invalid. I could write about writing, but what aspect of that is hard for me to come up with. There’s just so much to write about. Damn.

On Writing on Writing

How does one come up with something to write about writing? There are so many aspects. I had the entire argument on why we write. I like that. But how do I make fifteen pages out of it? And what do you research? I could write about argumentative writing as a form of creative writing, and structuring an argument as another form of fiction. I could write about fiction as argumentative writing, arguing for the validity of alternate realities, or moral lessons. I could write about something totally unrelated that I haven’t thought of yet. We’ll see what happens.

Why We Write

I’m writing this because right now I don’t know what else to write about. A lot of the time I write because I feel particularly inspired, other times I write because I don’t feel particularly inspired at all, and I just need to waste some time. Sometimes I only write because it needs to get done. But why do we really write? How can I answer this? Let’s explore.

People write because it’s a really good way to share ideas. With the information age, it is ridiculously easy to share information, over the internet, emailing, blogging, Facebooking, IMing or whatever else they may do. To a very large extent, it is all just more junk clogging the information highway, with my own blog posts included in that aggregation of inane musings of the empowered people. So maybe people write because they feel entitled to share their ideas. Maybe people think other people care about what they have to say. Are they right? Who knows. Not me, for sure, but I enjoy logging my thoughts for posterity, whether or not other people read them.

Fiction is not exactly what you find on the internet. It’s not to share the most recent restaurant that you tried or muse about the awesomeness we call carpeting, but something else, something less concrete. It’s about telling a story, whatever that may mean. Fiction is our alternative to reality. What we can’t have, but what we wish we had. If I was writing a fiction piece about my life, it would not include writing essays, but in a sense, this is an essay.

How do I justify what I write as not being argumentative when I have a pretty definite purpose? I guess I don’t see my writing as being constrained to the forms of typical academic writing. Papers that I read in the course of school and homework and research seem to be pretty dry. Most of the time they don’t have too much voice. They sound like they’re trying to educate you, to force you to see the point they want to make. I write, but without a very definite argument. I have a question, and I explore the journey towards the answer, but for myself, and if the reader catches on to my train of thought, they can join my journey towards some minor step closer to enlightenment (or perhaps become slightly stupider and more confused.)

Can I write something that explores a question with no real direction? I feel like I need a concrete place to jump off of, and that is what I lack as of now. What can I do to find a subject? I know I have to be writing about something that I am very much interested in to be able to conduct any sort of research without wanting to kill myself. Still, just finding that subject is very, very, very difficult. Why must I not be able to think of something that I can write a lot about? It needs to be a relatively simple subject, otherwise I will get lost in the depths of the wilderness that could otherwise be described as other ideas. Simple subjects that are interesting. Hummmmm I’m having problems already. I will come back to that.

Writing comes easily to me. I don’t have problems logging my thoughts, but only forming the thoughts in the first place. Somehow I have a command of the English language without having much of a sense for forming ideas with it. Kind of sucks sometimes. Now I just need to figure out what I want to write about. More later.