One of the easiest to overlook, but most harmful effects of school is the way it distorts our sense of time.
We are cordoned off into groups of people all within 12 months of our age and forced through exercises that never last longer than a 4 month semester. There are no long-term projects and there is no way to learn by observing people more than a year or two older than you are.
When you finish high school or college, you’ve been trained to think that anything longer than five months is long-term and you’ve been trained to associate only with people in the same life stage. As a result, you don’t have the courage and knowledge needed to invest your efforts into valuable long-term projects.
The thought of starting a job that you don’t love and working there a year seems not only like a waste of time (because you don’t have older peoples experience to reference), but it also seems unbearably long (because you’ve never done anything for a year in your life).
The only way out of the time warp is to resist the temptation to run from long-term commitments and to quit jobs after a couple of months and gain some life experience sticking with things for more than a school year. Eventually, your sense of time will recalibrate and you’ll move past the “semesters are long” perspective you’ve been trained into through school.
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