cogito ergo sum

A few days ago I went to my undergraduate college and looked up my thesis. It was the first time I'd ever seen it bound, and the first time since I graduated that I'd read or seen it.

You know what?

It was depressing. Depressing as hell on two counts, as illustrated below:

1) Entitled: What a Stupid Thesis! Or Why Most Undergrads Shouldn't Write Theses

The thesis itself always approximated the minimum standards of acceptable academic prowess. It wasn't that I blew off the project; on the contrary, I took it very seriously, and worked very hard on it. The writing and prose was polished, that much I can say about it. But, the thesis itself was an exercise in writing a very long, very dry paper that didn't say a lot about anything that hadn't already been said before. I agreed at the time that the "whole point" was merely for me to learn more about Kantian moral thought in a systematic, highly autodidactic way. I slogged through a lot of Kant. I slogged through even more commentary on Kant. I thought, and synthesized several academic approaches, and wound up with a 60 page thesis which has an excellent bibliography.

The odd thing is, I've thought a lot about Kant since graduating college, even on my shittiest day in nursing, I think about his ethical commonwealth, and his concept of the highest good, and what was really going on with all that "tension" and "unresolved contradictions" in his theories about the moral and theological nature of man.

I finally came to the conclusion that a lot of that "tension" in his works is still present in Western thought and culture, and is largely the result of the Scientific Revolution and rise of the modern historical collective conscience as we know it. Knowing it's electricity, not magic, that makes the lights turn on when you flip a switch can make it somewhat intellectually difficult to then believe the claim that virgins give birth to babies, and dead men rise after three days and ascend into heaven.

Kierkegaard got around this festering problem, as well as the problem of salvation based on a finite histoircal act (crucifixion and ressurection) with his "leap of faith" talk, which ironically, seems to make more sense to me than Kant's elaborate moral schemes mired in Cartesian duality and frustrated with its own fascination with science, objectivity and human freedom on one hand and traditional theological claims about faith and God on the other.

Of course, it took me five years of pondering this one, tiny thing in order to understand it, and I'm not so sure I didn't just finally understand why my teachers believed about Kant, as opposed to what Kant actually meant himself. In other words, I haven't thought of anything original.

I have often thought I have wasted my intellectual years of learning on, well... intellectual learning. I never felt I had anything orinigal or unique to say, much less write about. Now that I'm stuck in the messy moral quagmire of completely grown-up work, I have plenty to say, but little critical venue for my pathos.

2) Bye, bye Miss American Geekling

I miss being a student, and the validation of independent thinking in a liberal arts setting. In the real world, knowing the right answers often gets you nowhere, or backfires on you. Nobody may care you know what the right thing to do is, or how to do it. Instead of nuturing your intellect and offering constructive feedback, other grown ups in charge of you find ways mean, petty and countless ways belittle you, and suck the joy right out of your work.

After years of being encouraged to think on my own, working has come as a major culture shock, and many situations I encounter in the workplace feel like the equivalent of having to ask for a hallpass to take a piss, or getting mom and dad to sign a form explaining that I was really sick, not just sitting at home playing video games and eating icecream. The endless paperwork feels like those stupid handwriting exercises in which you had to copy the letter "W" over and over and over until your hand went numb.

And, they don't even make a fake effort, like they did in highschool, to corral the smart kids away from the stupid kids by giving the smart kids marginally more difficult courses in separate classrooms. In Work Hell, you're stuck with all those morons who spent their time being disruptive and lazy in the back of the classroom--only now, they spend their time being disruptive and lazy two cublicles down--or horror of horrors, "managing" you-- and no one, seemingly, can put them in detention or suspend them from coming to work for a day or two, so other people can get their work done in peace.

In conclusion: parts of school may have sucked, but work sucks more.