publish "Student Dysphoria, and a Previous Life's War"

This isn't my best work, but sometimes, you have to shove something
out the door.

diff --git a/content/drafts/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war.md b/content/2022/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war.md
similarity index 94%
rename from content/drafts/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war.md
rename to content/2022/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war.md
index d2c64b6..6bc2fc3 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war.md
+++ b/content/2022/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war.md
@@ -1,8 +1,7 @@
 Title: Student Dysphoria, and a Previous Life's War
-Date: 2021-12-30 05:00
+Date: 2022-04-16 18:45
 Category: commentary
 Tags: anecdotal, schooling
-Status: draft
 
 There was a brief, beautiful moment from 2014, the first year of my life (that I feel comfortable admitting to), until mid-2016—a year-and-a-half long moment when I _didn't_ have to fight a desperate and obviously hopeless [ideological war](/2020/Feb/if-in-some-smothering-dreams-you-too-could-pace/) of survival against a Society that's _trying to kill me_.
 
@@ -26,7 +25,7 @@ But making $9.40 an hour at the supermarket indefinitely (and paying a nominal r
 
 Somehow, this seemed more of a daunting problem than learning linear algebra. To make a dumb story short (I tried [career college](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heald_College) briefly on the theory that they could _just_ teach me job-stuff without them fraudulently claiming credit for my education, then found that horrible and traumatizing for the same reasons as regular school and quit, then thought I could study for the same [certifications](https://www.comptia.org/certifications/which-certification) on my own, then took a differential equations class at community college just for fun and to prove that my math self-study measured up to standards—and did poorly, leaving me devastated and feeling obligated to finish my degree after all in order to prove that I could), I eventually ended up back in college again, at community college, and then San Francisco State, my father not willing to pay for me to go back to the University in Santa Cruz again.
 
-Now that I had a higher form of existence to contrast it with, going back to school was _awful_. I hated the social role of "student" and the whole diseased culture of institutional servitude. I despised the way everyone, including and especially the other "students", talked about their lives and the world in terms of classes and teachers and degrees and grades, rather than talking about the _subject matter_. I wanted it to be _normal_ for boasts of acheivement to take the form of "I proved this theorem and thereby attained _deep insight into the true structure of mathematical reality_", rather than "I got an 'A' on the test."
+Now that I had a higher form of existence to contrast it with, going back to school was _awful_. I hated the social role of "student" and the whole diseased culture of institutional servitude. I despised the way everyone, including and especially the other "students", talked about their lives and the world in terms of classes and teachers and degrees and grades, rather than talking about the _subject matter_. I wanted it to be _normal_ for boasts of achievement to take the form of "I proved this theorem and thereby attained _deep insight into the true structure of mathematical reality_", rather than "I got an 'A' on the test."
 
 (Where, sure, it makes sense to take a test occasionally in order to verify that one isn't self-deceiving about the depth of one's insight into the true structure of mathematical reality, or in order to provide some amount of third-party-legible _evidence about_ the depth of one's insight into the true structure of mathematical reality—but the test score itself isn't the _point_.)
 
@@ -40,8 +39,8 @@ But that was just my good fortune. There are others who weren't so lucky, who ar
 
 We could imagine someone sympathetic to my plight in school deciding that my problem was a psychological condition called "student dysphoria"—discomfort with one's assigned social role of student. We could imagine a whole political movement to help sufferers of student dysphoria by _renaming_ everything: instead of a "student", I could be a "research associate", instead of taking "classes", I could attend "research seminars"—all while the _substance_ of my daily working conditions and social expectations remained the same.
 
-I don't think this would be helping me. When I was angry about being in school, it wasn't because of _the word_ "student"—it was because I wanted more autonomy and I wanted more respect for my intellectual initiative. Changing the words without granting me the autonomy and respect I craved wouldn't be solving my _actual_ problem. It would probably make things _worse_ by sabotaging the concepts and language I needed to _articulate_ what my problem was. My pain and suffering was no less _real_ for being ["merely" game-theoretic (looking to the reactions of others)](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/), rather than some intrinsic organic condition to be accomodated.
+I don't think this would be helping me. When I was angry about being in school, it wasn't because of _the word_ "student"—it was because I wanted more autonomy and I wanted more respect for my intellectual initiative. Changing the words without granting me the autonomy and respect I craved wouldn't be solving my _actual_ problem. It would probably make things _worse_ by sabotaging the concepts and language I needed to _articulate_ what my problem was. My pain and suffering was no less _real_ for being ["merely" game-theoretic (looking to the reactions of others)](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/), rather than some intrinsic organic condition to be accommodated.
 
 Likewise, being a "student" would have been fine in a world where students got more autonomy—a world where there was a collective understanding that courses are a supplement or pragmatically useful guidepost to one's studies, rather than course grades being _the whole thing_. I'm happy to learn from the masters: that's what textbooks _are_. I wasn't _delusional_ about doing particularly novel original research; I just wanted recognition for the real intellectual work I _was_ doing under my own power.
 
-Asking whether student dysphoria is a real or fake condition would be the wrong question. The pain of not being seen by Society the way you want to be seen is unquestionably real—but _because_ it's real, it can only be sustainably abated by addressing its real causes.
+Asking whether student dysphoria is a real or fake condition would be the wrong question. The pain of not being seen by Society the way you want to be seen is unquestionably real—but _because_ it's real, it can only be addressed by addressing its real causes: the mismatches between how I see my self, how Society sees me, and what I actually am. If I think Society has me all wrong, I might engage in a desperate and obviously hopeless ideological war to prove it—but to _actually_ prove it, not to coerce Society into humoring me. If Society isn't buying my vision, that terrible reality is something I need to track.