Sunday night after work while driving to my parents house for dinner I was in such a happy mood, probably mostly because I've about finished up another degree and will start a new job soon. (And will have more free time, less drudgery, more money). I'm driving to their house for dinner for mother's day and thinking I wanted to say a 'prayer' of thanks to the great sky fairy before eating, basically for the fact that here we all are still alive, having survived all these years with plenty of food and shelter. And that's about it. Happiness at mere survival.

I could spend a lot of my time like that. Jump in all the way to the mere survival game and believe it a good thing to enjoy whether I win or lose. But I really like to keep that sort of thing to a minimum. I prefer to think hard and be less happy.

This college program I've just finished up was quite annoying. Their goal is to pass a high percentage of people and then have a high percentage of those passed people manage to pass the RN exam to become certified nurses. So what they do is try to have the majority of people just barely passing for two years to keep them studying hard. They make sure a few people do fail. No matter what a few people have to fail to have that as a threat for all to keep studying hard.

A nice example is this very last test here, they don't want to fail anyone at the last moment, so they make the very last test a group test. We knew this because they just did it two months ago with the other section and two months previous with the section before... But they don't tell us this, they lie and say otherwise because they think we'll otherwise not study.

Instead of reason they've used force (fear, threats). The same as capitalism does in general. I remember in the military, where they don't fire people, they instead just scream and yell and constantly threaten to put people in jail for anything. It is annoying that this is how our society works. Force truimphs over reason the vast majority of time. Is it possible we could live on some other basis than merely surviving with such threats as being homeless, starving or in jail looming over us?

And of this degree, feh, I could learn everything I need to know and have passed the RN exam on my own with 3 months of study. Instead I've largely wasted yet another two years while constantly having the chop chop on my tail.

And this degree is one of the more practical and useful. My previous engineering degrees were far worse. And let's not even think about the public school system that came before. What a collossal waste of time. I could have just read William Golding's Lord of the Flies. (Well, OK, there's nothing like experiencing it first hand.)

And it all adds up to a ton of my life wasted. Flaming hoops for what? Mere survival. I'm arrogant enough to think I could have been doing something more useful than just surviving.

But now finally, hopefully, something more than merely surviving can soon begin. Now that my life is probably about halfway over.

(Not that anything other than merely surviving really exists.)