Exams are over!!!
One day I hope I dance this good.
Finally. A month full of exams, research plans, thesis agony… (are you asleep from reading that… hey, wake up!!) has finally culminated anticlimactically in a very tired blogger with a brain much like a minestrone soup swirling with random thought streams such as:
- “Why are we living like this?” Europe is having an ideological and an identity crisis. The French want to keep being French, the Germans to keep being Germans, we don’t want to be a United States of Europe if it means giving up our diverse history or our individuality and we are certainly rightly skeptical of handing over too much supranational freedom to an independent European government. We don’t want to end up federalised like America, with a homogenised ‘Europudding’ cultural identity, partly because you guys work too damn much and privilege corporate interests over the wellbeing of citizens, unlike us Europeans who try to strike a balance and favour quality of life in non-economic terms. We get 21 vacation days a year, paid, on top of public holidays. I think in America, it’s like 12? American society has a much more glaring divide between the haves and the have-nots.
Further, did you know that corporates practically own American universities and sponsor everything from their sporting events to their cafeterias, they sit on the boards of the top universities, and they have far too much of a say in the direction of education? The result is that your highest academic institutions are like mills churning out corporate drones saddled with massive student debt, obliged to slave away like dogs to pay it back to a system that privileges the very corporates that ‘sponsor’ these institutions. There’s a dramatic rise in business degrees, which discourage students from being critical of the corporate dominance of their society and a concurrent drop in liberal arts degrees, which at least encourage critical thinking for all their practical application, post-education. European universities? Well, the government contribute here, which means for your American Masters degree you might accumulate up to a crushing 50,000 dollars worth of student debt. I paid just over 500 Euros for my whole degree which is standard (though I think it’s now a few thousand in Ireland and it’s certainly higher in the U.K). And this is from a highly respected national university, not a technical or vocational college (nothing wrong with those either). Still think socialism is bad?
- A friend who works for a European organisation tells me they recently got an American intern on board. He felt really bad for the guy and kind of apologised because they only give a small allowance towards living expenses (like, 500 euros a month) and the guy was like “No, thank you – in America I would have to pay to get an internship”. Jaw on floor.
- We are being watched. From the moment we get up and log on to our smartphones, to when we buy things online and are filmed using the cash machine, CCTV, etc. You are being ‘surveilled’ at all times. This will get worse as our social and professional lives become more digitized, and legislation can’t keep up with technological progress in a way that protects your privacy. We are largely asleep about this because we benefit from all these technologies and services so we don’t challenge companies collecting our data and forming fixed opinions about our preferences (googled “horny goat dog fuck” for a laugh in 2005? Who’s to say future employers won’t be able to ‘profile’ this sort of information about you in time to come).
- Capitalism is still in charge. Power is inherently asymmetrical. There will always be a marginalised, excluded group in a capitalist system. Capitalism is not necessarily an evil monster, if it’s regulated properly – and people who declare emphatically that they’re anti-Capitalist are revealing their naiveté, because they have not learned that capitalism is an economic tool that relies on human agency. Possibly the only solution is to tie economic interest to sustainable policies. Make it worth industry’s while to care about a sustainable green economy, since they won’t otherwise unless there’s profit in it.
- Stuff and more stuff. We’ve become obsessed by consumption for the sake of consumption and resources will eventually run out. There are only so many polyester 20-euro blouses you can buy from Zara that you can actually reasonably wear. Our disposable consumption culture is accelerating this decline because it distracts us from asking where we are going with all this as a society. In the industrial era they were infected with the notion of ‘progress’, of improving the lives of poor people, of teleological-driven social change, and now we tend to just want the latest flat-screen and not care. But increasingly, the more we have, the less satisfied we are so we kind of screwed ourselves.
This is what they call education, folks.
And now to get my hair did, get my freakum dress on and go party like it’s 1989 – because back in 1989 all I cared about were episodes of Ghostbusters and whether my mother could be convinced to buy me some Ghostbusters jammies, and what I could do to sway her (mostly, whining): so now I have to make up for lost time.
