| HN Mirror

Check out The True Beleiver by Eric Hoffer or Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich for some explanations for this long observed effect.

Schooling trained myself and my best friends to expect to be able to use what we learned, even though there were no roles in society for us. We are national merit finalists, calculus users, programmers, 99th percentile GRE scorers... one friend is nearly homeless. Another bags groceries. The best off has a programming job only because his father was higher up in the company. I spray herbicides and pesticides and feed cattle and do whatever I am asked and more at our family veterinary clinic and on our family farm. I am extremely lucky. But I feel intensely guilty that I am not using anything I learned at university. No one owes me anything. But I sacrificed and suffered so much for academic success, debating championships, math team and programming victories, and it has never paid me back with a livelihood and now I am emotionally and energetically burnt out before ever landing an entry-level programming job. I can do all the Cracking the Coding Interview questions. I've never ran into anything in CS I couldn't understand. I'm just very emotionally fragile when it comes to interviews due to being on the autism spectrum and feeling so abjectified. If I had not been so successful in school I would not feel so terribly guilty about my failure at life. I would like a romantic relationship and a family. But I would feel guilty and to ashamed starting one without a career to provide for at least private schooling or more likely homeschooling for my kids. But I am unable to escape my social bankruptcy or move out of my parent's basement. Life seems to complicated and I feel so far behind in non-school skills I feel trapped. I feel I will never gain the prestige to feel desirable enough to make friends much less a wife. I come up with software ideas but I get so depressed at the likelihood of their failure that I feel guilty working on them (and yet guilty not working on them). Education causes higher expectations. Needing more people at university for social reasons has made them so easy that they no longer discipline people enough for success. More importantly, there simply aren't enough role slots people trained to expect those roles. Please give me counsel if you can. I want a mentor or someone to apprentice with so badly. My parents love me but they are very dysfunctional. They have no friends either. I had a genius uncle who got top marks in school, made all sorts of interesting gadgets, could solve a Rubik's cube in seconds... he ended up a derelict and I am so worried I will end up like him even though it might be a self-fulfilling fear... I think he is too. He wanted to see a game I made but I've never gotten one polished to the point I felt I could share it. My closest friends are all failing to launch, too, so I have no role models. And I am down to three people from undergrad that I can still talk to (through infrequent texting). I want to be able to spend real time with someone who has things figured out about a bit so that my mirror neurons might hurt me rather than harm me.