[Grustaf]

It helps your discipline to do things you don’t like, even if in some sense you are forced to. You are not strictly forced to do them of course because there is no law against slacking off in school, you just need to attend. And high school generally is not compulsory.

I don’t know where you are from, Korea perhaps? But when I was 16 I had oceans of time for mischief, parties and endless amounts of skateboarding and just slacking.

I’m not saying that people can’t change their lives, or that they have to be slaves. I am saying that school teaches people to sit down and concentrate and do something that’s maybe not very interesting and probably a bit difficult but has a reward waiting down the line in the form of good grades and graduation. Deferred gratification is the most important life skill of all.

And people can definitely change their lives, in most countries there is no outside force stopping you from doing almost anything, starting a company, begging, travelling or whatever. But most people are neither very interested nor capable of doing anything out of the ordinary. Most people just want to swim with the current. And that’s a very good thing because we couldn’t have society and civilisation if everyone was an iconoclast.