A student’s life is stressful and in some ways a little humiliating.

Student (relative) poverty is excellent training for future consumers. The feelings of limitation, deprivation, and envy experienced during a four year university degree becomes the wellspring of dissatisfaction that will drive the consumer lust (and therefore, the career ambitions) of products of the middle class at least until they have their mid-life crisis and start wondering what all the fuss was about. By then, they will have completely forgotten what college life was really like, and instead will idolize that time of their lives as a time of no stress and no obligations and good friends and going to the bars or to house parties.

And what happens then? Why, they send their own kids to college, and the cycle begins anew.

But the truth is, it is impossible to get young people to understand how good they have it and how glad they should be not to have the problems of an adult yet. Young people are too busy dealing with the problems of young people to entertain the thought that they should be glad to have problems they can’t even relate to yet.

There is simply no way to transmit your nostalgia to the young. And if there was, you wouldn’t want to, because it would cripple them. When you are older, you are free to think the best times are in the past. But if young people thought that way, they would give up before they even begin. Why bother even trying when the best time to be alive happened before they were even born?

That’s why I distrust nostalgia, perhaps irrationally. But I can’t trust anything that makes people think thing were better than they actually were, and that encourages people to live their life looking backwards instead of embracing the here and now and steering themselves into a future that could be just as good as their imagined golden age if only they would let it.

But no…. they would rather be miserable in the present than let go of their imaginary sunshine paradise of a past that will never return. After all, if they admitted that the future could be as good as the past, then they would have to admit that they have wasted a lot of time revering the past. And after all, their nostalgia has given them so much comfort that it would feel like a betrayal to accept that anything could ever compete with it.

So people ignore the wonders of today, forget all the problems they had way back then or even if they were happy at the time or not, deny their own subjectivity, and go on believing that the time when they were innocent was actually a more innocent time.

Sorry, but no. All evidence points to life on Earth for humans getting better all the time. Maybe you were happier back then, but probably not. Even if you were, that had nothing to do with the nature of the world and everything to do with your ignorance of it.

Right now, in my own student life, I am a little frustrated. The amount of homework I am getting is minimal and none of it involves real writing. I am not sure what I expected of VFS, but it was not this. They keep telling us things will get far tougher later on, and I believe them. I only have to look at the lesson plan to know that.

But right now, it’s too much like Kwantlen. Listening to lectures passively. Doing very basic assignments. Wishing I was doing things. Wondering how much of this bullshit I can tolerate.

This week it will change, at least in theory. We begin workshopping in our workshop groups, and I am excited and nervous. Excited because it sounds like a lot more fun than lectures, and nervous because this will be group work. And not just group work, but creative group work, and I have never experienced anything like that before.

My creativity has always been my own thing. Something where I didn’t have to share, compromise, negotiate, count on others, or win. It was my personal playground, and I liked it that way.

Now I have to let all the other kiddies in my class play, and I will be playing in their playgrounds too, where everything will seem weird and wrong and crazy. I am in no way prepared for this. How could I be? I have been a self-sealed social isolate for such a long time. And like I always say, things grow strange in the dark.

So the next week is probably going to be quite the learning experience. I know I will have the urge to dominate my workshop group, and what the hell, it might even work. I have the skills to lead. I can keep things organized and running smoothly. I can convince people that I am smart and can make them go. And I am reasonably wise.

And honestly, I might be a lot more more comfortable that way. As much as I dislike being superior, in many ways, being in charge suits me. I can run things as I please, and thus use the megalomaniac’s way of coping with the Other : make it more like the Self. I can make sure things are done the “right” way. I don’t have to fight to be heard or struggle for position.

And I know that when I am king, I am a good king. I want everything to go well for everybody, and I want our collective enterprise to succeed. My desire for power is not inherent, but a result of a number of factors that makes me reluctantly accept that I need to stop trying to fight the tide and let myself become a leader.

But who knows. Perhaps my workshop group with have someone with stronger leadership skills than I, and they will be able to organize and coordinate better than I could, and I will be happy that way.

But if I feel like I can do better….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.