6.8.26 - Bar Prep Day 1: What Is Real Will Prosper
The last couple of months of law school were acutely stressful due to a combination of family matters and overextension between school and work. But I wouldn't necessarily characterize my feeling as "burn out" at the end. All I know is that, after it was all over, I rested a lot, played a lot with friends, did a lot of my hobbies (like film photography), and I would feel refreshed. Then I would pick some day and say, okay, "today I will start Bar Prep" and then just not do it.
One account of this is classic procrastination and laziness, which I do sometimes. But I'm also a pretty hard worker and I can be self-directed in most circumstances--and it was my full intention to start Bar Prep earlier so I could have a more relaxed July where I have several social engagements and a move planned. As one of my classmates have put it, I'm also one of those law students who weirdly enjoys studying the law, so it's not like sitting down for Bar Prep will be super unpleasurable.
So I was wondering why I was putting it off--the gulf between my intentions and actions are wide enough here that I couldn't fully understand it.
I talked to one of the few people in law school I count as a friend about it (and one of the few in my institution I count as a "smart" person) and I learned something about my own feelings and motivations from my emotional response. He told me he's not worrying about a job right now, is planning to travel Europe after graduation, and is not taking the bar until the february cycle.
There is a large part of me that puts a very high value on speed and grit, and I have a deep respect for explosive youthful energy, so the emotion I expected was a bit of repulsion. I'm the kind of guy that if my roommate says he's too tired to go the gym (even though he's injured and stronger than me) I call him a fucking pussy. But I did not feel that way. And there's a few people around me on a similar wave to my classmate, mostly young men.
Two of my very close childhood friends have been unemployed for some time after mass layoffs (they worked in BigTech/BigTech adjacent firms) and I was a bit taken aback by the lack of urgency on the part of at least one of them in finding a job. He's sort of just been milling about, doing his little art projects and playing with Claude Code (as I have), enjoying time with friends and helping out family with house stuff. As an unsolicited advice giver to my friends, I would usually tell him to get it together and start looking for work--we're young, life is short, gotta chase your purpose, gotta move up in the world, and so on and so on. But similar to my law school classmate, my general feeling towards his situation has been something other than second-hand anxiety or revulsion. There's a tinge of jealousy and a begrudging respect for both him and my law school classmate.
Since around Sophomore Year of undergrad I've been on a "go go go" mentality. I would like to think a lot of this was motivated by grit/determination but the truth is a good deal was motivated by anxiety about being left behind.
See, in high school and especially in the rest of my early schooling, this sense of anxiety was not present, and I had a deep sense of contempt for people who had it. I was just having a good time, I did things I was interested in, I never did my homework, I never took a deadline seriously. I could not be fucking bothered. I just wasn't worried and I had an immense self-confidence that if I pursued my interests (however fickle they may have been) and cutlivated real excelence things would be alright. I guess, I had a faith that something like a true meritocracy--separate from the signalling war that my classmates were engaged in (oh No I have to do this extracurricular and i have to take these APs and I have to become an Eagle Scout)--undergirded American society. "What Is Real Will Prosper" is something my friends used to say (something that a great man, XXXTentacion, who never did anything wrong, tweeted once).
Then, when I entered a somewhat mediocre state school, and saw people I genuinely looked down on get amazing opportunities at top institutions, and when my own interests became more academic (I started liking the idea of academic research), I got a deep sense of anxiety that I had cheated myself out of opportunities and gave up space to fucking tards who didn't deserve them. My best friend (who was a temperamentally similar second-gen) who went to my undergrad would lament on how we were stuck at [state school] while the kids with tiger moms went to [public ivy]. Both of us had sincere academic interests that would be served by going to [public ivy], with its network and faculty, that our high school peers didn't really care about--all they wanted was a job as a banker or management consultant or a software developer or something (and that's what they ended up doing). And the worst part of it is that these people were genuinely stupid, they just dumped more hours of their young lives on nonsense like SAT prep because they were afraid of their parents, and it worked! ("Stupid N***** getting money Forrest Gump Right Now" - Kanye West, All Day)
So those years were characterized by a need to claw out by any means possible, and a deep sense of urgency fueled by resent.
That same friend and I, by all intents and purposes, in our efforts, did claw our way out--temporarily. He landed at an evil Big Tech company for a few of years. I got into a good law school after a pretty good gig in lobbying/communications after undergrad, and then I landed a Summer Associate gig at a trul evil Big Law firm. But fast forward to now, I was no-offered and he's been laid off.
One thing we both realized is that we fucking hate the "tops" of our industries. We hated the people in it. We didn't fit in. And we didn't belong there. We had just as much contempt for it as we did for the kids in high school who aimed for these things earlier than we did. And it was odd that somehow, in our anxiety, we ended up in the same spots as the people we hated with extra steps.
But maybe it was all just to show that we COULD, to prove something to ourselves, that we weren't just filtered out because of a lack of ability or that we were permanently walled out. For my friend, I know a little bit of had to do with money, since he grew up poorer than I did--but he admits he didn't need as much as he would've been on track to make for Evil Big Tech company. Really, he just couldn't deal with the idea of people dumber than him making that when he oculd be.
But maybe, having proved that to ourselves that we could do the things that that he people we hated could, we once again just do not give a fuck anymore. We touched the tops and realized it was as fake and gay as we thought it was when we were kids. Now we're free to care about other things.
Maybe this explains why--when I see my other unemployed friend just milling about, or my law school classmate who's just going to fuck around for half a year, I just feel a sense of respect. Maybe its why I could not be fucking bothered to prepare for the bar until now.
I had "motivation" when I finally succumbed to an incentive system and a status game that I once abhorred. I didn't have it before I succumbed to it. The purest version of me, the high school version of me, could not give a fuck, and did not have the motivation to do what he was supposed to.
After the very brief Big Law stint, I don't have it anymore either. All that's left is pure contempt for the system and who runs it, for the sham meritocracy that our society has built up. And it looks like, with this whole "populist" sentiment of the era, a lot of people have come to agree. I do not want to win a game I don't want to play. I want to take a step out, slow down, see the game board from a bird's eye view, and start strategizing with my temparamental/political/cultural allies--who I suspect are also non-participants in the game--on how we can wipe the whole fucking thing clean and build our own game board.
Step one of wining the war against the gameboard masters is to stop playing by their rules. That may look like chronic unemployment, fucking off to Europe for some time, or gambling with your career by just saying and doing whatever you want. Step One is just not being a slave and not letting someone else define "winning"--and that might mean letting yourself lose, in a nominal sense.
See, the gameboard as it exists has a "points" system that's supposed to reflect some values we're competing on. Things that we all care about. Humans are bound to compete. We all want to be strong, funny, smart, talented, get the baddest bitch, etc., and in theory, the points of hte gameboard reflect that. Society more or less works when the point system is connected to these things. Strong people should be rewarded with strong points, smart people with smart points, hot people with hot points--but also the point system should account for things like luck, randomness, and paradoxically have some dimension that e recognition that we are all of equal worth and dignity. It's a difficult balance to strike, but I think we have a sense of what it would be like. Right now the point system force equality on dimensions where there should be none, flattening out natural areas of competition, while perversely imposing hierarchy where there should be equality. I can articulate this in another post. But the movie the Incredibles more or less gets this critique and if you get what that movie is all about you get what I'm saying.
We all want a system that reconciles our need for deep equality while also respecting the ways that we are each distinct and excellent as individuals. The Incredibles shouldn't be better and lording over ordinary people--but Dash should be recognized as the fastest runner. That's fairness. I think the system as it exists services neither effectively, which is what is giving way to optimization culture. We are chasing fake points because we can't get the real ones.
I had a macroeconomics professor who would hammer down the distinction between "nominals" and "reals." He was talking about price levels, versus real economic output, mainly. Nominals are merely signals about reals. Inflation, for instance, works to reduce unemployment, only because it sends a slightly faulty signal about rising demand. The Professor, who was more neoclassical and thought Keynes was retarded, kept saying that yes, this works, but it just can't hold forever. People adapt. Nominals cannot affect reals forever, eventually, if the nominals are to mean anything meaningful, causality must reverse--reals have to affect nominals.
In other words, the world cannot reward people for being fake, gay, stupid, status climbers of a broken meritocracy forever. In the end, as the great artist XXXTentacion said, "What is Real Will Prosper."
Sincerely,
knxnts