Everyone wants the mistique of fatness or use the language of fatness to denote hotness without actually being fat or acknowledging that fat people or fatness can just be hot.

I don't understand the connection you're making?

The average citizen needs to instinctively approach complex information with the intent of understanding not only the information presented, but with active critical thinking required to determine if the platform presenting the information is reliable and trustworthy

If you read a story about a sad person in a room with blue curtains blocking out the sun, maybe it’s nothing. But if you come at it ACTIVELY SEARCHING for more, you may come away with a lesson

maybe the author was saying the sad person could move the curtains and is choosing not to, thereby saying that we as individuals have some control over our own happiness but are either unwilling or unable to exert our control, which could teach you about how feelings work or how to help others and yourself

maybe the author didn’t mean to say that, but it makes sense anyway, and you learn to view complex situations differently. You are literally building up the structures inside your brain that make you more analytical, more insightful, develop better and faster thinking skills

But if you’re never encouraged to even consider the possibility, if you take the curtains at face value and never challenge it, never consider the possibility of metaphor or symbolism, you DON’T grow those networks.

Without those skills and connections, you don’t learn to be inquisitive and make connections and you don’t learn how to seek out proof or fact-check yourself. You don’t learn how to recognize yourself when you’re wrong, or how to check if you’re right.

So you take everything at face value. Is Hamlet a reliable narrator? Who gives a shit. Is this sales rep pitching a legitimate product that will change countless lives for the better, or are they scamming me? Well, no way to find out, guess I have to listen to hem or the influencers they paid off or your random ass neighbor who says it’s a government listening device.

And the VERIFICATION part- finding evidence to support your theories!

Have you noticed how many people are buying into wild conspiracies now? That Antarctica is actually a giant wall of ice circling the earth, that the earth itself is flat, that vaccines cause autism and wifi is mind control?

Those are coming from people who either KNOW they’re lying for a profit, or from well-intentioned people who know how to be inquisitive and critical but never learned how to SEEK OUT AND EVALUATE RELIABLE DATA FROM RELIABLE SOURCES.

Being able to understand the message behind Catcher in the Rye might not benefit you in the short term, but it’s essentially a series of push-ups to strengthen your brain so you don’t take fucking horse dewormer to kill a virus cause the president told you to

The world is starting to see average citizens, most alarmingly in the USA, graduating and going into life without these skills, and younger generations not seeing anything wrong with that

Which is terrifying much in the same way as getting into the back of an Über and seeing the driver pull out his phone to Google “what is brakes” while going 110 on the freeway

I once wrote a 1500 word essay on something I'd forgotten to read in the 40 minutes before class. Including the time it took to read the thing I'd forgotten to read.

I got an A on that paper.

Writing is a skill. Skill is muscle. If you don't use a muscle, it atrophies. If you are a student and you are tempted to use genAI to cheese an assignment, I am begging you for your own sake to not do it.

This is not a moral stance about genAI (which is shit at what it's ostensibly for, and full of lies and evil, and fueled by art theft and burning rainforests, and there is no good reason to ever use it for anything; that's the moral reason for why you shouldn't use it), it is a purely pragmatic stance based on the fact that if you use it you will never learn the single most essential skill that is used in every single workplace.

You will never learn to bullshit.

And if you cannot bullshit, you will not understand when you are being fed bullshit by others.

For your own sake you must learn to do your own thinking, your own bullshitting, because our trashfire society runs on bullshit and for your own good you must become fluent in it, because very few people will bother to translate it for you. It was asinine in the late 90s, and it is asinine today, but it is the central truth of adult society: everything is bullshit, and you need to know what is going on beneath the bullshit, and you need to be able to bullshit back if necessary.

I know that the expectations being placed on you are ever-increasing, and I know that it does not seem rational to put effort into explaining the plot of a Charles Dickens novel to someone who has read the thing 50 times and will read 50 identical essays about it over the weekend. I know you are being handed ever-greater heaps of what is functionally mindless busywork because of an institutional obsession with metrics that don't actually measure learning in a useful way. High school was nightmarish in the 90s and I am fully aware that it has only gotten worse.

Nevertheless, you must try, if only for your own sake. Curiosity is your best hope, and dogged determination your best weapon. Learn, please, if only out of spite.

I was able to get an A on that paper because I was able to skim the reading, figure out what it was about, and bullshit for 1500 words in the space of 40 minutes.

Imagine what you can do if you learn to bullshit like I can bullshit.

For my senior year of AP English, I was assigned reading over Easter break. We were instructed to read The Old Man And The Sea, and save the rest of the short stories in the book for the first week back.

Unfortunately, what I heard was "read everything BUT The Old Man And The Sea."

Double unfortunately: the first day back was a test, on The Old Man And The Sea. Which I had read exactly zero words of. It was, notably, a short essay test. It wasn't multiple choice or fill in the blank. It was designed to require deliberate answers from scratch, entirely out of your own head, with nothing to go on BUT what was in your head.

And in the course of about 45 minutes, I was able to use the questions of the test itself to piece together a vague enough sense of how the story went to bullshit my way through other questions. I gave wide, thematic answers that were extremely light on details, since I did not know any of them, and did not even know this test would be happening until it was in front of me. An essay test for an AP-level English class.

I had a starting point of zero information, and an essay test about the thing I was supposed to have read.

I bullshitted my way to a B+ on it.

On a test I should have gotten a ZERO on.

It's been 16 years since I took that test.

I couldn't tell you a damn thing about The Old Man And The Sea.

But you better fucking believe I still know how to bullshit, and when someone is trying to bullshit me.

The power and utility of knowing how bullshit works CANNOT be overstated. It is one of the most important skills you can ever have.

My favorite part of this is the little “Yet I’m still failing” at the bottom of the screencap. It’s not yet occurred to you to change something you’re doing? Maybe try not using ChatGPT?