The problem with cynicism and seeing everything as bullshit and unfair is that it's self-reinforcing. I used to wallow in that too because it was the only way to make sense of the world, because I just was not very happy and couldn't see what I would be able to do to change that.
Once I graduated from college and started working that completely changed for me, because I finally for the first time had some semblance of agency and real stakes in my life, and wasn't forced to spend all my time with other people my age who were just as lacking in real perspective and experience. Someone gave me real responsibility over something actually pretty important, I could speak up and do and change things in ways that weren't explicitly decided for me ahead of time, it wasn't all just a game anymore.
Being a student is essentially modeled as a zero-sum audition for the real world that is simultaneously extremely low stakes (nobody else really cares about what you're doing) and high stakes (if you fail you could seriously harm your future life). You live completely at the whim of institutions with deadlines and gameable processes. The students who seemed legitimately happy to me were either the ones who didn't feel the same kind of pressure to succeed or those who legitimately found it meaningful to participate in school clubs and work professors for higher grades (go to all their office hours to get help with homework, argue for higher grades). Of course there was fun to be had too but the entire environment is engineered for cynicism, it forces you into a ghetto of inexperience and helplessness.
That is not to say that cynicism is good, and obviously the students who used it as an excuse not to learn or take accountability for their own actions or lack thereof were seriously harming themselves. But I do not think it is entirely irrational, given their perspective of the world as one in which they have very little agency and the rules are almost all artificial, to perceive it that way.
> Once I graduated from college and started working that completely changed for me, because I finally for the first time had some semblance of agency and real stakes in my life, and wasn't forced to spend all my time with other people my age who were just as lacking in real perspective and experience. Someone gave me real responsibility over something actually pretty important, I could speak up and do and change things in ways that weren't explicitly decided for me ahead of time, it wasn't all just a game anymore.
This is a very helpful way to look at it. Thanks for writing it out.
One of the biggest potential benefits of mentoring programs is that it can expose students to the real world outside of their academic bubble. The hard part for me is trying to break into their bubble and explain that there's more to the world than the mental model they pieced together from snarky Reddit posts. It can be difficult.
Once I graduated from college and started working that completely changed for me, because I finally for the first time had some semblance of agency and real stakes in my life, and wasn't forced to spend all my time with other people my age who were just as lacking in real perspective and experience. Someone gave me real responsibility over something actually pretty important, I could speak up and do and change things in ways that weren't explicitly decided for me ahead of time, it wasn't all just a game anymore.
Being a student is essentially modeled as a zero-sum audition for the real world that is simultaneously extremely low stakes (nobody else really cares about what you're doing) and high stakes (if you fail you could seriously harm your future life). You live completely at the whim of institutions with deadlines and gameable processes. The students who seemed legitimately happy to me were either the ones who didn't feel the same kind of pressure to succeed or those who legitimately found it meaningful to participate in school clubs and work professors for higher grades (go to all their office hours to get help with homework, argue for higher grades). Of course there was fun to be had too but the entire environment is engineered for cynicism, it forces you into a ghetto of inexperience and helplessness.
That is not to say that cynicism is good, and obviously the students who used it as an excuse not to learn or take accountability for their own actions or lack thereof were seriously harming themselves. But I do not think it is entirely irrational, given their perspective of the world as one in which they have very little agency and the rules are almost all artificial, to perceive it that way.