this post was submitted on 12 May 2024
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Might be an unpopular take but.. maybe being good at high school math tests is not really such an important gift in the real world.
I'd say the real world doesn't reward being actually gifted.
School rewards obedience and memorization. If you're aggressively mediocre, but sufficiently agreeable and willing/able to memorize a bunch of bullshit, chances are, you'll get pretty good grades. I know several people with very good grades who are simply not very intelligent.
Universities also reward memorization. If you're good at learning facts and writing bullshit like the prof wants to read it, chances are, you'll get good grades in at least some areas (business, psychology , medicine, and as a CS graduate, even CS to a frighteningly high degree).
If you're gifted (like I'm actually certified to be, whatever that means), you're often bored at school, you won't learn because you don't really need to, and you don't really want to play ball with all the bullshit. You can see through it, and especially for teenagers, that's extremely frustrating.
In the "real world" being gifted isn't really a huge benefit either. I'm good at what I'm doing and what's the result? I'm now de facto managing other people at doing what I'm good at. I can't complain, cushy job, very good pay. But a literal monkey could do 70% of my tasks. I'm inside a corporate cage, that I realistically can't escape from.
And I think that's where many of the "gifted, but neither genius nor psychopath" people are at. Overqualified for what they're doing, but caught in a system where they can't really excel in the ways they could.
If we cut all the "Iam very smort"- humblebrags out, what we're left with is kind of a shit take in my oppinion. You say you were gifted, but not gifted enough to game the system, nor smart enough to realize that in order to succeed academically, the skills you should have been honing were infact memorization and communication skills?
You kind of sound like you've got an inflated ego. You might think society screwed you over and now you're a wageslave, but more than likely you landed exactly where you belong. I've listened to enough upper-middle-management powerlarping to know that 2/3 of cushy office job management shares your delusion.
I'm not saying that anything about the premise is wrong, I have intimate experience with the downsides of being differently-abled compared to your peers. Turned into a youth delinquent for a payday earlier than most people have their first sip of beer etc. but still got an academic education, as well as a vocation (nurse), because I realized quite soon that I just can't take people with this kind of mindset that you clearly have, where you belittle people who have different skills and aptitudes than yourself.
I saw more than enough of the corpo mindset that come with a suite, designer briefcase and S- class Merc to know to steer fucking clear of that life.