Daily Truth July 31, 2022

It's up to you to step out of the industrialized mindset.

Midway through my daughter’s 6th grade year, I pulled her out of the most academically prestigious school in our area. She had gotten strep throat after a week of finals (yes, you read that correctly-finals in 6th grade) and subsequently missed three days of school. With one day for every day missed to make up her work, she was buried in past due assignments. When I picked her up with one day remaining to turn in all the past due work, she was in tears. She opened the car door and said to me, “I have nine assignments due to tomorrow.” I looked at her beautiful, but alarmingly defeated face and said, “do you want to stop going to Charter?” She instantly perked up and said absolutely yes, but wondered how that would help her in the here and now. How was switching schools going to relieve her of the nine assignments due the next day? I told her we were done - like right now. We both started to laugh and drove to our favorite pizza place for dinner. I called my husband to tell him she was done and we would figure something out. I returned her books to the school the next day and that was the end of that. Best decision I ever made as a parent.

The truth is, since starting this new school she spent every evening sitting at our kitchen island doing homework until about 10:00pm. Most nights she didn’t even take off her uniform until she put her pajamas on - go to bed, wake up and repeat this cycle the next day. We began to question whether or not this was good for her but we were torn. This was the “best” school after all and wouldn’t it be a failure if we pulled her out? We talked to her about our concerns and told her we didn’t believe homework for hours on end for a 6th grader was healthy. She agreed but she too felt she would be a failure if she didn’t stick it out. She had received an academic excellence award already and wasn’t going to be seen by others as a failure. We explained to her that when we were her age, we were out riding our bikes, watching Gilligan’s Island and eating tuna sandwiches after school and by all societal standards, we were pretty damn successful. In hearing about our childhood, she said to us, “your childhood sounds like a dream!” What the fuck were we thinking?

We were participating in the industrialized mindset - that’s what we were thinking.

There is a process in place to create a so-called successful life and you must follow the process or else. My husband and I both came from families where neither parent had anything beyond a high school education, which made us the first generation in our families to go to college. But times have changed in the thirty years since we went to school. Like most of our modern world, education has become corporatized. It has become less and less about the free exchange of ideas and preparing young people to make important decisions in their lives and more about safe spaces, group think and fitting into a role to be played for the remainder of their lives. Our system teaches kids what to think, not how to think. Turning out citizens who are prepared to sit in a cubicle or an office for 8-10 hours per day. If they’re really lucky, they will have a 401K and two weeks vacation per year. Even those receiving their MBA from an Ivy League school face a future of working excruciatingly long hours for the financial benefit of someone else. Inflated egos and not-so inflated bank accounts.

Don’t get me wrong, education is by far the most important factor in bringing people into a richer, fuller life - but not in the way it’s being delivered today. We have blinded ourselves to what education can and should look like by accepting the roles of being a cog in the wheel of our modern, industrialized world. We have exchanged the aspirations of a rich life for simply being rich. We view education as something we receive when we are young rather than something we participate in for a lifetime. We’re stuck in a sort of check the box life - go to college, get a job, retire, die. Very little thought is given to creating a rich, abundantly fulfilling life. I don’t think I’m wrong about this and the statistics support my way of thinking.

One-hundred years ago, 70% of Americans owned their own businesses. Today, less than 20% of our economy is made up of small business. We went from a time of innovation, creating and determining our own financial destinies to punching clocks. America is one of the richest countries in the world yet our divorce rate is well over 50%, with the average marriage lasting just 8.2 years. We carry an average of $90,000 of debt per person and $60,000 worth of debt upon death. 40% of people are obese with estimates of this number reaching 50+% within the next eight years. And the most alarming are the rates of suicide and drug induced deaths. Suicide rates have nearly doubled since 2000 and last year we experienced a one-year jump of 30% in drug or alcohol related deaths. Are all of these a result of an industrialized mindset? Of course not - but you don’t have be a genius to see that our way of thinking isn’t creating a happier existence.

Out of all divorces, those amongst people 50 years and over is the fastest growing segment. This surprised me at first, considering the assumption is that young people would be more likely to divorce. But after I thought about it deeper, I realize this is one of the greatest indicators of a flawed, check the box way of thinking. Those who have done all the things that supposedly are designed to make them successful, reach middle age and realize they aren’t happy at all. Come to find out their college degree, punching a clock, vacationing when their employer allows and watching the stock market determine how they get to live out their final decades isn’t quite as satisfying as they were told it would be.

Our systematic way of thinking is flawed - it is as simple as that. Humans are designed for so much more. In my research for my upcoming book, I came across the work of Dr. Iain McGilchrist, world renowned psychiatrist, author and thinker. His work is literally changing my life on the daily. This is what I mean by the importance of learning as a participant, rather than as a recipient. Over the course of my life, I have realized how very little I know. How my ways of thinking grow and change as my knowledge and understanding expands. Dr. McGilchrist’s work so eloquently explains the right and left hemispheres of our brain and how we’ve become driven by our overly simplistic, mechanistic, categorizing left side. In every aspect of modern life we are losing touch with the contextual, implicit, richness of the right hemisphere. Without the proper balance between the two, we are destined to an overly industrialized, reductionist way of thinking. Represented in our check the box way of life we are currently witnessing.

But what is the solution? How can we break free from a system that puts industrialized education at the pinnacle of success and seemingly punishes anyone who steps outside of it in search of a more meaningful life?

A good place to start is to stop participating. Like I did on the day I picked up my daughter and went for pizza instead of burying her in senseless, cog-like work, you will have to set your ego aside. Other people will question you and most will think you are absolutely irresponsible. That’s ok - your life isn’t theirs and what they think is of no matter to you. You will have to be uncomfortable and accept that life isn’t something to be lived according to a check list.

I can assure you those of us who step outside the system are not punished. When I joined my entrepreneurs mentoring group, my eyes were opened to the lies told around financial success. The level of wealth within that group is startling and the vast majority of them never stepped foot into a university. They made a decision they would chase their dreams and they accepted the uncertainty and inevitable failures it would involve. Those who stick it out are rewarded by complete control of their financial lives. That isn’t something everyone is equipped to tackle but it is without a doubt, the surest way to financial freedom and personal fulfillment.

A college degree will earn you a place in the system and provide security. But, it will also place you into the control of a system that doesn’t give a shit about you. My husband will tell you first hand how that feels. As a private practice physician, he always considered himself in control of his professional life. He was wrong. When he started in medicine, there was a beautiful combination of art and science -that has now been converted into a corporatized, check the box, profit driven field. That is extremely sad and catastrophic for anyone who values their health.

I am not telling you to stop sending your kids to college. I am encouraging you to ask yourselves why you are sending them to college. What are you setting them up to accomplish? Maybe a college degree is essential for their line of work but maybe it isn’t. Maybe you are setting them up for an unsatisfactory definition of success. Ask yourself if you are feeding your own ego, or feeding them the necessary tools to create a life that will allow them happiness and fulfillment. Look at your own life and ask yourself if that is what you want for them.

My daughter ended up staying home for the second half of her 6th grade year after I pulled her from Charter. Together we floundered through a private, international online program. We look back now and laugh about the bitter sweet nature of that year. My frustration in her lack of understanding the Watergate Scandal and the fun of sharing a desk for her school work and my building a nationwide food company from scratch. Not something either of us would repeat but it was better than the educational concentration camp we had placed her in. And guess what - her education didn’t suffer from a hiatus from traditional school in the 6th grade. In fact, it has flourished. We now see the role traditional education plays and the importance of stepping outside of it. She now attends a public high school where she learns math, science and English, and participates in three music programs. She is enrolled in the Berklee College of Music online where she takes one class per semester to earn her music production certificate by the time she finishes high school. She works at a restaurant running food two nights per week so she learns what it’s like to earn minimum wage and work with the general public. This summer she also works at a summer camp at a private club where we are members (where the vast majority of members are entrepreneurs, I might add-not someone’s employee.) The rest of her time is spent hanging out with friends and doing what young people are meant to do - enjoy life without a mountain of responsibilities. This fall we are dedicating our Thursday “family night” to taking free, online courses offered by Hillsdale College to deepen our understanding of the Constitution of the United States and the principles upon which our country was built. Given the current upheaval in our country, this is essential.

When she graduates in three years, our family plans to pull up all roots and travel for a couple of years. She plans to go out and learn from composers and other musicians; learning by participating, not by receiving information. We will turn our home into a bed and breakfast and go help her discover new parts of the world. The timeline established by our educational system is arbitrary and completely at odds with neurological development. The human brain does not fully develop until age 25 so why in the world do we set laws and educational timeframes to age 18? We refuse to participate in that nonsense.

After she travels, learns hands-on and matures, she may get a degree or she may not. I encourage her to studies the humanities because no matter what she chooses in life, learning to be a good human will always come in handy.

We are currently working on a business for her and I to partner on initially. I am teaching her the basics of how to create something from nothing and potentially have a financial resource adequate for her to explore things she enjoys. Our budget for this start up was $3,000 - a heck of a lot less than a year of college tuition. This may work or it may not. Either way - she learns.

You can’t just step outside the system haphazardly without any sort of plan at all. But, you don’t have to participate in a system simply because it is what you are told you “should” do. Figure out what it is you are really trying to accomplish with your life. There isn’t a single answer and that’s the beauty of it. Life is meant to be unpredictable, hard, rewarding, disappointing, exhilarating, defeating and triumphant. Stop trying to fit it into a box. Fulfillment doesn’t come in the form of an equation - it comes from living.

The most comforting thing I’ve heard as of recent is this…

The meaning of life is to live it.

Do that.