Something doesn’t feel right. You can’t always name it, but you know the shape of it — you’re following a route you never actually chose, and it’s someone else’s.
You don’t have to. Most of what gets presented to you as compulsory is a default, not a requirement. The difference matters enormously.
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What I mean by “the System”
Not the government, or not only. I mean the whole set of defaults you were handed: go to school, get the grades, get the job, keep the job, and don’t ask too many questions about any of it.
I stood outside it early. Partly because of a childhood that didn’t offer much stability, but mostly because once I started educating myself I couldn’t unsee how much of it is arranged for the convenience of the arrangement rather than for the people inside it.
I’m not alone in that. Plenty of people take a step back, look at what’s considered normal, average and acceptable, and quietly decide it isn’t for them.
Nobody gets to dictate how you think, feel or live
Including your own mother.
When I say “the System” I don’t only mean institutions. Your closest friends and your family can carry the same expectations, and from them it lands considerably harder.
Your mother may love you. She doesn’t own you. And her advice, however well meant, is often just what she was told decades ago, passed along without ever being examined.
You aren’t obliged to meet anyone’s expectations, however much you feel you owe them. The only person you genuinely have to stay in agreement with is yourself.
That isn’t a licence to be unpleasant. I’m not suggesting you pick fights with your family for sport. But be realistic: friction is a likely result of changing direction, and it’s worth expecting rather than being wounded by.
Stating your position isn’t an attack on anyone. It’s noticing that your actual values don’t line up with what’s around you, and then gently phasing out what doesn’t work.
Education isn’t the only door
There’s a good chance you don’t need to fight your way through a system that isn’t built for how you learn. There are other routes, and more of them every year.
My complaint isn’t about reading, writing and arithmetic. It’s that we teach an oddly narrow slice of what’s worth knowing — history told conveniently rather than fully, and almost nothing about how a body, mind and spirit actually work together.
And teach them about the cosmos properly, rather than a fancy chart of planets and a peek through a telescope. Tell them that we’re not alone and other races in the universe exist, always have been and always will be. Teach them about dimensions and levels of energy, and that our minds are powerful enough to manifest things and experiences — and that we do it every day, just unconsciously.
Twelve years of schooling, and almost none of it on how to think, how to stay well, or how to decide what you actually want.
That’s my view, and you’re welcome to disagree with it. Plenty of thoughtful people would — education has lifted an enormous number of people out of far worse circumstances, and that’s not nothing.
But it’s a route, not the only one. And if it’s a route you’ve already tried and found unbearable, that isn’t a verdict on you.
My own three wasted years
I spent three years at a private school studying Multimedia Design. Nine thousand dollars a year.
It was poor. I frequently ended up explaining things to the room rather than learning them. The scramble for grades stripped out most of the curiosity and all of the fun.
Here’s the part that stayed with me: in all the years since, across every client and every project, not one person has ever asked what grades I got. Not once. They asked what I could do.
And everything that course was meant to teach me is now available online, free, without the debt or the deadlines.
The honest caveat: free requires discipline, and discipline is the one thing school does install in some people. If that’s what you got from it, that’s a real thing to have.
Not all schools are bad and not all teachers are hopeless — most of the good ones are working inside a system that constrains them.
Teach yourself, and build your own income
Starting adult life with a large debt is a strange thing to recommend to a young person, and we recommend it constantly.
Meanwhile a job — the supposedly safe option — is a single income stream you don’t control, at a rate that tends to move slowly if at all. That’s not security. It’s one point of failure with a pension attached.
Here’s the argument I’d actually make: if you had the discipline to survive years inside a system you disliked, you have more than enough to build something of your own. That’s the same muscle. It’s just pointed somewhere else, and the materials are mostly free.
It’s genuinely harder than it sounds and slower than the internet claims. But it’s not gated behind anyone’s approval, which is the whole point.
Your health is yours to run
This is where I want to be careful, because it’s the area where being contrarian can cost someone something real.
What I’m arguing against is passivity — treating your body as something you hand over to be dealt with, having never taken any interest in it yourself. Most of what determines how you feel day to day is what you eat, how you move, how you sleep, and what you spend your attention on. Almost none of that is anyone else’s job.
What I’m not arguing is that you should avoid doctors. See one. Get the persistent thing looked at. Medicine catches what you cannot possibly catch yourself, and being suspicious of institutions in general is a bad reason to skip a scan.
The version I stand behind is unglamorous and it’s this: eat real food, move most days, sleep properly, filter what you consume — including news and the people who leave you depleted — and take an active interest in how your own system works. Then use medicine as the powerful tool it is, rather than as the only thing you ever do about your health.
Being a participant rather than a passenger. That’s the whole claim.
Build your own system instead
Stepping off the carousel doesn’t mean living without structure. It means the structure is yours.
- Nobody dictates who you are or what you do with your life. Including family.
- If formal education isn’t working for you, there are other routes — most of them free.
- A single salary isn’t security. Build something you control.
- Run your own health actively, and use medicine properly rather than avoiding it.
- You don’t need any belief system handed to you whole. Work out what you actually think.
Being an outsider isn’t a problem to be fixed. It’s just an unusual starting position, and the tradeoff is that you have to build your own structure rather than inherit one.
If this lands, you’ll recognise yourself in 11 reasons you’re not fitting in with society and success without education.
Ready to stop drifting and start creating on purpose?
The Reality Shift Template is my free 3-step framework — filter the noise, get clear on who you actually are, and consciously create what comes next. Drop your email and I’ll send it over.