My Name Is Iden | Bored and sad — by design
- Published: May 21, 2026
OK, I am not a teacher. I am not a psychologist, or a sociologist, or an “ologist” of any kind. At best, I am an amateur philosopher; at worst, an opinionated fool. My point is, however poorly qualified I am to do so, I like to think and I have been thinking a lot recently. I have been thinking about thinking, and learning, and learning to think, and I have been thinking that we need to rethink how we approach learning.
I hated going to school. It was nothing personal against my school, or my teachers, it was just, you know, school. And it sucked. Even without the anxiety that came with being a confused little trans kid, it sucked. It was all day, five days a week, plus sports, plus homework, plus extracurriculars, plus community service. Year after year, there I was, and as far back as my young brain could see clearly I had been at it. Most days the only thing that got me through was the thought that someday it would be over and I would be free.
I spent 13 years in K–12 working my butt half off and another seven in college working off what remained of my poor tired backside. But then I graduated. I was finished, done, out. I was free. It wasn’t until this past year that I took a second to consider the deeper implications of that feeling.
What was it that was over? What had I finished? What exactly was I free from? Not working, certainly. Not being tired, obviously. In fact, I was just getting started there! No, what I was saying was that I was finished with school. But school is just an institution; it’s only a framework for scheduled learning. So, was I saying that I was free from learning? Was I celebrating being finished with learning?
I realized that I was indeed saying that, but also that that was not at all what I wanted. I don’t hate learning. I love it! So why was I so desperate to be free from it?
We all have those friends, family, or co-workers who are plenty intelligent, they just are not interested. Like, in anything. They eat at the same places they’ve always eaten, listen to the same songs they listened to 20, 30 or 40 years ago. I’m not here to say that an oldie isn’t a goodie, just that I don’t remember any of my fellow students not loving and being excited about finding something new. I don’t believe any human is born not loving to learn and explore.
Observing that in people is what has me thinking about all of this. I have come to believe that we have inherited an educational system that is designed not to foster and encourage learning, but to turn our minds against that natural instinct to explore and discover so that we will fit better into the machine that is capitalism. I can’t see any other reason to make school so much like work. Why would one exhaust a mind and a body so thoroughly, if one was not trying to break it and remold it into something more profitable? Is there a better way to make someone reflexively turn away from learning than to fill their day with constant negative associations to it? Stress, grades, work, pressure, tests, practice, conference, regional, state, work, work, work.
I am not here to blame any of the people sweating and pouring themselves into this system to do their best for all of these students. I am, ultimately, only speaking from my experience, and as I have said, I am in no way an informed observer. But I am an observer nonetheless and I cannot help but observe how perfectly suited this early training is for turning out the obedient workers and consumers that a capital-driven economy needs.
By the time we step out of school into the world, we are already accustomed to being overworked, to having no free time, to being graded and judged and to thinking that those grades matter and that this stress is natural. As new grads we would have just spent the entirety of our lives being taught that being tired and stressed is the rule, not the exception, and, most critically, we will have been conditioned not to explore or seek out new knowledge because that just means new work.
We live at a time when we can explore anything, a time when knowledge of any topic is available, for free, instantly. And yet most of us are on the couch, watching, listening to and buying whatever the algorithm shows us. Learning has become work to us now and we already have plenty of work. Like an abused dog, we will flinch away from it because for 12 or more long, exhausting years, we dreamed of nothing more than an escape from learning.
The way we educate our people is a testimony to, or perhaps an indictment of, our values as a society. I think that we all need to think more about the way we are training ourselves to think. Humans are born to learn, born to discover. There is a joy in that purpose that can be seen in any child — a joy that has been beaten out of whole swathes of us, and it shows. It shows in our consumerism and waste, in our populism and groupthink and in our deepening societal depression.
I don’t know what the fix for this is. I don’t know how to shift the cultural values of an entire world. I am not a teacher, a philologist, a psychologist, or an “ologist” of any sort. I am just an observer. I am just a human who loves to think and learn, who has noticed how many of us are bored, and sad, and who thinks that we must learn to do better for ourselves and for each other. We are not machines. We are humans and we deserve to rediscover our joy.
*The author is an artist and writer. She lives in Yellow Springs with her wife and three children. You can follow her work at mynameisiden.com.
The Yellow Springs News encourages respectful discussion of this article.
You must login to post a comment.
Don't have a login? Register for a free YSNews.com account.
No comments yet for this article.