Whirly/Putinbot was/is right
I have returned from the dead as a shell of the personality I used to be--in part to write this.
The past few years have been a downhill ride for me, the past six months especially. I am now used up. My passions are all but gone, and correspondingly my innate masculine drive.
Exercise, a plethora of supplements, regular meditation, and healthy diet have perhaps slowed my decline, but in the end it was inevitable.
I try to call upon my emotions, my passions, my anger, but nothing is there. I am completely burnt out and unable to function at an acceptable level. Old peers have told me that I look twice my age. Chronic stress has left me apathetic towards life and purposeless.
Academia consumes the asocial, individualist personality and spits them out as a shadow of their former self. My entrepreneurial spirit is nearly gone. I've missed out on opportunities and seen others take reap the rewards as all my time, money, and energy was eaten up by higher education.
Putinbot was right. It is not about what you know, but who you know.
I've been rejected from all the internships and co-ops I've applied to, but startling enough, for reasons I dread.
Companies do not seem to care about technical understanding of material but rather how candidates function in a large team setting.
Every company I interviewed with bombarded me with human resources type scenarios rather than focusing on what technical skills I can actually provide.
I am extremely introverted by nature, but do possess the skillset to BS through your typical interview (hence why I received follow-ups after initial screenings). While I am able to 'fake-it' for a brief amount of time, extensive on-site invitations with various departments quickly drain me of my energy, and my facade falters.
Additionally, the complex what-if scenario type questions asked by human resources goes beyond my scope of pre-existing knowledge of group/social/emotional behavior and I'm unable to provide convincing answers as, again, I am limited in my exposure to social settings.
Yes, only now in the end do I understand. Society and business culture has shifted to a highly collectivist model where social aptitude is valued above technical knowledge.
In other words, we are observing a strong shift to a feminine society and work culture. The traditional male is obsolete, no longer valued by society or businesses. Women possess all the traits that employers look for and excel past their masculine counterparts.
Women, or rather feminine personalities, are better communicators, better orators, better at analyzing situations from a social and emotional perspective. They are better able to focus and deliver on long-term goals where as men have traditionally been focused on short-term results and instant gratification.
Nikola Tesla predicted this rise of women in the work-place:
"It is clear to any trained observer, and even to the sociologically untrained, that a new attitude toward sex discrimination has come over the world through the centuries, receiving an abrupt stimulus just before and after the World War.This struggle of the human female toward sex equality will end in a new sex order, with the female as superior. The modern woman, who anticipates in merely superficial phenomena the advancement of her sex, is but a surface symptom of something deeper and more potent fermenting in the bosom of the race.
It is not in the shallow physical imitation of men that women will assert first their equality and later their superiority, but in the awakening of the intellect of women.
Through countless generations, from the very beginning, the social subservience of women resulted naturally in the partial atrophy or at least the hereditary suspension of mental qualities which we now know the female sex to be endowed with no less than men. But the female mind has demonstrated a capacity for all the mental acquirements and achievements of men, and as generations ensue that capacity will be expanded; the average woman will be as well educated as the average man, and then better educated, for the dormant faculties of her brain will be stimulated to an activity that will be all the more intense and powerful because of centuries of repose. Women will ignore precedent and startle civilization with their progress."
To reiterate, I am by no means the smartest among my peers--average at best--but I do (did) possess an entrepreneurial spirit. In spite of the unique, relevant projects and skills on my resume I pursued outside of the classroom, I was questioned on these but a fraction of the time, and only on a superficial level. 95% + of the time spent at interviews was on intricate social what-if scenario questions gauging my social and emotional intelligence.
Disappointment does not even begin to express my attitudes upon this realization.
" The play goes on, but the suspense is over. It has become mere pantomime, as intricate and as meaningless as the space-time curves that guide galactic clusters through a measureless cosmos. Dooku's decades of combat experience are irrelevant. His mastery of swordplay is useless. His vast wealth, his political influence, impeccable breeding, immaculate manners, exquisite taste—the pursuits and points of pride to which he has devoted so much of his
time and attention over the long, long years of his life—are now chains hung upon his spirit, bending his neck before the ax. Even his knowledge of the Force has become a joke. It is this knowledge that shows him his death, makes him handle it, turn it this way and that in his mind, examine it in detail like a black gemstone so cold it burns. Dooku's elegant farce has degenerated into bathetic melodrama, and not one shed tear will mark the passing of its hero.
As he looks up into the eyes of Anakin Skywalker for the final time, Count Dooku knows that he has been deceived not just today, but for many, many years. That he has never been the true apprentice. That he has never been the heir to the power of the Sith. He has been only a tool. His whole life—all his victories, all his struggles, all his heritage, all his principles and his sacrifices, everything he's done, everything he owns, everything he's been, all his dreams and grand vision for the future Empire and the Army of Sith—have been only a pathetic sham, because all of them, all of him, add up only to this. He has existed only for this. This. To be the victim of Anakin Skywalker's first cold-blooded murder. First but not, he knows, the last.
Then the blades crossed at his throat uncross like scissors. Snip. And all of him becomes nothing at all."
Masculine Men in the 21st century are seen as expendable and inferior to their female counterparts.
I see alumni of my school; I see who is successful. It is those who are socially developed and have a broad network of professional contacts. Whether or not they were good students does not matter. Their technical knowledge does not matter. It is their social, and correspondingly professional, values that companies see worth in.
I also see alumni who are working menial jobs in-spite of their engineering degrees. They simply could not compete with socially developed personalities.
I have traditionally kept to myself and only spoke as necessary or if spoken to. At most I had a few friends ( I use it in very light terms) during my teenage years. I never longed for more social contact and only started initiating contact with my classmates during my second year of high-school when I was startled by a comment that several of them thought I fit the personality of a school-shooter due to my asocial behavior.
Even more startling was a genuine comment made by a rival classmate during my senior year who stated that I would likely end up working a menial job (e.g a janitor) not because I was stupid, but because I was a queer socially.
As I come to the aforementioned realizations of corporate culture in America, this comment haunts me more and more to this day.
I am now half-way through what many would consider to be one of the most demanding undergraduate majors. I carry several thousand dollars in debt and become increasingly concerned with my inability to land internships, but even moreso my mental deterioration.
I can no longer integrate like I could in high-school. I had to withdraw from my data structures and algorithms class after failing my midterm. Calculus 3, Linear Algebra, and Differential Equations become increasingly difficult to manage with each passing week. It seems neuroplasticity has set in. I've passed my intellectual peak and am now in decline.
My biggest regret is pursing higher-education under the pressure of over-bearing parents and a society that looks down on the blue-collared workers.
Had I pursued a trade, I would likely have better prospects of being self-employed or owning my own business, which has been my ultimate end-goal since youth.
I cannot back-out or switch my area of study now. I am thousands of dollars in debt and more miserable than I've ever been.
I've been a fool in pursing engineering. I was never genuinely interested in the field and only pursued it in hopes of obtaining a degree with the most market value. Unknown to me was that the degree means nothing without the corresponding personality.