How school makes you lose yourself

This article shows how school socializes us away from being able to create or own lives. We are not trying to make some moral argument. We just want to make this simple and clear so you can think for yourself.

Our society's current "program" of socialization hurts you systemically by prioritizing the needs of the system over the needs of our children - and yours when you were a child. When we talk about "system-needs", we mean things that the system requires to not collapse and to instead keep growing. Our society is systemically structured to uphold itself and the rules established to the highest degree possible. This is normal for all systems - they try to uphold themselves. It also creates effects nudging our actions, way of thinking, values, etc. towards what is best for the structure itself, following the rules that support its growth, etc.

Through school, you are taught to make the system-needs your own. Often these are engraved in our personality and psyches. There are many, deep-rooted effects of this conditioning. We believe that to overcome it you must first become aware of it. As we always do, we suggest some adjustments and practices that support you being the creator of your life (instead of a tool of society) at the end of this article.

A sober look at the world we live in

The system mainly trains you to CONFORM and OBEY

What the system needs before all else is obedience. It needs the vast majority of people to keep doing what they do. If any significant fraction of society goes on strike and behaves differently than expected, shit hits the fan. Infrastructure grinds to a halt. Shortages appear. The economy becomes volatile. Leaders are toppled out of their power positions. Influential people loose money.

The system does not support you doing anything detrimental to it. The most important example: If you don't work a regular full-time job, you are treated like shit by the whole system and society. It doesn't matter whether you are temporarily unemployed or choose a lifestyle that entails minimum work. This is an important example because most of our society is structured around the creation of goods, services and economic growth in general.

Consequently, the main system-need is you earning and spending more money consistently.
Obviously neither of those are inherent needs of the human organism.

Never forget that you are the one fulfilling the system's needs with your own behavior:
If doesn't want you to question the status quo of power. Which actually is a human need by itself.

Individual needs

Being obedient, making money and spending it doesn't make you happy. Sure money can help. But there are tons of rich people that are miserable and poor people that are happy. It's about HOW you live.

What humans generally need to be happy is simple.

1. being safe. Children get this by constant verification of grownups around them.

2. being who you are, feeling what is happening inside your body right NOW and acting upon that. That would be much easier if you weren't forced to spend a decade in a school system that teaches you that the main thing that counts is thinking "correctly".

3. being in good social relationships. Something you can actually learn and do. School doesn't exactly help there.

4. being in control of your life situation. E.g. where you live, how you live, how your community works, how people treat you and you treat them, right up to taxes and governance. Doable when you actually believe you can.

5. No, porn, social media, shopping and easily accessible dopamine is generally not it. (check our article on the internet).

How the needs of the system are valued higher than individuals needs in school

To us the situation looks like this: You are taught to suppress your own wants and needs to conform to the outside situation. School is pretty bent on making you do what is not in your interest(sic!). Sit still on an uncomfortable chair (proven to fuck up your posture and physiology) and not do anything that you weren't told to do. Maybe you were allowed to do what you want to after asking for permission. Taking a break when the clock tells you, instead of when you feel like you need one. Going to school even though you don't feel like it, maybe even when ill because your parents can't take care of you as they both need to work.

How you can tell that this socialization impacts your life until today, just think of this situation:
You want to take a 30 min walk during work because you need a break.
But you don't because it's strange and nobody in your office does it.
Why? Because living in the system made you believe it would be wrong to not do what the "imagined authority" inherently expects. Needing to move and take breaks is not wrong. It's just one of the normal human needs you systematically suppressed since childhood.

To make things worse, not even the content in school is geared towards your needs or living your true potential. Your school teachers teach you math, literature, science, politics and history. Those are things that make you a functional gear in the societal machine. The things that make life rich and fulfilling are not taught in school: Relationships, health, wellbeing, knowing what you actually want, creating your own life. How you can make a proper living for yourself is a side-topic at best.

School deprives you of practical life-experience for more than a decade of your life. One effect of this is that it makes you overly identified with thinking, being right or wrong and proving your worth to others, especially authority figures. It does not make you identify with what should naturally identify with: Finding your own way to learn skills and succeed at a vast amount of different practical tasks that are required to live a life you love.

School is developmental trauma

Yeah, it sounds wild but hear us out.

Humans have innate needs and desires. You can feel a pull towards things you like. You look at your favorite food and it pulls you towards it. In your mind and even in the sensation of your body. You feel an urge away from other things. You look at a pile of shit or a big angry guy with a gun and you wanna go away from these things. In your mind and body equally. Just notice it in your everyday life. Or now: Surely you feel drawn to a few aspects of this article more than towards others. Do you feel that traction and repulsion?

On a very basic level, trauma happens when you are in a situation of having a very strong impulse to do either engage or flee ("fight or flight"). In the traumatic situation you can't, so you freeze or please and appease instead. Usually it is not an extreme situation where this means a literal freezing of the body. more often this means acting like everything is fine even though it's not and you are suppressing your own emotions to stay in the act. Or not getting up from your chair and moving even though that would be quite the healthy thing to do. This is the basic setting of what kids are expected to do in school. All the time. You act like everything is fine even though you want or need to do something else, be somewhere else and someone else than you are being allowed to be in school.​​​​​​​​

The parts of you that are "frozen" usually unfreeze once you get some time to just be in a place where you feel safe and where you are alone and not dealing with someone else's presence or processing more information. This often doesn't happen in today's world of stress and media overload.
This inability to unfreeze creates strong shifts in personality, as there are many parts of yourself (feelings, memories, traits) that you are not really in touch with anymore.

The personality that people form is strongly influenced by the needs of the system

Consistently depriving children of receiving love and care that they need to feel safe and repetitively making them conform to doing what the "outside authority" needs makes you form a personality and way of experiencing life that fits this behavior.
It is shaped by these continuous stresses and never readjusted. (Ancient tribal societies always had rituals for transforming personality and healing psycho-spiritual wounds. We do not.)

If you want to be your own person and live a life that you yourself deem good, you need to take responsibility for your experience of life and your actions. Society will not cater your needs if they are not system needs. You have a strong force inside you that will help you on the journey. It is your creative aggression. This is the urge that propels you forward to engage and create what you want. It is the counterpart of the energy of fear, that pushes you backwards and makes you disengage.

When you are made and taught to suppress your needs over and over and over again in school, the energy of fear becomes your standard mode of operation. Your ability to connect to your creative aggression is crippled.

How does this impact you as an individual?

Maybe you can relate to a few things on this list:

• Your innate human needs and especially the general need for self expression and being in control of your circumstances are wrecked.

• You don't know what you really want from life.

• You probably feel lost and like you are out of control quite often.

• Maybe you try to keep control by either controlling your very local environment or your self (eg. emotions, thoughts, morals, etc.) and what others might think of you.

• Maybe you have totally repressed your creative aggression and don't even notice anymore.

• You probably do things that, if you were truly honest with yourself, are devoid of meaning and resemble a distraction from life more than actually living and creating a life you love. Yeah, Netflix and Instagram most likely don't count as living life.
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Reality check:

You are going TO FUCKING DIE!

Yet, you are wasting your time brainwashing yourself with mass entertainment media, eating shit food and absolutely devastating your mind by constantly feeding it useless and stressful information from Netflix, the news and your own repetitive thinking.

It's just obvious that you wouldn't be doing this if you were happy and content with yourself and life. So WHY THE FUCK would you do that?!?!?!

Because you are traumatized and conditioned by a fucking horrible and abusive socialization. Yes, we keep repeating ourselves but only so you actually really get this. It is deeply important. And it's not your fault. It also isn't your parents fault. Maybe it's nobody's fault. Yet, you can change it.​​​​​​​

Either you change the system, or you change yourself

Changing the system by yourself is basically impossible. There are many who benefit and are interested in keeping it just the way it is. Well, not that they really benefit, but it does seem that way to them, since their personalities and values are also shaped by the system. Those who don't benefit from the system are shaped in a way that benefits the system and those who benefit from the system.

In a nutshell, it would take a huge coordinated effort to change the system. Lots of people would have to make a decision and many systematic changes over a long time to gear the system to catering actual human needs. We aren't super optimistic about that. This has not been going well. Many trends point in the opposite direction. So what can YOU do RIGHT NOW to at least change YOUR LIFE for the better?

QUIT
BEING
YOUR
SOCIALISED
TRAUMATISED
SELF

meaning

Be who you actually want to be. You self is not fixed. It's a decision.

... welcome to the quitters life, where we quit all that dumb shit and live the life we love.

We're not gonna lie. This isn't a 1-day project. It's gonna take a while. We are talking about rebuilding almost everything you believe from scratch. We are all about transformation, so this is what it looks like in action:

CALL TO ACTION

• Cultivate the ability to act like you have amnesia every time you feel like you MUST do/be/act.

• Then ask yourself all the fucking time:

• What could I do to feel authentically good about myself?

• How do I really want to respond to this situation?

• Who do I want to be for myself, now?

• What would I enjoy doing?

And then DO it. Every time you do this you will liberate your mind a bit.
Every time you will better learn to listen to your gut.
Every time you will feel more empowered.
We are along there with you.

About us:

We, Kain and Leo, are living a quitters life. We have chosen to go our own way and want to help you find yours. If you want help on your journey, contact us start@quitters.life and put “I’M IN, I WANT TO COMMIT” at the top of your message.

And honestly, we are not interested in you singing up/writing us personally if you are not committed to creating a different life.