Deschooling Archives

Me, Myself, and I: Gap Year Loneliness

Beep… Beep… Beep Beep… I throw my sheets to my left, climbing out of bed. Stumbling to my alarm clock, I bend over and press snooze.

Drawing every last second of sleep I can get, I snuggle in the leftover warmth yet wrestle in my mind.

Why should I get out of bed?

It’s so warm and soft.

You should get more work done on the book.

Relax, you don’t have anywhere to be.

You should go to the gym later.

But that’s hard.

Want to call a friend later?

I just want to sleep.

Beep Beep Beep… Beep Beep Beep. Climbing out of bed, I slide the clock to the off position, and retreat back to comfort.

My eyes slowly crack as the high sun creeps through blinds. I take a moment to find my bearings. Scanning to my right I see 9:52am.

“So, today is happening.” It will be a day of yesterday and the day before. I will do the same work. I will listen to the same intermittent burst of the heating system. And, I will be with the same people: me, myself, and I, because is there anyone else to see?

I don’t have anywhere to be. No one is telling me what to do. I am accountable to no one. I must motivate myself.

For the better part of January, my life could often be described as isolated and monotonous. Without variety in my routine and a close community, I would go through the philosophical struggle of questioning why I’m doing what I’m doing on a daily basis. No one was telling me what to do. I didn’t have to be anywhere. I was completely free. Free to do whatever I want, and also as I learned, free to do whatever I want. This was bad. The absolute freedom I had allowed me to optimize my life for myself and forget about anything else. The isolation and monotony that characterized January easily led to loneliness and boredom on a bad day, which in turn slipped into depression. I don’t mean to scare anyone, but that is simply how it was.

Still, I have always enjoyed being alone. But as Edward Abbey says in Desert Solitaire, “There are times when solitaire becomes solitary, an entirely different game, a prison term, and the inside of the skull as confining and unbearable as the interior of the house-trailer on a hot day.” Sometimes I want to be alone, sometimes I want to be with other people, and sometimes I am alone yet want to be with others. An overdue, unfulfilled desire for community is challenging to bear.

Despite the hardship of this time, I would not change a thing. This is how I’ve wanted my life to be ever since I can remember: free. I am doing work that I love that will eventually help other people. I am challenged intellectually on a daily basis. I can’t say this about school. I am growing, even if that means suffering a little.

And to update today, I am working a job that I enjoy and challenges me; I continue to grow personally through all of the projects I am working on and love; and I am integrated in a community that I cannot say enough good things about. Also I’m a shred bum at a ski resort! I needed to find something to fill my time other than myself and a strong, present community. I’ve found it.

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Deschooling: Structuring My Time Like School

Greg Gould / Deschooling

Since beginning my semester away from college, I have been going through a massive restructuring period. Among many things, I no longer have anyone dictating my schedule. Rather, I must simply make enough money to provide for myself and work diligently towards my six-month and greater goals. Charting this new reality (which all will face when they leave school) has confronted me with the fact that work expands to the time available. And to solve this, I use nothing other than mathematics.

n / a = i

This formula relates an individual’s working intensity (i), number of tasks to complete (n), and time available to complete them (a). For example, if the number of tasks is small and the time available is large, then the required intensity is low, and vice versa.

Now before discussing the difference of the formula applied to school and adult life, I would like to clarify the levels of working intensity. First, each person has an optimum intensity level, or focus, where they have consistent high-quality outputs. This optimum level is different for different people. Some people thrive in high-pressure situations where they have much to complete before a looming deadline, and some don’t. With this, working intensity is on a spectrum. On the low end of this spectrum, work may be characterized as distracted or pushed off until later with procrastination. On the opposite end, work is characterized as stressful and leads to fatigue. Both of these states lead to low-quality output. Also, funnily, low intensity work in the form of procrastination leads to high intensity work such as last-minute cramming. This is not a recipe for high-quality output.

Connecting back to the formula, school set the number of tasks and time available to complete the tasks for me. With two known values, all I had to do was complete the task at the intensity level that was required of myself to meet the strict deadline. This was easy to do.

On the other hand, outside of school I must define all of these variables. To do this, I have my long-term goals which I break into weekly and daily sub-goals. This necessitates gauging my average working intensity to understand how long tasks should take and then setting a deadline for myself. I find it very hard to set accurate deadlines. For example, I have pushed the deadline back for my upcoming book so many times. This largely stems from me learning how to write a book by writing a book, and not knowing how long individual items take to complete like revising a 80 page manuscript.

The ability to constantly push deadlines back, creating essentially no deadline, has caused two issues for me. First, my working intensity can diminish greatly with no perceived deadline. It is easy to get distracted and procrastinate. Personally, I can get distracted by the minutiae of my work because of my perfectionist tendencies and procrastinate on making real progress. This is highlighted by the fact that when I am working independently I am not held accountable by anyone to complete tasks in a timely manner. No one is going to dock my grade for finishing a project late. Without enforced deadlines, I am neither rewarded or punished when I complete a task. My work expands to the seemingly infinite time available, and I struggle to make urgent progress.

To solve this, I copy school. I continue to work on enforcing my deadlines with a system of rewards and punishments. For example, if I finish my blog article by Friday night, then I can go snowboarding Saturday. And if I don’t, I will spend Saturday inside writing. I know what I want to do.

In closing, to anyone looking to achieve your independent goals: build the structure of school around your values. Or as serial entrepreneur and philosopher Isaac Morehouse states, “The need for structure in an individual life is too important for it to come from somewhere else.”

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man wearing black crew neck shirt and black jeans

I Do The Same Thing Everyday

Greg Gould / Deschooling, Self-Improvement

Every morning I begin by making my bed. This is my first small victory of the day. I follow this by drinking a glass of water, reading two chapters of the Bible, kneeling next to my bed, and stretching lightly to loosen my body from eight hours of sleep. Next, I wash my face, brush my teeth, and get dressed. Finally, starving, having not eaten since 9pm the previous night, I eat a toasted bagel with either turkey or peanut butter and drink chocolate milk.

It is now the afternoon, and I am getting tired. So, I take a 20-30 minute nap to rejuvenate my energy supply and destress.

A few hours later I do some form of exercise for roughly 30 minutes, then yoga or foam roll for 30 more, and finally play wall ball for another 30.

Lastly, it is nighttime and I want to go to bed. Before this, I read the current book on hand for half an hour, and tidy up my room to declutter my mind before sleeping.

Everyday I do the same thing.

This process, that I continue to optimize, promotes my personal well-being and removes unnecessary thinking.

Completely my routine, I improve my physical health through exercise, sleep, healthy food, and hygiene. I grow spiritually by consuming scripture in the morning to center my day on what is most important. And cumulatively, this routine allows me to remain at peace with myself, no matter the circumstances in my life. Having a structured routine for my day is the number one thing for my personal well-being.

Additionally, my daily routine removes unnecessary thinking, offering me more cognitive energy towards my intellectually demanding tasks for the day (like writing this blog). A key component to greater cognitive focus is an idea I picked up from Deep Work by Cal Newport known as time-blocking. With time-blocking, each night, I create a list of the tasks I am going to complete the next day. From this list, I give each task a time of day. For example, I will research publishers for my book from 10am to noon, and exercise from 5 to 6:30pm. Planning my day in advance, structured around my routine and tasks, removes the energy sap of constantly asking, What’s next? I am able to be hyper-efficient and give greater energy towards the demanding tasks of my day.

When I don’t obey my daily routine I am out-of-touch with myself. I am tired, stressed, and confused. I can’t fully articulate all of the benefits that my daily routine has for me, but I am a significantly better person because of it. If you don’t yet have a daily routine, I encourage you to build one. As my life has improved dramatically, so will yours. Now, I’m going to read.

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Where’s My Rubric?

Greg Gould / Deschooling, Future

I struggled to get myself to write this week. No one told me what to write about, how to do it, or when to complete it. Where was the rubric?

For years, I had the outline for success, and that was the rubric. If I wanted to be successful, which I always did, I could simply follow the rubric that the teacher gave. With this, I didn’t have to make any decisions. I just had to work to complete the goal put upon me. I did this all for the praise that stemmed from academic achievement.

This recurring praise changed who I was. Overtime, I adapted to having my decisions made by someone else. I wanted to be praised for success, and I was successful at everything. My life was comfortable. I just had to do what I was told and everyone praised me. I lived in a bubble, until I popped it.

Many people never pop this bubble but go into adulthood living with their decisions made by someone else. They graduate from school to go into careers that treat them like students and live lives according to their schooling. They are told what to do, how to do it, and when to do it. They are praised for their conformity, and find comfort in it. They are addicted to comfort.

But they are in chains. These people will do whatever they are told, even if it goes against their conscience, to be comfortable and praised. People as such are in tyranny to themselves. They can be pulled by strings in any direction if comfort and praise is the destination. They live an illusion, and don’t have any meaning or purpose other than perpetuating their comfort. Overtime, they lose the desire to be free, if freedom does not lead to comfort.

This way of life terrifies me. I can’t imagine living an illusion after popping my bubble or coming out of the cave as Socrates described. I am the philosopher in the light. Upon seeing true reality, I can’t go back to living an illusion.

The wisdom I have gained from truth can be a burden, but is liberating. I am burdened by the newfound value of my life. Being burdened with the understanding that your life is too important for someone else to live it, is the first step towards individual liberation. If you want to be free, you must build the rubric. The rubric is in your hands.

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