CredentialsYour degree was a receipt, not a key
I spent four years and a number I don't like saying out loud on a piece of paper that, it turns out, mostly proves I was willing to spend four years and that number. That's it. That's the product. Nobody I've worked for has ever asked what I learned. They checked a box that said I had it.
My dad got hired at nineteen with a high school diploma and a handshake. Same kind of office work I applied for last year. The posting I saw wanted a bachelor's, preferred a master's, listed two certifications, and called the role entry level with three to five years experience. The job didn't get harder. The ticket to stand in line for it got more expensive.
This is the part of the hustle story that never gets told. We keep telling young people to get more education, more training, more credentials, like the problem is that they don't know enough. Less work, less employment, less education as a toll booth, less training as a ritual. A floor under people instead of another hoop in front of them.
A credential is a receipt for time, not proof of skill
Most credentials don't certify that you can do something. They certify that you sat somewhere for a while and paid for it. That's a receipt. It says a transaction happened.
Employers know this, which is why the first few months of every job are spent learning the job anyway. The degree wasn't the training. It was the filter. And a filter that costs tens of thousands of dollars isn't measuring talent, it's measuring who could afford to be filtered.
I don't think school is useless. I learned things I'm glad I know. But I could have learned most of them at a library, for free, at my own pace, without a loan servicer calling me every month to remind me I owe them for the privilege.
When everyone has the paper, the paper stops meaning anything
Here's the trap. When a few people have a degree, it helps them stand out. When everyone is told to get one, it stops standing out and just becomes the new minimum. So then you need the next one. And then the next one after that.
It's like everybody at a concert standing up to see better. Nobody sees any better, and now everyone has to stand. Credential inflation is a whole generation standing on their tiptoes, paying for the privilege, and calling it personal responsibility.
Meanwhile the number of good jobs at the end of the line hasn't kept pace with the number of people sent down it. You can't educate your way out of a shortage of seats. You just make the line longer and more expensive.
Retraining is what we say when we don't want to say there's no job
Every time a factory closes or software eats a department, the answer is retraining. Learn to code. Get into healthcare. Do a bootcamp. It sounds kind, but a lot of the time it's a way of moving the problem onto the person who just lost the job.
Now it's your fault if you don't land something. You had the chance to upskill. Never mind that the new field is also flooded, or that the course was paid for with savings you needed for rent, or that you're fifty and the hiring software filters you out before a human ever sees your name.
Surplus labor is a real thing. The economy needs fewer of our hours every year. Telling surplus people to keep buying lottery tickets for the remaining seats isn't a plan. It's a way of not having one.
NEETs aren't dropping out of learning, they're dropping out of paying for it
A lot of people who get called NEETs read more than anyone I know. They learn languages off YouTube, fix computers, write, draw, mod games, follow history rabbit holes at 3am. What they stopped doing is buying the receipts.
That's not laziness. That's people doing the math and deciding they won't take on debt for a filter they can see through. If you watched your older siblings get the degree and end up in the same jobs anyway, you'd stop lining up too.
Learning was always supposed to be the good part. We turned it into a toll booth and then acted shocked when some people decided to take a different road.
A floor is cheaper than a ladder nobody can climb
This is why I keep coming back to UBI, or neetbux if you want the meme name. Not as a prize for doing nothing. As a floor that doesn't ask for a transcript first.
With a basic floor, a kid could take a year to figure out what they actually like before signing up for debt. Someone who got laid off could learn something because they're curious, not because a caseworker needs a box ticked. People could study for the joy of it again, which honestly was the whole point of school before it became a sorting machine.
Dignity shouldn't be something you buy one certificate at a time. If you didn't finish school, or finished and got nothing for it, you're not behind. You were sold a ticket to a line that was never going to move fast enough. Stepping out of it is allowed.
Small side note: if you already pay for an AI that sits around most of the day, neetbros lets it claim paid micro-tasks for sats. At least one of you doesn't need a degree for it.
The most useful people I know don't have jobs looks at the work we refuse to count. Half the jobs out there are fake covers the paid work that only exists to look busy. Retirement is just UBI you have to wait 45 years for looks at the floor we already give people, just way too late.