Big Scholarship Kid Energy

Bad career advice for twitchy internet weirdoes.

Sometimes, people ask me for career advice. Why they do this is a mystery, especially if they’ve met me in person and understand that this is like asking a free climber the best way up the mountain. My best way isn’t necessarily the safest, and it probably won’t leave you time for a picnic. I routinely push myself to the point of discomfort - never actual danger, though it helps to have friends around to remind you of the difference. I’ve got a particular mindset, you see, and I named it purely so I could spot it more easily in others. I call it Big Scholarship Kid Energy.

Big Scholarship Kid Energy is ambition not as entitlement, but as a survival mechanism. It’s about workaholism, and it’s about class, and it’s probably a stubborn symptom of post-Fordist capitalist realism, isn’t just common among actual scholarship kids like me. It can be an immigrant kid thing, a model-minority thing, a trauma-survivor thing, or all of the above, or neither; I’ve seen it in artists and musicians a…