Some days, I’m pretty sure I never learned a single practical skill as a child. Or at least, my brain never retained a single bit of that information. Because I have no idea what I’m doing.

In this life, you’re either a kid or an adult. Somewhere along the line, people suddenly stopped treating me like a child and immediately expected me to act like an adult. I can’t pinpoint exactly when this occurred, but this change was abrupt. I had no responsibilities and no worries. But I also was not allowed to have any opinion or say, else I was being rude. Now, I’ve been thrown out to the wolves. They said, “You have to do everything yourself now, good luck!” And I have approximately zero life skills to get me through.

Why do they teach us the things they do in school? I have learned about the American Revolution no less than three times in my schooling, but not once did they teach us how to deal with a customer yelling at you about company policy that isn’t your fault, or how to deal with anxiety that’s crippling your ability to function.

They’ll punch you in the gut with useless algebra until you collapse, but god forbid you learn the proper way to tip at a restaurant. Do they teach you which important paperwork to keep around, how to deal with a landlord, the proper way to meet someone and take them out on a date, or how to fix a car? No, but I bet that everyone knows that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.

Yeah, some of these things might be useful if you’re going to grow up to be a historian or an engineer or a biologist or a mathematician. But in a lot of cases, you’re probably not going to be one of those things, and at some point in your life you’re going to have a minimum-wage job which makes you hate your life. You’re going to be living on your own, and you need all these practical life skills to get by. And have you learned any of them? Probably not.

My parents have taught me a good amount of things, or at least have given me a quick crash course, but school was absolutely useless. The amount of information I retained from middle and high school is surprisingly little, and it’s really enlightening to not only how arbitrary everything they teach you is, but also how the system doesn’t work. That information could potentially be useful or at least interesting, but the grading system based on results rather than learning turns off any useful outlet.

After leaving the comfort of my home for the first time and shipping myself off to college, I realized exactly how little I knew about anything. I was an AP student and always considered myself to be smart, but now I realize how absolutely useless that is in the real world. You know how you BS a paper, and how you did that all through high school and college? I’m currently doing that with every aspect of my life. If no one knows I’m faking, perhaps they’ll think I’m a real adult. And maybe one day, I’ll learn all these life skills on the fly.