Some would tell you that the point of education is to learn, to attain a higher level of enlightenment and submersion into life, humanity. These people would be lying to you, not that they are wrong, just that they are not being honest with you about their actual views on education.

The reality is that you go to school or college or whatever for one reason only: to put yourself in a position to make more money and get a better job. Why would you actually want to learn about yourself or the world? That's hard and it makes you actually think and try in ways that don't correspond to flow charts and regression functions. More importantly, you don't actually have to know anything about anything other than your prospective occupation to make a lot of money.

Good, bad, or indifferent, that's just a fact, Jack. Establishing yourself as a true piece of humanity has no actual value in the world into which we have been spat out. You cannot put a dollar value on it or analyze it on Excel.

I am, by no measure, claiming that one cannot become rich and successful in conjunction with personal and societal growth. It is just not common. Chances are that you are taking your classes and reading your books for the sole purpose of working at Fannie Mae or something like that. You are worried about your GPA because that is the only way we have been taught to measure ourselves. If our GPA is bad, we are bad. We have made some fatal life misstep that is going to completely derail the way we live. We will almost certainly wind up in jail or dead and destitute in some kind of Edgar Allan Poe-esque scenario, either like him, drunk and face down in a muddy gutter, or maybe trying desperately to keep the pounding of a disembodied heart out of our heads while the police are investigating the inevitable meth house we will inherit upon a sub-par graduation spot.

I would like to assure you that a GPA lower than 3 will not ruin your life or even derail your desired livelihood. You will not wind up in a hovel in the outskirts of Detroit living only on the flesh of rats and fish that you have to catch out of a frozen Lake Michigan with your bare hands. You'll probably end up OK, unless you just have no idea how to function around people or refuse to submit to the suffocatingly commoditized and dollar-value-centric world.

Then, let's say that everything went hunky-dory for you all the way through your young adult life: You were squeezed out into a family of means and managed, through the accident of birth, to avoid any arbitrary characteristics that would curse you with persecution, mental disabilities, nonconformist ideas, or anything like that. We are assuming that you are the ideal American, a money-and-power-driven machine of success and Grade Point Average. You breeze through your prep school, boarding or otherwise, land yourself in a top-30 university and get a good business degree or go to a solid law school. From there you get your post grad degrees, like you'll need them, you lucky bastard, and immediately land yourself a job with a starting salary of at least 75 grand and a signing bonus of at least 10.

Assuming all of this, and assuming that you will not be overtaken by an addiction that would dismantle your professional career (let's pray that it only destroys your personal life instead of something important), you are going to be making a lot of money over the next few decades. Now that I have given you the absolutely perfect picture of an American, meaning essentially, as defined by our fallacious societal constructions, that you are a white male born in the upper middle class, let me ask you a question. Why? Why have you done all this? What is it really doing for you?

I understand that money is super nice to have. You can buy things and things are nice. Just think about how many pairs of duck boots and Sperry's this guy could buy! No color or pattern would be amiss. There is nothing wrong with trying to live comfortably or even in the lap of luxury, but to do that, get laid all the time, drink yourself blind, and ruin your septum with that sweet, sweet cocaine, you don't need all that money. I hate saying "You don't need that much money." It's such a cop out. It's a tool for the ignorant Marxist who cannot aptly express the philosophy. However, there is a certain amount of money that exceeds the bounds of spending. At a point you have to set it ablaze to get rid of it all. I, again, cannot claim that having that much money is really a bad thing.

So here we are again, without any real answers. Just something to chew on.