According to the Center for College Affordability (PDF), “The number of college graduates is expected to grow by 19 million, while the number of jobs requiring a bachelor’s degree is expected to grow by fewer than 7 million.” This means that “We are expected to create nearly three new college graduates for every new job requiring such an education.” This leads to massive amounts of underemployment, outstanding student loans, and a waste of a generation.

Typically, when articles like these get thrown around, there’s wags who pop up and say “Well, what did you expect if you went to school for Underwater Basketweaving, with a minor in Gender Studies! If you wanted a job after college, you should have majored in STEM.” Never mind that a STEM degree is no guarantee of success either. As someone who studied Computer Science, yet has a degree in English, lines like that make my eye twitch. Not all of us are cut out to be programmers, mathematicians, engineers, or the like. Higher mathematics makes my brain shit itself, as I learned the hard way. I found the study of literature and writing to be a much more rewarding experience, and I studied it knowing full well the difficulties that would come with having a BA instead of a BS.

Still, the implicit question in these reports and the retorts, is if college is valuable at all. The STEM-types think that college is valuable for learning hard skills, and that’s true to a point. When you’re learning electrical engineering or studying the hard sciences, college has distinct advantages over learning by yourself including access to equipment. Outside of those fields, the value of college becomes more abstract.

Plenty has been written about the death of Liberal Arts, and I’m not going to repeat it. However, I will point out that the practical benefit of any good Liberal Arts program is teaching a student how to communicate—especially in writing. A good Liberal Arts program also teaches a student how to think critically, to formulate an argument and defend that argument with facts—or at least with citations. I’ve joked to friends that getting a degree in English is learning to write papers about books you never finished reading. This is an exaggeration, but the point of literature classes is typically more than appreciating the book—it’s using the book as a tool to teach writing and argumentative skills.

Of course, writing and argumentative skills are not going to get you a job. My advice for anyone who wants to consider studying anything in Liberal Arts is to also learn some hard skills, preferably technology skills, as well. I taught myself how to build websites, how to make WordPress themes, and how to do some basic audio editing. More importantly, I used these skills as part of my hobbies, building a small portfolio of things I could point to and say “Although my work experience and education don’t reflect this, I know how to do these things, and here’s proof.” Even in the world of technology and programming Github is becoming the new résumé. A stamped piece of paper doesn’t say you know how to do x, a body of work says it.

Here’s the thing: college was never a guarantee to begin with. The idea that college is simply getting your ticket punch is no longer true, and I doubt it ever was. Putting in four years (or more) only shows two things to a prospective employer: that you can apply yourself to something, and that you can finish something. Having that to your name is a benefit, but it’s not—and never has been—enough. College can punch your ticket, but increasingly, you’ll still have to pay your dues working something unrelated to your major, or even area of interest, while you build up experience, skills, and maturity.

Yes, it’s hard to even get a job these days, I admit it. I’ve lived it. But, they do exist, even if it means taking something below your level. After college, I worked a full-time telemarketing job, and later a clerical job with the local government. Neither used the skills I learned in college, and the latter only required a high school education. I’m not saying to flip burgers, unless that’s all you can find, but something is better than nothing while you teach yourself something practical.

There’s still a value to college, but that value has changed. College is either the place you go to learn hard, practical skills, or the place you go to get soft skills while teaching yourself another skill. It is not for everyone. A college education is not a requirement if you want to become an iron worker, an artist, or a programmer. You can go to school, you can apprentice, or you can teach yourself. If you feel like college is the best option, however, do yourself a favor, and do it on the cheap. Get scholarships, go to a state school or a community college, stay local, and live at home. Student loan debt will cripple your aspirations far more effectively than a terrible job market.

One way to know you’re succeeding at something is when you make people angry.

I’m not talking about specifically aiming to make people angry. No good can come from deliberately upsetting people. What I mean is, if you’re succeeding at something, the very act of your success is going to engender jealousy and resentment among some people. Sometimes, these people will express their resentment through anger, or even sabotage. That’s how you know you’re succeeding. These people are not your friends, and if you thought they were, think again.

By way of example, let’s look at Apple. By any measure, Apple is a successful company, and yes, that success engenders resentment. Recently, a story came out that Apple is cutting supply orders for the iPhone 5. More than a few have suggested that it’s an attempt at stock manipulation, and I would agree with this line of thinking. It adds up. Because of Apple’s runaway success, it’s engendered a line of thinking that assumes its okay to tear it down for financial gain.

To take it back to the human level, there’s other reasons to attack someone else’s success beyond the merely financial. The first is simple that it makes us feel good to fling our metaphorical feces as the object of our jealous ire. It’s easy, it’s effective (to us), and doesn’t cost us anything but our time. Everyone, at least once, has thought to themselves “He/she/it sucks. The only reason they got successful is that they got lucky.” This may be a reason, but it’s far from the only one. Even if “eighty percent of success is showing up,” to quote Woody Allen, that still leaves a gap to fill. You have to do the work.

And, when you’re doing the work, and putting it out there, the one thing you want most is feedback. You ask two questions: “Am I doing this right?” and “Can anybody hear me?” Angry people answer both of those, and both of the answers are “yes.” This makes sense for the latter question, but for the former, anyone who comes up to you, unsolicited, and says “you are doing this wrong” is validation of the opposite.

I want to separate this from professional, craft criticism. When Roger Ebert says you make bad movies, he does not approach your work from a perspective of jealousy, but from a perspective of craft. This is the same of any, quality critic, in any artistic medium. When you approach your (real) friends and family and beg for harsh, serious criticism, if they actually give it to you, there should be no jealousy there. It’s those people, known and unknown, who come up out of seemingly nowhere to attack you that are the unfortunate marker of being on the path success.

However, this is not an excuse to turn around and start berating those successful people you’re jealous of. The other distinguishing factor of the people who try only to tear down the successful is that they don’t produce anything of value. It takes no effort, no talent, and no skill to simply dismiss, or insult someone or their work. To channel that jealousy, that resentment, and do something constructive with it is much, much harder. This is what separates the poo-flingers from the people you actually have to worry about, though it’s hard to tell when you’re busy dodging projectiles. Once you understand, however, you won’t have to.

Musician Amanda Palmer recently posted a very intense missive to her blog about online bullying. [1]

I did something, and I don’t know exactly what possessed me to do it, but I did it. I typed “hate a…” into Google. I was going to type “hate amanda palmer” into the rest of the field to see what came up, but Google auto-filled for me. It auto-filled “Amanda Todd”.

“Who is Amanda Todd?” I thought.

Probably an actress. Or a teen celebrity girlfriend of Justin Bieber.

These are the types people who people typically like hating.

I Googled her name to find out what kind of celebrity she was.

She’s not a celebrity. Well. She is now.

She’s an ex–15-year-old girl who became specifically famous for leaving a sad, desperate YouTube clip behind before hanging herself a few months ago.

Reading this made me thing about something I’d read elsewhere, on ex-Futurist Jaron Lanier, and his reversal on the Internet.

As far back as the turn of the century, he singled out one standout aspect of the new web culture—the acceptance, the welcoming of anonymous commenters on websites—as a danger to political discourse and the polity itself. At the time, this objection seemed a bit extreme. But he saw anonymity as a poison seed. The way it didn’t hide, but, in fact, brandished the ugliness of human nature beneath the anonymous screen-name masks. An enabling and foreshadowing of mob rule, not a growth of democracy, but an accretion of tribalism.

It’s taken a while for this prophecy to come true, a while for this mode of communication to replace and degrade political conversation, to drive out any ambiguity. Or departure from the binary. But it slowly is turning us into a nation of hate-filled trolls.

Surprisingly, Lanier tells me it first came to him when he recognized his own inner troll—for instance, when he’d find himself shamefully taking pleasure when someone he knew got attacked online.

While some might brush off Palmer’s discovery as simply the cruelty of children, this sort of thing is not exclusive to children. Or the Internet. [2] This is a fundamental problem of human nature technology exacerbates, not a problem endemic to technology. What makes Internet bullying more insidious is that you often can’t put a name and face on your attackers. Even on Facebook, it’s easy to become someone else, and without seeing someone face-to-face, it’s equally easy to become a jerk. [3] Still, I can’t stress this enough, people have been jerks since time immemorial. Blaming the Internet for the problem is like blaming buffet restaurants for obesity. It’s not helping, but it’s far from the underlying symptom.

Rather than condemn, we should ask what can be done? Then again, is there something that can be done? I don’t want to take a defeatist attitude, but I’m not sure anything can be done to stop people from deliberately hurting others, online or in person. Solving fundamental problems of human nature are beyond me—one guy, a blog with a limited audience, and some experience in being bullied is unlikely to change the world. However, I would like to propose two things that can help mitigate the impact of the inevitable.

1. Don’t Feed the Trolls

“Don’t Feed the Trolls” is a piece of advice as old as the Internet, if not older. Sadly, it’s often very hard to do. People, especially children, never know what is going to incite someone to attack you. Expressing even the smallest opinion leaves you open to attack. When the wolves start sharpening their fangs, that’s you’re cue to disengage. Run the other way, and don’t say anything. At least online. The sort of people who attack you online have a short attention span. If you can get away early, and stay away, they’ll move on to an easier target.

2. Be Pre-emptively Private

Anonymity is a double-edged sword. If they don’t know who you are, that limits what they can do to you. Don’t put anything out there that you do not want associated with your name. It’s simple, basic Internet security practice, but if you didn’t grow up with this stuff like I did, you don’t think of it. In fact, I learned some of this the hard way, as a teenager—and as an adult—but that’s a story for another time. Our lives on the Internet are lived in public now, quite the difference from how it was when I first got online. However, Facebook and Tumblr can’t read your mind. People only see what you post, and we need to learn to post with discretion in mind first.

I’d also like to suggest something to parents on the Internet: be aware of what your child is up to. Look over their shoulder. Be aware of what can happen, step in before things get too deep, and do what you can to minimize damage before it happens. Kids will do stupid things, make fools of themselves, and be attacked. Only now can it happen on a global stage. Your job is to pay attention, and not let it get to that point. Surviving adolescence is hard, but it’s not as hard when you provide a support system, and that goes for things online and off.

This feels slightly defeatist, but I see little in the way of options at the moment. I’d like to have a discussion about this with anyone with experience in these matters, whether academic or otherwise. Please use the contact form to reach out and say your piece.

Perfection doesn’t come the first time around. It’s a process, and it’s a paradox.

One achieves perfection through iteration and refactoring. The more you do a thing, the better you will be. Whether this is playing a musical instrument, writing code, painting landscapes, or writing novels, doing it more makes you better at it. The process is just doing the work. That’s easy(ish). You do it over and over, improving each time, even just a little bit. That complex piece of music becomes easier to play. The next app is done in half the time with less bugs. The next landscape looks more realistic. The next novel gets a personalized rejection slip, instead of a form letter. We can see ourselves improve with each iteration of the work.

The paradox is harder. We all have a frame of reference for what we want our work to be. The piano player wants to be on par with Thelonious Monk. The coder wants to write software on par with Apple. The landscape painter wants to be on par with Peter Paul Rubens [1]. The novelist wants to be on par with Vladimir Nabokov. Each work only gets you part of the way there. It’s like walking a distance of a mile by walking half of it, then half the remaining distance, and half again, and so on. You never get there. Sound familiar? It’s a lot like Zeno’s Paradox. This sounds awfully depressing. Try as we might, we’ll never get to where we want to be.

It’s not as bad as it sounds. First of all, it’s not just you. When you realize this, it’s liberating. Everyone has their idea of perfection that they’re trying to reach. Without that driving, compelling force, there’s no need for them to try, after all. We’re all chasing each other’s unreachable ideals, and though we may get infinitesimally close, we may never get there. But that’s fine too. If we got there, we’d either find another unreachable ideal to chase, or we’d stagnate and die. When you accept that, life becomes much easier.

The biggest worry I had—and still have—about blogging daily is whether I’ll actually have anything to say each day. It was sometimes a struggle to find something to write about on a weekly basis, after all. For this go around, I’m trying to prime the pump, making sure to read—not skim—good writing on the web. I’m putting my Instapaper, Google Reader, and Flipboard accounts to good use, keeping an eye out for anything that might spark an idea. All the best writers are voracious readers. Reading gives a writer not only ideas, but a voice. We synthesize what we see, hear, and read, combining it into something distinctly our own. A writer who does not read risks stagnation. [1]

I know the day will come, sooner rather than later, that I’ll be sitting here, facing the blank page, and be unable to think of a damn thing to say. When that happens, I’ll try to figure out how to work around it. However, I shouldn’t force it. Iain Broome put it well:

Here’s a rubbish analogy for you. If a plumber cuts his or her hand on a pipe and it’s bleeding all over your nice new carpet, you don’t say ‘Carry on plumbing! Plumb man (or woman). Plumb like you’ve never plumbed before!’

Instead you say, ‘Goodness me, you’ve made a mess of that haven’t you? Here, sit down. Let me make you a cup of tea and get you a biscuit. Perhaps when we’ve got that blood cleaned up and you’ve had a chance to think about what’s happened, you can crack on again. Tell me, do you charge by the hour?’

I’m not afraid of sucking. I’m just afraid of being silent. This brings it around to why I’m even doing this whole blogging daily thing in the first place. Yes, it’s because I want to write more, but also because I want to read more. I want interesting writing, interesting links, interesting commentary, and interesting people providing it. What better place to start getting all of that than on my own blog. Be the change you want to see on the Internet, or something like that. As long as I can keep my pump primed with good things that get me thinking, I’ll never want for something to write about.

Until the day I do.

This will hopefully be later rather than sooner.

When that day comes, I hope any ostensible reader of this site doesn’t notice. Either I’ll manage to find something to write about, or I’ll find a great link deserving of commentary, or I’ll just bang on the keyboard and pray it doesn’t suck. I figure the more I make the clackity noise, the less likely I’ll be unable to find something to say. Once the pump is flowing, the job becomes a lot easier.