Critical Question Draft and Free Write

Part 1:

In the third floor stacks at Love Library, I look to my right and see a wealth of thick books resting on parallel floors that stretch to the ceiling. The titles on the majority of them are too small for my eyes to distinguish; one says something about social security, another about labor, one about industry, and another about business and some normative claim about employee benefits. Capitalism seems omnipresent.

Normally, I have profound shower epiphanies. However, when I showered this morning at 8:25, those meager three hours of sleep I had mustered were failing to withstand rumination before I had my coffee.

I try not to think while I’m falling asleep; otherwise, I’ll remember that I’m trying to sleep and that thought alone will destroy my chances. This is my personal brand of insomnia.
I'm a mega-nerd who manages to fall in love with most of my classes, but AP Government stole my heart as a junior in high school. It is to date the hardest class I have taken, but Mr. Baker revolutionized not my political views but my sense of civic duty. Whenever we complained about either the workload or the annoying trivialities of American politics, he would simply retort, "If you don't understand what controls government, then government controls you." I have done my best to be an informed citizen ever since.
 My most recent interpersonal quarrel involved one of my best friends, who had opted yet again to give the manipulative, cheating, and emotionally abusive man she somehow loves another chance to treat her the way she deserves. We argued because I knew that he was only doing so much (“changing”) to get her back, as previously demonstrated, because he hadn’t been able to call her his own for a month. But last time, she lied to me about going back to him. I opted to put aside my frustration because, with or without a protective friend on her side, he would go back to his old ways. She needed a confidant who would refuse to see him through rose-colored lenses. Their relationship manifested a disaster masquerading as “love” to everyone around her. Can you realistically talk someone out of your own idea of love, when such an ideal convention is painted as passion outweighing logic?

Right now, I’m thinking about this pivotal phase of my life. I’m living on my own for the first time (not with my family, and not in a dorm), and I don’t have a car for transportation. I, a comfortable-middle-class West Omaha girl, am living in a low-income neighborhood and am the only female in my house. This newfound autonomy is strange yet pleasantly liberating, not liberating in the “Yay I’m on my own, no rules!” sense, but in the sense that I’m learning how to adapt (while most of my friends are back home with their families for the Summer). I guess the pivotal part is that I’m okay in this new setting.

Actually, I just spotted a respectably sized black spider right next to the outlet in which I need to plug my laptop charger. I demanded that one of my roommates supervise while I banged against the wall to put the little devil in a more preferable fatal swat position. I carried out the plan, only to have the spider not scurry up the wall but jump off of it, as well as my roommate scurry up the stairs in record speed.  I’m immersing myself in a wholly unfamiliar milieu that is the unadulterated antithesis of de facto segregated West Omaha. Further, all members of my household, regardless of gender (as if that were a coding for fear of specific stimuli), are paralyzed with fear of an organism that is exponentially smaller than one of us alone.

My home community personally epitomizes “bittersweet.” It’s so easy to forget the collective and individual hardships of your loved ones when you depart to college. Then, when you visit, you’re simultaneously relieved by the heartwarming familiarity and flooded with the realities you left behind.

Part 2:

What is the relationship between “hard work,” societies that insist its value, and mental health? This is a critical question with various branches of relevance and without a definitive answer. I chose this question (which will need refining) because the promise of reward on which functioning societies hinge is objective in theory, but the “hard work” that is validated by reward is subjective in practice. I’m aware that this sounds a bit Marxist, but I believe that this relationship poses a unique challenge for Millennials. As we are so often reminded, Millennials are a coddled generation, with helicopter parents and irritatingly high expectations. We find the prospect of starting at the bottom of a company’s ladder and “working our way up” like our parents did to be unappealing at best and unfulfilling at worst. We refuse to accept the custom that “doing what you love” and financial security are mutually exclusive; we have also witnessed a recession, which made clear that “hard work” worthy of reward transcends elbow grease. Reality has evidenced that hard work is subject to rigorous standards, which have somehow taken the form of elite club sports and prestigious schools. The problem is that an unprecedented number of Millennials are willing to do whatever it takes to meet those standards. This question is relevant to me because I succumbed to a pervasive overachiever culture that was the norm at my college preparatory high school. Despite my unconditional love for the pursuit of knowledge, the pressure of getting into an elite college so that I could get into an elite law school so that I could actually make it as a lawyer so that I could fulfill my dream—to be a firm advocate for victims of sexual assault in the courtroom—college applications reduced me to numbers, to my high school statistics. My mental health suffered inexplicably, and I am not alone. And it actually gets worse than America; test scores matter so much in many Asian countries with advanced economies to the extent that student suicide rates soar when the crucial test results arrive. We are the future of this world, and we coddled, naïve Millennials are in reality willing not only to meet but to attempt to exceed the impossibly high standards of hard work that societal expectations tell us is worthy of reward.  This critical question is applicable on a personal, national, and global level; it concerns the value of education for its own sake, the financial burden of higher education before school even begins, and a societal stigma surrounding mental illness. There is no definitive answer to my critical question, but it addresses various branches of relevance that can shed a different shade of light on this important discussion. In a personal conclusion, I wholeheartedly believe that education is one of the most beautiful, beneficial, and critical aspects of humanity; both seeing and experiencing it bound and gagged by the increasingly heavy pressure to succeed moves me ask why.