College or Survive

There is a version of my life where I'm in a classroom right now. Somebody is explaining derivatives. I'm taking notes in a good notebook I paid for with a loan.

It was a real choice. Not a metaphor.

I'd been accepted somewhere. I could have gone. Tuition was on the table in the form of debt I could sign for and stretch out over twenty years of whatever job the degree produced. My family wanted me to go. Some part of me wanted me to go. There is still a part of me that thinks the other version would have been easier.

But easier isn't the thing I'm after.

I sat on the floor of the sublet one night and did the math. Four years of tuition. Four years of not building anything real. Four years of learning things that in four years would be out of date because I'd be learning them from professors who were themselves four years behind.

Meanwhile I had a laptop and free model credits and a city that didn't care what I had a piece of paper for as long as I could pay rent.

I picked the city. I told my family a week later. My mother cried. My father was silent for a long time and then said: OK.

Most days I think I was right. Some days I don't know. I think that's probably the shape of any real decision.