Is life too short?

SapphireStar

SapphireStar

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I was thinking this last night as I was angry at my essay deadline being brought forward by 15 days!? I was wondering is life too short for tests?
Think about it, Im only appling this to the UK educational system, dont know the ones in other countries:

The musts
Nursey: Can range from 2-4.
Primary school: 4-11.
High school: 11-16.

The Maybes
College: From 16 and onwards.
University: 18 and onwards.

We spend in the musts 15 years in education, then in college one course can be 2 years or more. Then at university the courses range from 3 years and up.
You may be thinking "well dont bother with college and university then! Duh!"
But think about the job you want. If you dont want to go out and earn a fortune then by all means, just go to a work experince and get some qualifications there or just go and get a job once youve left school. However most people I know have taken that option and are know either on the dole or are depressed because they didnt take another path.

Im not saying that those who dont go to college and university get crap jobs, not at all. Some people who left school have very good paid jobs. But noneadays if you want a really good job, you need the education to back it up.

Which brings me to my point. Is all this really nessary? Do we need to spend 15 years in an education that will probably lead us to either McDonalds or Sainsburys? As Martin Prince said in an episode of the Simspsons "Lifes too short for tests!" Is it?
 
15 years i didnt realise how long ive spent in school. On the point that your making, its nessarcery for those living in a westernised country too be educated for them to be a productive member of society. they need to beable to read and do numbers to buy thing pay bill and to the goverment mor importantly pay tax. now thats fine people can read and write reasonable from anytime between 10-14.
It is my oppinion that they are kept at school if they show no intrest in education to be regulated and have tabskept on them because they are too young too work. this is so that authrities know why they are.
Also britain is priding itself on being the capital of education cause we aint got anything else in britain al the industries are gone. it wont look good for the capital of education to have 15 year old youths on the streets causing havoc.
 
In the US, high school is from ages 15-18 (usually), so it's a lot easier not to go to college after leaving school. However, by the time people are out of high school, the "smart" kids will have had 2-3 years of work experience already, making it far easier for them to go to a "real" job with an actual salary. Because of this, school really only consumes your life in the last few years of high school (or college, if you go on), so it really doesn't feel that long. However, I wish schools would allow students to only go to classes specifically designed for their future career rather than spending 80% of their school time in the "big four" classes and other required electives that contribute nothing to their future career. I honestly think a class in Computer Science right now would be a heck of a lot more valuable than virtually all of the required classes I am taking currently.
 
Life is much too long. If there were some way to cut out all the bullshit and just on to the end part of it I'd be really happy. lol I think they should quit trying to prolong life and just start trying to make the front part shorter. Who cares if elderly people live longer anyhow? They should focus on cutting out all the education and work bullshit and just get people up to speed faster... but then just have the do recreational "work". There's no point in anything else. All it does is detract from positive things.
 
Life really is too short for tests in my opinion. I wish I could have had 2 - 3 years in school to teach the basics of the big three (reading, writing, arithmetic) and then been able to go onto some sort of apprenticeship instead of constantly digging deeper and deeper into these three key points, pointlessly spiraling into the madness of know-it-all-ity that we are supposed to eventually achieve apparently. I think we spend way too much time going over the "basics", which is what school is supposed to be about in the first place.

After 12 or so years in school, I never really learned a whole lot that I apply in my real life activities (including work). It's sad really. All of those years when I could have stopped after learning how to read, write, and do simple math and then spent the other 8 -9 years really learning how to do something specific. Could you imagine how good I could have been at anything by now? I could have been a fucking doctor by this point had I have been able to be an apprentice, or at least start choosing my own courses after a short period in the real basics.

It sickens me to think how much I could have accomplished had I not have had to constantly keep digging deeper into things I could care less about like history, and social science, and geography. You can say that history is important to know because it supposedly repeats itself all you want. I say, let someone who cares deal with predicting the future based on history. Let me cut people open so I can be a billionaire, 30 year old retired doctor, living it up on my yacht in the Caribbean.

Now that I've gone through 12 years of bullshit that rarely ever interested me I have little motivation to continue on just so I can accomplish the same thing by 45 or 50 years old instead. And because I no longer have the motivation to continue school, I'm stuck in a go nowhere job doing something that I'm sure to hate with every ounce of my core within the next 5 years (provided the industry even holds out for that long), and all for what? So I can be a little more "well rounded"? I say fuck well roundedness, give me specific knowledge of something I care to know any day.

And that was my rant. For now at least.
 
life is never long enough. i hope they finally invent that technology they were talking about where they said humans could live forever as long as they didn't get some fatal disease or killed accidentally. thatll be awesome i hope it's done before i get old
 
idgi said:
life is never long enough. i hope they finally invent that technology they were talking about where they said humans could live forever as long as they didn't get some fatal disease or killed accidentally. thatll be awesome i hope it's done before i get old
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What technology are you referring to? Can you post some sort of link or reference so that we know what you are talking about?

I do like the idea of living forever, however. I doubt I would want to, but I'm sure I'd make it at least 2 or 3 hundred years before you heard me complaining about it. That is, provided the aging processed is halted also... I don't want to be a vegetable, but still live forever.
 
I agree with you people here, we definably spend way too much time in school, learning things that we will probably never need, we should not waste so much time going over the same thing over and over again, and don't misunderstand I like trigonometric, and world history and a little of geography, but the problem is that they kinda teach you it over and extensive period of time, and you see the same over and over.

Let's say that the average person lives 75 years, he would spend his first 17 years going to school then to university for 4-5 more years and by the time he start in his first "real" and "full-time" and "productive" job he will be 22 or so, he would have had expended 25% of his entire life just learning how to live, and that is counting his retirement years, when he be just too old like to do anything really interesting.

So in the end I find human life to be incredibly short, and insufficient like to enjoy it how we should
 
Life is neither too short or too long yet. You wont know the answer to that until you die. School was the greatest time of my life, I loved it. I went on to college, so I guess *counts on fingers* I spent about 13 years at school. Yeah, 13. I started Kindergarten at 5 and left college when I was 18. 13 years isn't really a long time in the scale of things, 3 of my friends died in that time, for them life was too short. At 18 your life is really just beginning. You are classed as an 'adult' and enter that strange world with your first real job. I have very good educational qualifications but my first real job was as a care assistant in a nursing home. I am now 36 and my current job is civil servant. I have never used my college degree. There just isn't any reason too. I am not rich by any stretch of the imagination, nor do I want to be. I stayed at school because I loved it. You should make your own choice. Work if you want to work, continue education if that's what you want to do and in the mean time enjoy what you are doing, because what you are doing, be it school, work or lazing about on the dole, you are living. Enjoy every moment, every breathe, every experience be it a test or a work deadline or serving a burger at Maccy D's. This is the only life you get, the only chance you have to just BE. Grab it with both hands and run with it because you never know when fate will throw you a curve ball.

I've rambled enough.
 
yep life is too short for tests screw that shit. i left school when i was 16 and went and became an apprentice welder. i cudnt have faced any more years of learning my brain wud have exploded.
 
Too short? Lawl.

I recently took to analyzing what I'd done with my last 19 years of life. After concluding that shit all was done, I couldn't help but notice about a quarter of an above-average lifespan had gone down the drain for me.

So in that perspective, yeah, life's way too short. It's just a shame you can't get to the good stuff early on... all this education lark is way too dull and stressful.
 
Life may be short for some, but it can be long for others. When it comes time to die though, I think all of us will say life was too short simply due to regret. We regret that we didn't get to experience certain things.

There are zillions, gazillions, and godzillions of things to do: sky diving, crafting a canoe, writing a novel, and all of them have one thing in common: intrinsic drives. There are extrinsic and intrinsic motivations, which are reasons for why we do certain things.

For example, a promotion at work would be an external motivation to work harder, thus it is an extrinsic drive. However, someone else may choose to work hard to prove to themselves that they can push themselves to the edge, and feel an internal satisfaction. That is an intrinsic drive.

Of all the stories you hear for what people say on their death bed, they never ask for more extrinsic, material things: "If only I had more money... If only I became a CEO..", but rather, they ask for what matters most: family and self-actualization.

So yes, life is short but mainly because we spend so much time doing things for extrinsic desires. Most of our life is spent in school, then work, then finally relaxing. If you find learning to fill some purpose inside of you, then it is worth being in school; if working gives you a purpose in life, then working gives some amount of internal satisfaction; and if resting gives you time to do that which you desire, then relax. Life is short, so don't waste it.
 
Kibbies said:
So yes, life is short but mainly because we spend so much time doing things for extrinsic desires. Most of our life is spent in school, then work, then finally relaxing. If you find learning to fill some purpose inside of you, then it is worth being in school; if working gives you a purpose in life, then working gives some amount of internal satisfaction; and if resting gives you time to do that which you desire, then relax. Life is short, so don't waste it.
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I entirely agree with all of that. And as for that article link that was posted.... I'm very afraid to think if your able to live for such long time periods. I think the first problem that needs to at least be fixed before that is birth rates/control. The earth is already starting to get crowded. What happens when people start to not die as much?

I also think life can be to short for some, long for others. It just depends on how far up or down your are in the 'pecking order' of life. If your moderately smart, and you have okay 'luck', then you can be content, of if you have something worth living for. Example: A mate, a fulfilling job, children. But if you've lost people you loved, people betrayed you, your constantly beaten in school, then life can seem so long and hard. It just depends on what happened to you.

And I do agree on the school stuff, that waaaaaaay to much time is spent on education. Half the time I see adults who don't use or even remember half the stuff they learned in school. The only good thing I see from it is that it makes you think, but still, you can find other ways to do that. I'm in High School now, and I'm really frustrated with my English courses. I NEVER cared about grammer and puncution, and the way I say/write things. I only do it so people can understand me. But it's required (to get a High School diploma) to have passed English I, II, III, and IV. And we have only four years in High School here. It's ridiculous. And over half the history I learn, and half the math I learn, I'll probably never use. I'll be working as a vet (i hope), for goodness sakes! I won't need to know about all the bloody battles that are over, the dead people who are dust by now, and all that. History does repeat, it's nothing special. Tragic maybe, but nothing special.

~Done with ranting. For now. ^_~
 
You know what? I seriously thought I was going to make a mistake making this thread as I thought people would jump me and say that education is not a waste of time, but you havent. I agree we should have an education, but we just need the basics, english, maths, science. The rest should be a choice.
 
~SapphireStar~ said:
You know what? I seriously thought I was going to make a mistake making this thread as I thought people would jump me and say that education is not a waste of time, but you havent. I agree we should have an education, but we just need the basics, english, maths, science. The rest should be a choice.
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your are right about the basics but what are you going to use Geometry for and Calucles ( srry cant spell today) I cant find any reason for these subjects, dont get me wrong I love math but i dont see a point to it
 
Of course life is too short. I once read a book with that involved a character who had lived well beyond a normal life...thousands of years actually, and what he said right before he died was very interesting, "Throughout my whole life only one thing remained the same: There was never enough time."

And I think that is true.
 
As said by many already, I agree, education is quite the pit of quicksand for your life: ever so time-consuming. I've pondered about this before and thought, if only we had the choice to hone in on specific drives rather than the universals for 13 or so years, we could advance so much faster and have the time to actually enjoy life. I know I was frustrated when picking my courses each year in high school because there were so many good-looking electives, but I couldn't take them as the required standards hogged the space in my schedule.

However, for life itself to be "too short for tests"? I disagree. You figure the climax of your life is around the 20's and 30's when you're released from the walls of the school building and out to explore. 40's and 50's, life is going on the downward slope, but it's still okay. Passed that though, your joints are deteriorating and you can't give little Johnny a piggyback ride anymore. As far as I'm concerned, once there's joy sapped from life, it's not life. Technology has merely extended the area of the downward slope/flat line. Therefore, heck no, I don't want to live forever, let alone 100... 90... 80 years.

Due to how we've organized life, it seems short. If we'd only plan it better, we'd be able to do some of the things we want to do. The ideal is to make it so that you're free to do as you wish during the climax years of your life, versus having them hogged by work and the like. Education is important, but it needs to be more focused. If it was, then the ideal would be closer to being achieved, ergo a happier, more fulfilling life to the point in which you don't have a reason to say "life is too short."
 
yup i relised life is to short for tests and essays, when i found out because iwas away for a week (on holiday) i got an essay and it was dew in 4 days for punishment for taking that week off >_< and like in Australia we have primary school (7 years) then high school (6 years) so thats 13 years of your life wasted doing 6 hours a day of school and plus homework :(
 
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