Sick and tired

It has been quite a long while since I found out some of my friends were adopting the 'threat' culture whereby pupils will pinpoint top scorers of most of the subjects they learn and identify those high flyers as threats. Initially I thought since I could not change the culture, I decided to fight fire with fire by also adopting the same system as them so as to gain benefits for myself.

Sure I did reap some benefits from the effort of constantly benchmarking different students as my target. However, in the long run the culture became more of a nuisance than I ever expected it to be. For one, we had to constantly be nosy parkers and try to source for how well the top scorers faired in their respective classes, then we had to spend time making ourselves disappointed because of how lowly we faired against them. Sure it does make us more motivated to study to defeat them, but in the end I found no true benefit in all this concern about how other people faired against us when we know we cannot even cover our own butts by being one of the high flyers as well.

What I meant was, I have slowly come to realize that it is infinitely better to make more friends than to make more rivals. I believe that as we make more friends, we help one another with problems and questions that we might have. Not just academically but also emotional or social problems that are frequent visitors of our minds. Compare that with making more rivals and you would have realized how much less you actually benefit in the long run, where your only resource becomes the selfless teachers because you remembered that all your friends are your threats. Don't tell me that it’s not all about benefits. It IS about benefits. In fact, every choice we make every day is about whether it brings us more benefits that the other. Likewise for friends, why do you want to become a certain someone's good friend? Is it because they abuse you and insult you? No! It’s because they treat you well and thus you want to become their good friends. That itself is considered a benefit. Thus proving my point that everything that we do is about how much benefits we could actually gain.

I’m sick and tired of the culture and recently I have been really irritated by people who adopt the culture because they seem to always have a hidden agenda whenever they want to befriend anyone. It’s hard to convince anybody to ever trust anything that they utter from their vocal chords and this has led me to believe that their dishonesty for things has caused some uproar in the cohort, except they don’t actually realize the enormity of their crimes. In this rapidly callous world, I don’t know what to expect in the behavior of students anymore. We have got nobody to blame but ourselves for this phenomenon. Perhaps we should find a quick remedy to eliminate this problem once and for all.

But how?