Yes these kind of discussions are often useless to me because they ignore the things in life we don't choose. They're written as if someone has complete agency and is just choosing between easier and less reward versus harder and more reward. For me at least the real difficulty is dealing with broken systems and all that's needed of you from them, when rejecting the system can mean complete failure of the worst kind.

People don't let others steal their time because they're weak, it's because the system is so broken.

It's not so much "do I put this effort into building a ship and charting new territory" it's "do I chart this ship into pirate-infested waters when then outcome could mean death, and shipbuilders are defrauding people about the safety of materials?" The correct analogy in contemporary society often isnt builders or explorers, it's refugees.

Yes I'm cynical. I wish I weren't.

I really like how society provides libraries/internet - well you still have to spend some time on banal things like learning reading or filling in forms in writing to have access.

School is also useful to learn about mistakes or shitty things people did in the past so you don't do the same in your life. Without society you would not have access to great minds of the past which might be even more useful.

Unless you know you are kind of prodigy that without learning reading or writing you could build modern washing machine from raw materials available in your area.

My point is that school is just a baseline for living in a modern society.

If you by any chance live in a first world country maybe you should be ashamed of yourself. Maybe you should watch some documentary about how barely literate people struggle in 3rd world countries and how much of their life is wasted on meeting basic needs and they did not have time to attend the school or there was no school available at all.

Life is short because of senescence

If only as a society we could put some effort into that instead of pretty much everything else for a little while. If we solved anti-senescence we'd have all the time in the world to fix everything else

Yes, looking back I cannot believe I did not just walk out of high school each day. I could have headed to a library and learnt a lot more in a fraction of the time. I could have become incredibly physically fit with the remaining time, or improved my guitar playing.

I guess I just didn’t have the confidence to think - well, actually, this is stupid and walking out is a smart thing to do.

Society can only give what it takes (from you and others).