Next up: ENG 102. The course criteria has changed since I wrote this, but I keep sticking with ENG 102 because these projects may actually effect things outside the classroom. When I first attempted this, instructors weren’t in the habit of penalizing the kind of ambition (and hubris) I brought to the table. Now they sometimes do, which is exactly why I need to keep writing these. I need to practice “Walking the walk” so to speak. Unfortunately for me, that tension between “swing for the fences” style projects and “the rules that try to tame them” will be a focal point of the rest of my portfolio. Unless there’s a market for essays about my high school shenanigans.😄 Then i’ll just do that! Until then, my writing utility maximization routines will keep me in ENG 102.
This was a passion project then, and it still is. Almost everything I’ve written since can trace its roots back to this PSA. The more I write, the more it feels like this might be Chapter One of whatever my “magnum opus” ends up becoming.
At its core, it’s a long-form PSA that connects rising despair to wage-productivity decoupling, depersonalized work, and “epistemic alienation,” then sketches reforms aimed at restoring meaning through fairer labor and freer, more humane institutions. There were so many tangents worth chasing that the paper wasn’t fully “complete” when I handed it in. I’m finishing it, though. Bit by bit.
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