The thing at stake in the “why not buck up and innovate” question⁰¹ is a class issue that’s much harder to quantify because it doesn’t tie directly to income or race or religion or birth order or immigrant status (though it may relate a bit more directly to the education of your parents and their parents.) In fact, although it relates to all those visible things; it’s ultimately something internal, something personal and characteristic made of you plus the way all these things define your circumstances. The suggestion to become an entrepreneur if you can’t get a job out of college is as meaningless to many people as it would be to suggest a career as a pharaoh or a lobbyist.

Entrepreneurship with a capital E requires a certain complex sense of entitlement that only comes from privilege. At its best, it is the entitlement to think for yourself, to be critical enough of the world around you, to want to fix it somehow. Uglier, is the entitlement it takes to inconvenience or potentially harm others in pursuit of your single-minded vision.

Critical thinking is the whopper though. Because of that, dismissing college is a huge mistake, especially dismissing liberal arts education. College is the first moment a lot of people experience the explicit permission they need to think critically for the first time. (Once you get the hang of it, of course, you can’t stop.) It’s vital to make it there, but ironically, to make it there you have to spend years practicing the antithesis of critical thought. You put your head down and become as obedient, compliant, and unquestioning as possible to make the right grades and tell admissions what they want to hear. If your family was very religious or very strict, you are probably already well versed in unquestioning obedience as a moral imperative, especially if you were a girl. Corporal punishment combined with a certain kind of religious belief (i.e. Repeated explanations of the falseness of your own perception combined with an elaborate vision of a contradictory, always-present invisible world knowable only by faith.) effectively makes critical thought feel like madness. If you belong to a minority culture, finding fault with your immediate world can be interpreted as disloyalty or shame. It’s risky bordering on crazy.

If you’re poor especially, you probably went to a school obsessed with standards, and so got a fine education in superficial thought and conformity. To get the scholarship you need, you absolutely cannot risk failure, so become an accomplished little pleaser. If you’re lucky once you get to college, you stumble into the class of a teacher who will provoke you and demand you think for yourself for the first time in order to get the good grades you are used to getting by studying day and night. You will make your first C but everything will suddenly be different. Different and not always good. If your parents are religious, your new capacity for analysis will reaffirm their belief that a secular education, or really any education at all, is dangerous to the health of your soul. And so it is.⁰²

The people you grew up with may begin to be wary of you and your ability to find fault with the world they say is just fine—good enough for them—but don’t really give much thought to. (Your mother will pray for you.) At the same time, you’re still you. The person who did what it took to get where you are now. Ta-Nehisi Coates writes well about how the skills that get you to grownuphood might be the same ones that get you kicked out:

And then there’s the fear of that other world, that sense that if you discard those practices, you have discarded some of yourself, and done it in pursuit of a world that you may not master.

It takes a long time to adjust to your new self, a self you don’t necessarily like very much. You feel compromised and sad most of the time. You have to put your head down and trudge through a no man’s land for a long time, maybe years, getting used to your new self. You can’t go home, but you still smell of home, so you can’t pass unnoticed in the vivid world you’ve aspired to your whole life. During these years, the best thing you can do is work quietly and well alongside the kind of contented people who aim to hold a tolerable day and go home to their families at a decent hour. You repay your parents, and pay down your student loans, and at some point the registration of your soul shifts, finally aligning, and you realize you are the adult you are pretending to be. You are capable, not only of criticism and curiosity, but, for the first time, it occurs to you to make the world you live in more like the place you always imagined.

And all of that can take a long time, during which it is still important to eat.