You Should Skip Class.
by Max Pociask
Yes, you. You, reading this on your laptop in the middle of a lecture. Shut it and run straight out the door. There are literally hundreds of things that will bring you more value. You can go to the movies, for example. Or do a new drug for the first time. You have nothing to lose. If your parents front the bill or you’re on scholarship, you have no excuse! Let’s be honest with ourselves. You weren’t paying attention anyway.
In April of 2024, I skipped Economics 396 and drove three of my most belligerent friends deep into Vermont to watch the moon cover up the fucking sun. It was awesome. We saw a DJ set in tinfoil hats and drank excessively and crowd surfed to Short Dick Man by Gillette. All my cherished college memories came from outside the classroom. I crashed parties. I shot a sitcom with my best friends. I ran around campus in a giant hamster ball. I graduated cum laude. Who cares.
Unemployment among recent graduates is now the same as those with a high school diploma. If you’re racking up 20 grand in debt, you better come out of it with some stories to tell.
You could stay in class. You could even participate, if you really cared, but you’d look like a jackass. Nobody else is talking in discussion sections. They’re on their laptops, too. They should also skip class. Snap them out of it. Invite them for drinks or a to a show or ask them on a date or rally a band of vandals. None of you are learning right now, and you could be.
All my smartest friends skipped class. All my smartest friends work in finance. All my smartest friends use AI to optimize the kill chain. If your greatest piece of political resistance is your ability to sit in lecture and look at Depop, you will rent a shoebox apartment from your more interesting peers.
Skip class and protest. Skip class and learn how a non-profit is financed. Skip class and train to carve a spoon out of a goddamn tree branch. Show up late to the syllabus week because you rented a shed in a cornfield and filled it with your grandmother’s Halloween decorations and paid bands to play there on a Friday night and 300 other kids showed up to skip class together. And now you gotta clean it up and drop a bunch of cash at the ATM. I did this, and all without a syllabus.
Images courtesy of Max’s aforementioned cornfield-shed indie rock show, which was gracefully conducted inside an old airplane hanger. The band Stańczyck (@stanczyckband) can be seen performing here. Other headliners included Harrison Gordon and the band Noise 2.
Fuck it. Skip class and read a textbook. It’s better than 2048 in class. Skip class and join a political journal. Maybe you’ll learn something. Maybe you’ll make a friend. And when the textbook is too dense and the piece you’re writing gets stuck, go to office hours and ask for help.
The professor will say something like, “Who are you? I’ve never seen you before.” They might follow it with “thanks for coming, nobody else has questions at this point in the semester.” They might be bored, like you. They might be excited to work through a problem with you. Maybe you’ll finish that article. Maybe you’ll learn there’s a talented expert talking at the front of your 100-person pinterest seminar, and she’s actually pretty cool.
You might start showing up to class. You might greet the professor by name, and answer questions, and not even bring a laptop at all. You might have spotty attendance, but you know the textbook, and you’re coming to class with a razor-sharp attitude. The lecture might not make sense in your head. You might derail the whole class. Your professor is on board, however, because they see where you’re coming from. You might learn something brand new, together.
But you shouldn’t do that.
You’d look like a jackass, talking up there, disturbing the peace of your perfectly attendant classmates in the back row. Stay quiet, stay disengaged.
You’re better off skipping class.
📸: Kane Rubel
