"I should do a course, get some direction in my life. work towards something"

"But this is life, a course may give you something to work towards, but it just fills up time while you could be out living your life."

"But how can I live my life when I don't have the means to secure a decent paying job that enables me to do what I want to?"

"Having a job provides money, yes, but it again fills your life with routine, a sometimes unobtainable goal to work towards, dangled like a carrot on a string."

"Then wheres the balance? how can one be happy and free to live a full life whilst still being able to afford the finer things?"

"The truth is sacrifice, you have to cut out of your life what isn't directly linked to your happiness. Take-away's, video games, cigarettes, partying. All these things are money sinks that give you an almost tribalistic identity to attach yourself to. How defensive we get when a friend calls out our favourite Chinese restaurant. All these things provide a small amount of reward and happiness when indulged in, but really detract from the time you have to truly live your life."

"That's not true, I love video games and parties, and Chinese food is awesome. these things make me happy, I work in order to afford them and i get a sense of fulfillment from them."

"Exactly, but when you finish a video game, you do not walk away, when you leave a party, its never the last one. Every game must be better than the last, every party must be more wild... Surely this is because you're not actually happy, but trying to find an end goal, something to fill your life with in order to never truly look mortality in the eye, to replace real experiences with virtual worlds and drug fueled conversations that mean nothing, so as to feel accomplished in something? anything?"

"Well if life is about memories, experiences and connections then surely the things I have done check these boxes? The connections I've made with people at parties are still stronger than most of my family ties, I've experienced some amazing things at festivals, incredible bands and sights most people wouldn't believe happens behind the zip of a £15 pop up tent, I've visited a handful of incredible countries, places where drugs and sex are legally traded commodities, places where mountains rise up sporadically out of snowy plains for miles. And Chinese food is awesome.
As for video games, I have played the role of the hero in many stories, I've saved and destroyed countless worlds, and experienced first hand, and sometimes first-person, some of the greatest stories written by a human mind. Are these not real experiences?"

"Or are they designed to make you feel this way? to stop you exploring your own creativity and posing a threat to the industry that supplies these to you? to satiate your hunger for adventure to stop you exploring the boundaries of our world and realizing that the entire planet is one, that borders are concepts designed to keep us in check? That we're kept within these boundaries in order to work, providing a better life for people who can afford more than us? That countries are privatized concentration camps where we're born into an Orwellian system that trains us from
age 5 to be regimented, in uniform and working in industries that benefit no one but corporations? Then spat out into the world where we're expected to continue this vicious cycle otherwise 'the system' will disown us, cast us out, make us without homes. We're shown adverts on TV for jobs, movies show us people that are happy because they're in jobs they love, everyone and everything is designed to market to us the benefits of having a job. And jobs are the only way you can afford to experience video games, parties, holographic adventures that replace the real thing."

"I suppose you could say that, working in retail, hospitality, bars whatever is really the lower classes selling things they can't afford to people who can on behalf of people that have more than their employees and customer base put together. The majority of society view school as a positive thing, a place where we can expand our knowledge and explore multiple avenues of thought, socializing with our peers in the formative years of our lives is very important and can teach us a lot about later life."

"Are the subjects we learn at primary school, even up to high-school, not things we can either learn ourselves or be taught by our parents? We live in an age where almost every human, child or adult has a device on them that has access to pretty much all human knowledge on any subject, the capability to know everything and anything at any given time, yet still we rely on a system that was designed in a time where the most advanced technology was a decent sword. We learn religious studies, yet not how to properly manage money. We learn how to do advanced mathematics
but not how to groom ourselves. We're taught the names of base elements and how to handle them but not how to handle our own thoughts and emotions. We're taught the differences between cultures and races, but not similarities. We don't even learn philosophy, it's not that we're taught to NOT think, but rather not taught how to think."

I stop.

And I think.

"Why are you a taxi driver?" I ask eventually.

"What do you mean?"

"You've given me more to think about than any teacher I've ever had."

He laughs, and takes a corner.

"I drive taxi's because I get to have conversations like this. Those people we talked about that love their jobs? I'm one of them. I have the open road, I meet the most interesting people and everyday feels like an adventure."

"Feels like an adventure?" I ask "Isn't that a bit hypocritical given your argument?"

"Hey, I'm only human."