Fear, and Loathing Wharton

Hello! It is great to see you. Today’s post is about two things: fear, and my hatred for Wharton, my alma matter. Enjoy.

fear

Recently I have been feeling a lot of fear. I know that I am not alone in this feeling. People in my real life are telling me they are afraid, people online are telling me they are afraid, and I’m afraid. Fear is everywhere, and it’s certainly peaking in the United States, where I am located. As such, I thought it would be a good time to revisit one of my favorite Thich Nhat Hanh books. The book is about fear. It’s called Fear. Maybe, it will help us with our fear. Fear!

I haven’t done an ounce of anything that I usually classify as ‘work’ in a while. Those two things being working on my video game development project, and speedrunning on Twitch. I did wrap up my Chip ‘n Dale project - I ended 30 seconds away from the world record, but only 23rd place on the leaderboards. Chip ‘n Dale is quite crowded at the top. If you want to check out the culmination of my progress, here you go. This run took place on March 11, 2025.

Since March 11, I have done no work. The number one reason for this is abject terror at the state of the USA. It’s difficult to be productive in this environment. In fact, it’s difficult to do anything in this environment, productive or not. Do you seriously want me to make a healthy meal and then wash the dishes right now?!?!? THE WORLD IS FALLING APART.

There’s a couple difficult caveats with this fear. The first is that it’s largely justified. There’s real shit to be afraid of. It’s hard enough to shake fears that are irrational, exaggerated, or far away, but this fear is increasingly not those things. The second is that, as far as I can tell, it’s not going to end anytime soon. We are a month or two into this new accelerated timeline of the USA hurtling head first into fascism. We’re on a path whose end does not feel close. It’s going to keep getting worse before it gets better.

So, with fear severely limiting my ability to lead a happy and productive life, and with the causes of that fear having no end in sight, something needs to change. Naturally, and kind of unfortunately, the only thing we can actually change is ourselves, how we think, and what we do.

There are a few bits of Thich Nhat Hanh’s insights in Fear that I have been finding helpful in recent days. The first is to imagine that you are an astronaut who just landed on the moon. Upon landing, your ship and a bunch of critical gear malfunctions. You have 48 hours of oxygen left. There is not enough time for someone from Earth to come save you, so you know you will die here on the moon.

If you were to grant this astronaut one wish of their choosing, they would surely wish to be back on planet Earth, just walking around and seeing the sights. They wouldn’t wish to be the head of a corporation or to be a world famous athlete or musician. Simply being back on Earth - our home - would be the most tremendous relief imaginable.

I think this speaks to a couple techniques. The first is more obvious to me: gratitude, which is a well-known way to improve your happiness today. “The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green Earth in the present moment, to appreciate the peace and beauty that are available now.” If you are able to read these words right now, you are likely safe. You can be present in your own body, and enjoy that safety available right here and right now. I am now trying to do exactly that as often as I possibly can.

The second technique the astronaut thing makes me think of is related to the fact that Earth is the home of humans. We are from this place. Lately, as I walk around my neighborhood, I try to remember that I am home. I am home in the sense that my body is a home for my consciousness, I am home in the sense that I am from the United States, but I am also home in the sense that humans are from Earth. Part of the tactics being employed in the USA right now center around displacing people from their homes, via mass deportation. Less-direct ways to remove the feeling of ‘home’ from us citizens is suggesting that certain types of people - people of color and trans people being the two that I identify with - do not belong here.

One thing helping me fight off the fear our overlords are trying to instill is to return to my body, feel my feet on the Earth, and think, “I am home”. This is your home too. Every day that we can spend here at home is a gift for us to enjoy. We belong here, and can feel comfort being here. This is our home.

loathing wharton

One surreal thing about what is happening in the United States right now that I have to talk about at some point in some capacity is how personally connected I am to the backstories of THE two biggest actors in our current drama - “president” Donald Trump and president Elon Musk.

Right now, I want you to think about your undergraduate education, if you have one. Think about the school you went to. And I am talking college - not the university. This is the smaller college within the university, if applicable. Now, imagine that Donald Trump and Elon Musk went there. Ewww, right?

Me, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk all went to the same small undergraduate program: The Wharton School, a business school at the University of Pennsylvania that has around 500 kids per graduating class. We all have the exact same educational experience: we have a Bachelors of Science in Economics from Wharton, and none of us went to graduate school (though Elon did fabricate a story about having a PhD in physics, but we’re talking about real degrees only, here. He definitely doesn’t have a PhD in physics, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t have a bachelors either).

Do you know HOW shocked I would have been if, when I was a senior in college, you told me that the collapse of the United States was being engineered by two people who had Wharton undergraduate degrees, just like me? I’ll tell you - I wouldn’t have been surprised in the least fucking bit. And, I’m just as not-surprised today.

It is with great pride that I tell you, I had not one single friend among my classmates at the Wharton School. This is not an exaggeration - not ONE, single friend. My friends at Penn consisted of a few engineers, and a few liberal arts and fine arts kids. Even at age 18, I found Wharton to be a hilarious combination of entitled and idiotic people.

And you might think, “well hey, Penn is one of those Ivy League schools isn’t it? Of course they were entitled.” Here’s the thing about Wharton undergraduates though - they are the most entitled kids at Penn, even with Penn itself already having the most entitled kids in the world. Penn at large is full of rich kids with glittering credentials, but then even among the rich glittery kids, there’s an even higher and more glittery class of students at Wharton. It’s the hardest to get into, the hardest to transfer into, produces the most over-inflated egos, all while simultaneously never asking you to prove yourself in any measurable way (this is because business school is all bull shit fluff. If you’re not familiar with business school, believe me, it has no reason to exist other than as a class barrier. You learn nothing). It is the closest thing to real life Slytherin I know of. That’s Wharton.

Honestly, it’s utterly shocking to look in retrospect at the fact that I went there. I still think it might have been some sort of clerical error that they let me attend. If you simulated my life 100,000 times, this life we’re living is probably the only one where I go to Wharton. My parents were far from rich. Neither of them went to college. My mom is an immigrant lunch lady at a public school and my dad is a Boston-Irish masshole who sells lumber. I was drastically out of place at Penn, and then even moreso at Wharton, where not being rich is scarcer than any other minority classification. When I told my parents I was going to Penn, neither of them had ever heard of it.

Other than being the most prestigious and entitled, the other thing Wharton undergraduates specialized in was being much worse at anything measurable or provable than their credentials would lead you to expect. In just my four years at Wharton, I witnessed two great examples of this.

First, the requirement to take Calculus 2 (essentially, the Calculus that follows BC Calculus and starts three-dimensional calculus) got dropped from the list of required courses while I was there because these premier Wharton kids mysteriously couldn’t pass a course that every single kid at Penn’s less-prestigious engineering school was passing. That’s the funny thing about math: there are actual right and wrong answers, so the Trumps and Elons of the world can’t just pay to get a passing grade.

In a similar example, my freshman year at Penn saw a massive cheating scandal in the only course in all of Wharton that required any computer programming. Back then the course was literally called “Intro to Computers” (lol, yes, I am getting a little old). Everyone in my year turned in the exact same code for their final project - all copied from each other - and it put the school in a bind. Again, similar to math, computer code either works or it doesn’t. Since none of the genius Wharton kids could get their code to work (again, despite many talented programmers coming out of the school’s engineering college), they all wound up copying and pasting one kid’s answer that actually ran without errors. Unfortunately, this cheating was extremely easy to see. The school’s response? No kids got punished and they permanently changed the course to make it easier. Specifically, all programming was removed from the course. Even three years later when I was a senior, there was still no programming brought back into the Wharton curriculum. When your specialty is spouting bull shit, writing code can be tricky. It’s all good though - that stuff never comes up in business. And even if it does, someone less important than us business people can use their less valuable time to do it.

There are so many stories I could tell about Wharton. I will leave you with one of my favorites. My senior spring was in 2010. This was pretty freshly off of the bankruptcy of Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers, who, prior to their demise, typically hired around 1/3 of the kids from Wharton. It was always the case that rich kids’ parents would get them jobs after school, but with this massive chunk of jobs gone, it made your parents finding you a job a requirement, rather than just the most common outcome.

Me being me, with no connections that would just hand me a job, did not have any plans lined up for after graduating. One day in one of my classes a bunch of kids were talking about where they were working after graduating. When asked, I mentioned that I didn’t have a job yet. The girl sitting next to me looked at me utterly shocked, and literally said, in complete seriousness, “wow really? Wait, if you don’t have a job, why don’t you just work for your dad?”

And that ladies and gentlemen is the cloth that our two presidents were cut from. Fuck Wharton.