Is Your 6 A.M. Alarm the Echo of a School Bell You Never Escaped?

I slipped out of bed, the pre-dawn hush still pressing against the windows, and the thought struck like ice water: the 7 a.m. bell that once herded me into rows of desks still rings inside every Sunday-night dread I feel at thirty-nine. Coffee steaming, I opened my notebook to a blank page and let the autopsy begin—my own, not borrowed from anyplace. This is the map of a prison I helped build with perfect attendance and gold stars.The sentence is forty years, give or take: rise, commute, eight hours, bills, collapse, repeat, retire, fade. Ninety percent of us, they say. My own ledger confirms it—twelve years of schooling, twelve more of cubicles—and the bars were forged long before the first paycheck. They were cast the morning I learned to raise my hand for permission to think. Picture the architecture. Thirty desks bolted to the floor, thirty spines aligned, thirty pairs of eyes fixed on one blackboard, one pace, one verdict in red ink. The air smelled of wax and fear. We called it learning; it was synchronization. Nietzsche promised resistance would make us stronger. The system removed resistance and rebranded the surrender as “focus.” I still flinch when a calendar notification pings.The curriculum was never the danger; the hidden syllabus was. Math drilled one correct answer, pre-approved by a distant authority. Language sanded my voice until it fit the five-paragraph coffin. History handed me statues and dates but never the invoice for the marble. By graduation I could ace a test on revolutions without noticing the one still running my life.Grades were the original soul-crypto. A 9.5 bought parental pride; a 6.0 bought silence at dinner. I traded curiosity for stickers, discovery for smiley faces. The kid who asked why we memorize capitals instead of drawing escape routes was marched to the coordinator. Originality registered as noise. Standardized tests sealed the deal. Multiple choice shrank the universe to four bubbles and a smudge-proof pencil. I still scan life for the pre-filled answer. When the boss says “think outside the box,” he means select the box that matches the quarterly deck. The box was issued in primary school. 

Creativity? 

Quarantined to forty-five-minute art blocks where suns must be yellow and oceans blue. I once painted a purple sea; the teacher praised “imagination” then docked points because the boat had square wheels. Lesson absorbed: imagination is adorable until it delays dismissal. The meritocracy narcotic is the cruelest. “Work harder, rise higher.” Yet the starting blocks are staggered by postal codes. My classmate hadn’t eaten since Tuesday; I had private tutoring (all though I wasn't from a very well to do family). Same exam, different fuel. When he flunked, the system shrugged: effort deficit. Twenty years later when the same friend fixed my office printer for minimum money and still believes he didn’t study enough. Corporate life is school with expense reports. The bell became a biometric scanner, recess became a microwave queue, the honor roll became the Slack leaderboard. I recite KPIs the way I once recited state capitals. The fear of being “held back” morphed into the fear of being “PIPed.” Same adrenaline, higher stakes. Bonhoeffer called stupidity a sociological phenomenon—worse than malice because you can’t argue with it. I see it in the alumni WhatsApp defending twelve hours of homework because “that’s how we made it.” They are passing the baton of their own domestication. I almost reenlisted. Last week I caught myself praising a colleague for “perfect attendance” like it was a virtue. The old circuitry sparked: obedience equals value. I swallowed the praise and asked instead what side project kept him up at 2 a.m. His eyes lit up describing an app that maps food-waste routes. For a moment the matrix glitched. Breaking the cycle starts with refusing to reenlist. It means treating questions as the only real assignment. It means painting purple oceans and square-wheeled boats. It means admitting I still unlearn school every morning—still measure worth in metrics I didn’t choose, still flinch when the calendar pings.The system banks on exhaustion. Forty years is a long time to keep the blindfold tight. But exhaustion is also the crack where light seeps in. I’m writing this at dawn because the crack is widest before the world wakes up and hands me its script. So I end with the question here that keeps me awake: If the classroom was the first cell, who still holds the key—you, or the version of you that believed purple oceans were a mistake?