I have heard rumors of a place, my friends. A place after graduation.

Where there is always bread on the table and a bun in the oven. I mean a baby in the oven. I mean on the table. I mean a mother in the oven.

Wait.

I am still a bit confused about the details, but I read it all in this book, you see, so it must be true (when I say book I mean it was a book I read on the internet, but the words are the same and the message is the same and I trust it wholeheartedly).

This place I read about was a place free from pain. It is a perfect place, because there are no more questions. Everybody receives a Manual at the door,  which answers any questions that might arise during your time in this new, pure and exciting world. Worrying has been eradicated, needless to say, and although this wonderful advancement has led to some minor losses in overall productivity, it has also led to the greatest quality of life the human race has ever enjoyed.

Here is how it works.

On the last day of your college experience, after your adviser has handed you your diploma and your family has taken you to dinner and you have thrown your cardboard-topped hat into the air and trampled it underfoot on the way out the door, you do not return home.

Some do return home, oh yes my friends, but these are the ones who did not achieve enlightenment during their time on this campus. They will forever be doomed to wander the halls of their old haunts, wailing in strangled voices about student loans and part-time jobs. Their disillusioned souls yearn to find a non-profit that will help them pursue that one social issue they have always had a passion for, that they have spent the entirety of their four years learning and speaking about with the desperate, yet stubborn hope that one day they will be the face of great social change.

But instead they wave their diplomas in the air, fists clenched, as they cry to the gods, “But what happens now? Was it all worth nothing? What have you done with my four years and forty-thousand dollars?” Their cries are met with an absurd silence. They live as best they can with what they have always had at the core of themselves, before they even arrived on campus.

But the rest of us. Oh, my friends, the rest of us. We will enjoy paradise. I have seen visions of it—of tall reaching buildings filled from lobby to rooftop with smiling faces, blissfully tapping away on their computers from the hours of nine a.m. to five p.m., then returning home to a stable household where they will dwindle away the evening with their ideal partner (preferably one they discovered during their sojurn on this mortal coil of a campus) and wake up perfectly refreshed in the morning to do the same blissful thing all over again.

I have seen it, friends, in many visions.

All we need is a diploma. That is the key, friends. They ask for it at the door—did I not mention that already? If you try and get in without it, the sanctified spirits of Aristotle and Confucius will politely tell you, sorry, no entry without the prerequisite degree. “Are you sufficiently in debt, my child? Have you fulfilled your non-Western cultures and gender studies requirements? Oh my, did you get this from a technical college? I’m very sorry, my child, only the esoteric may pass. The nearest McDonald’s is there, just a block away from your parents’ house.”

But if you have put in the required four years of arbitrary discipline and anguished soul searching, during which time you will have finally found yourself … then you may pass. And you may embrace either Aristotle or Confucius, whichever one you wound up liking better after those four years, and he will give you the Manual. And with a tear in your eye and a full heart you will thank him and turn to the first page.

And then your life begins.

Reality begins.

No more mistakes.

No more tough questions.

Just security. In yourself, in your job, in your family, in your relationships.

Because after four years of confusion, lectures and good hard work, you finally know all the secrets now.

Don’t you?