Wow. I guess I'm just so glad that I got to grow up in a completely different universe.

Where no one cared about "selling teaches and counselors of their desires and passions..." - we cared about our desires and passions quite a lot, thank you, but for their own sake. And couldn't give a rat's ass about selling an admissions counselor on them. Even if in fact we were busting our chops to get into the best school we possibly could -- this would have seemed like an incredibly vain and superficial approach to getting to go where we wanted in life. Like trying to game the system somehow, because that was the only way to get ahead. Or flattery.

And the thought of nurturing a portfolio of extracurricular "desires and passions" for the sake of impressing these kinds of people -- let alone for the supposed brass rings that would supposedly be within our reach, after years and years of such compounded drudgery and self-abasement -- really, now. Who has time for any of that?