Here’s a general maxim I’ve found true: in general, the lower your GPA is, the more likely you are to be interesting. Not because GPAs mean anything in and of itself. But the point of being young right now is to take a lot of risks and fail a lot. A high GPA usually shows not taking a lot of risks, playing it safe. Not a lot of suffering, doubt, or pain. What’s there to talk about over beer, then? It’s the disappointment in realizing you were the dumb one, disappointment in yourself for not knowing better, that makes it fun to drink with or hang out with. It’s only when the high GPAs are a reflection of low GPAs, or some other failure, that are really worthwhile. Like my environmental professor at FSU who has a 4.0 because he failed college the first time, in his 20s, setting up warehouse parties for Daft Punk in the 90s. That shit is lit. And it was a choice; it was volitional; it was a trade-off; it demanded a choice between oneself and convention, and that choice was reflected in a failure on conventions’ part, on the abandonment of college.
A 4.0 in his 40s though. Also, he doesn’t give a fuck, he knows what he wants, and he wants to teach environmental science to a bunch of overzealous buff tank tops who are vaping and looking up Fortnite guides in between slides, and he’s fine with that.
As a rule, old people are cooler because they’re more comfortable with the ways in which they messed up when they were our age; people our age replace sincere, honest mistakes with emotionally bloated hubbub because emotions tell a story and honest mistakes don’t. Sure, but where’s the story you and I were leading up until now? We’re already in our 20s, in the Middle Ages, we’d be fucking dead. We messed up when we treated our sisters like shit, we messed up when we let our moms dress us up in stupid Polos instead of manning up and walking into Abercrombie and Fitch ourself, we messed up when we pretended like we knew how to put on a condom when those things are slippery as hell.
A high GPA, as I see it, tends to be indicative of someone who chooses not to deal with pain-pain that irreparably comes with picking one’s own choices, because people are gonna call you out for wearing all black like you just watched Walk the Line, I know because I’m lazy. If you don’t suffer all your life, it’s easy to focus on being respectable-because your grandparents’ illness doesn’t bother you, your lame friend group that doesn’t make you happy doesn’t bother you, your crap diet doesn’t bother you, your dependency on your family’s income doesn’t bother you, your inability to hang out with people not in your socioeconomic bubble or ethnic group, doesn’t bother you; what’s the point of even grabbing a beer together at happy hour, then? To bitch codependently about the GMAT? Cmon, dude. The pains not a big deal, the suffering’s only normal, but those things just mean you made personal choices, and THOSE are what make IPAs worth chugging-let me hear about those.
A high grade point average means nothing in and of itself; I think a Buddhist might correctly say it’s empty. What’s the point of a GPA? To say how you fucked up, how you are a human being. At lower (“lower”) tier schools such as FSU, a high GPA might mean some self-doubt, since everywhere you see, others are partying and it’s not supported. But the unsupported is the truth. I don’t think there’s such a thing as a “high-performing” person. Would you rather be the best performer, or just yourself? Would you rather take shots with an ‘outstanding performer,’ or a human being?
Alcohol is a terrible metric, yeah, but a worse metric is absolutely turgid toil, things that stand alone as independently worth sacrificing yourself just to prop it up, and then you see that it doesn’t even reflect you-GPAs, marriages, job descriptions. What reflects me is how messy my room is right now. What reflects me is what I choose to wear at the gym, which are ratty high school T shirts back when I was fat, because that’s the truth.
So, with this in mind, the more perfect your GPA, the less likely you are to say something worth taking a shot to at the bar; the crappier it is, the more likely you are to be able to do the truffle shuffle with a bunch of babes in the dance floor. The truffle shuffle means nothing: it’s just a nice happenstance, a byproduct of taking the time for dance lessons, or going to raves, or dancing by yourself with Bowers&Wilkins and listening to Stromae. But it’s you. Unless you are you and I am me, there’s no point going for happy hour. You can brag about a house, a watch, or a 3.8 average, but what’s the point in bragging when it took a 20 year mortgage to afford that house, when the watch was your dad’s present for making him proud every day of high school, when the 3.8 took days and days camped out in Van Pelt library, sleeping with the fishes and the Narcos marathoners? All it is is the truth of what you decided to pursue, nothing more. What more to say?

What I find true is that worthwhile people are people who’ve messed up before; the people who can teach me are the people who’ve been there themselves. I spent a lot of time assessing people by outward things like people’s beauty or their wealth, but that just comes from the pain they went through to get there, the hours at the gym, the tribulations and choices of their family-it’s a reflection of people’s chillness, and not a very good one. For what it’s worth, GPAS may make a good metric for evaluating people’s inherent chillworthiness-are they worth chilling with? But it’s just good for approximating; your time is not decidable by a GPA, or anything outside of yourself, fixed and absolute; that is the point.