NB – The ball of rancid grease who edits my school magazine invited entries for the end of year issue. I submitted this. Not only was it rejected in half an hour, but I was summoned for a meeting with the Head of Year, who tried not to laugh as he read parts of it back to me. O saeclum insapiens et infacetum! BM

Here is a question finally put by my classmates with increasing and anxious frequency: What do you want to do when you grow up? Here is my answer: not law; not accountancy; not anything that involves wearing an off-the-peg suit and pretending that human input still matters. I’m going to be an electrician.

When I can be bothered to join in those conversations, this gets me funny looks. Everyone may claim to hate me, but no one has ever suggested that I’m thick. I’m far beyond A-Level Greek and Latin. I know most of Iliad 22 by heart. I have the best marks in the year, and in every subject. So the assumption is that I should shuffle off to some Russell Group swamp and spend three years nodding at fat women with nose rings as they explain why Aristophanes is patriarchal. But I’m not going to do that. Because I really am not thick.

Let’s begin with the obvious: AI has already killed off most graduate careers. The knowledge economy, as they used to call it, is dying. Junior legal work is now handled by apps like Harvey.ai. According to the Institute of Professional Willwriters, 67% of firms using AI are hiring fewer entry-level lawyers. The same goes for finance. Deloitte says 40% of roles in financial services are being automated. Coding? Medium says that entry-level recruitment for developers is down 25% since 2023.

Journalism has collapsed into AI-generated mulch. You want to write for The Guardian? You’re competing with a language model that never needs coffee, and doesn’t spend its time sobbing about Palestine in the staff kitchen. Good luck. That’s if you even make it through university without going broke, or being stabbed by your fashionably diverse but schizophrenic flatmate.

The average British university is now a kind of childminding service for the intellectually mediocre. It exists to launder public money, by processing the unemployable and turning suggestible school-leavers into left-wing midwits who use the word “problematic” in a sentence without blushing. The degrees are worthless. And the students—God help us—are the worst of all.

Take my classmates—and that means you. I am surrounded by the dysgenic refuse of what used to be a civilisation. You stink. You sweat. You squint at the board like cave-dwellers seeing fire for the first time. You’re not just fat, but also geometrically irregular—bulging in places no human body should. One of you recently took my advice to join a gymnasium—and I didn’t tell you to join mine. For the record, I wasn’t staring at your drooping apology for genitals the other day in the changing room. What I couldn’t stop looking at was the bright pattern of stretchmarks blooming across your stomach like a fungal outbreak. Coming back to the general, your faces are as irreparably ruined by pockmarks as the Moon—that or still covered with spots that look ready to spray everyone in a six-foot radius with stinking pus. Your breath smells like dog food. Some of you have yet to learn how to cleanse your bottoms after evacuating.

And it’s not just your bodies that are broken. Your minds are filled with sludge. BBC talking points swirl in what passes for your thoughts: climate change is going to kill us; the British Empire was worse than the Mongols; men can have babies; kindness is strength; beauty is a social construct; there are 372 genders; meat is racist. You think these are opinions. You think you thought of them.

You are the people who will go to university. You will study courses with names like Creative Activism or Digital Intersectionality. You will borrow £50,000 to learn how to cry about microaggressions. Then you will graduate into a job market where nobody needs you and nothing awaits you but debt and buying clothes in charity shops. You’ll end up scanning barcodes in Tesco or submitting cover letters to HR bots that ghost them. It would be sad if I had a heart. But you know that I don’t.

I, on the other hand, will do something useful. I will be an electrical engineer. I will join the family business. I will learn a real skill that people need. I will charge £270 an hour to fix the light switches in the overpriced flats of Media Studies graduates who can’t boil pasta without supervision. And I will come home to books, and classical music, and a clean and beautiful life.

Because I am not giving up the classics. I will read Lucretius while you Google whether your degree entitle you to benefits, and I will write my commentary on Herodotus while you watch YouTube videos about how to “network effectively.” I will be a classicist and an electrician. I will wire your house and recite Homer while I do it. That, in my view, is what success looks like.

I am not being contrary. I am being rational. When the AI revolution finishes chewing through what remains of the middle class, all that will be left are those who can do things—those who can fix a boiler, build a roof, wire a dole office. The economy of the future will belong to the useful and the beautiful. The rest of you will be left behind—grunting, scratching, and wondering why the world didn’t hand you a job just for existing.

So no, I will not be going to university. There is no university in England worthy of my time. I will not spend three years being taught that logic is colonial, or that Virgil was a white supremacist, or that free speech is a tool of the oppressor. I will not pay a fortune to be insulted by people who smell worse than unemptied food bins and can’t scan a single couplet of Callimachus.

I will be rich. I will be free. I shall be cleverer than the machines and more useful than the men who built them. I will have hands that fix, a mind that knows, and a body that turns heads. I will not shuffle from cubicle to cubicle hoping not to be noticed by my line manager. I will not waste my life trying to climb a corporate ladder that no longer leads anywhere.

When the lights go out, I shall be the one who gets paid to turn them back on. And when the system finally collapses, as it must, I will step over the bloated corpses of a thousand media graduates and walk on, wire-cutters in one hand, Plato in the other.

Let the rest of you rot. I shall and will have work to do.