Reading Bryan Mercadente’s latest article, University: How and Why not to Waste Your Youth, I am struck, as always, by the clarity and savagery of his prose. Even when you disagree with him—and in this case I do—his sentences have the steel of someone who knows exactly what he is saying and why. His demolition of the higher-education racket is brutal, detailed, and largely accurate. He is right that universities in Britain have, with a few exceptions, become debt-traps for the gullible and re-education camps for the weak-minded. He is right that AI is eating the white-collar job market from the inside out. He is even right that most graduates now emerge into the world as debt-laden, credentialled incompetents.

But there is a difference between knowing a thing and building your life entirely around that knowledge. Bryan is one of the few young men of our generation whose mind is already operating at a postgraduate level. He can read Herodotus in the original, quote Lucretius from memory, and dismantle an opponent’s argument in the space of a paragraph. He has the rare combination of intelligence and style that does not just win arguments but reframes them. This is why I hesitate to accept his decision to bypass every possible avenue of formal intellectual engagement in favour of life as an electrician.

The trades are valuable—essential, in fact—and Bryan is right that practical skill will outlast much of the hollow “knowledge work” now collapsing under automation. But there is such a thing as comparative advantage. A man with Bryan’s abilities could, if he chose, cut through the matted undergrowth of law, politics, or academia and establish himself where he could shape the intellectual climate rather than simply comment on it. The spectacle of his genius confined to wiring flats for the half-educated feels, frankly, like a form of cultural vandalism.

Bryan’s decision is rooted in an admirable desire for independence: no debt, no HR department, no corporate ladder to nowhere. I share his contempt for the lanyard class and their sterile cubicle politics. But genius of his calibre is not just a personal possession—it is a public resource. To lock it away in a van stocked with voltmeters and spools of cable is to deny it the stage on which it could exert real, perhaps decisive, influence.

I would never suggest that he march blindly into the maw of a modern university without conditions. The higher education system is hostile terrain. But there are ways to navigate it as an insurgent rather than a supplicant: to extract the resources, connections, and institutional leverage without absorbing the ideology. The law, for instance, still rewards those who can write like him, think like him, and refuse to be intimidated. The same is true for certain areas of research, political communications, or even publishing. These are not safe paths—but neither is retreat from the public sphere.

Bryan’s closing image—stepping over the bloated corpses of a thousand media graduates—made me laugh. But I would rather see him at the head of an army than walking alone through the ruins. It is one thing to be useful and beautiful; it is another to be indispensable. He is already the latter. My hope is that he will, one day, choose a stage worthy of it.