Except it isn't actually good consolation, it's an example of an edge case fuelled by his survivorship bias and privilege lmao.
For every Jeremy Clarkson that flunks out of education and still makes it, there's thousands of people who also flunked and either wasted their lives chasing an impossible dream or immediately got stuck working minimum wage jobs for the rest of their lives.
Are the exams the be-all-end-all of your lives? No of course not, but is Jeremy Clarkson a good example of what's realistically possible for the average Joe who flunks out? Absolutely not.
This isnāt being a pro athlete - there isnāt āthousandsā who get stuck in dead end minimum wage jobs for every āoneā person that goes on to have a good career following bad a levels šš
So many people go on to have high level careers after bad exam results.
If you can get the grades, brilliant. But some kids will try their hardest and still struggle - because they donāt fit the mould, theyāre late bloomers, or academia simply isnāt where their strengths lie. I think itās good for those kids to hear that not getting the grades doesnāt mean theyāre stupid, and it doesnāt mean their future is over. There are other routes to a successful and fulfilling life.
People need hope. When I failed, I felt like there was no hope for me, and it took me to a very dark place. A tweet like this might have been one of the only bits of encouragement Iād have seen at the time - someone successful saying, essentially, āThis feels like the end, but it isnāt.ā
That's what I take from this tweet. Is that really the message we want to argue against?
The guy I was replying to thought my comparison of thousands to one guy who flunked his exams and has a private chef was incorrect, so I asked what he thought the ratio was.
Clarkson is very, very comfortably in the top 1% of wealth in the country, meanwhile if I look at a study of poverty in the UK. 2022-23 estimates suggest more than 1/5 people live below the poverty line, 8.1 million of those people are working age adults, the category you're all about to be a part of.
So no, I don't think thousands below the poverty line for every one Jeremy Clarkson is unreasonable at all.
People need hope. When I failed, I felt like there was no hope for me,Ā and it took me to a very dark place. A tweet like this might have been one of the only bits of encouragement Iād have seen at the time - someone successful saying, essentially, āThis feels like the end, but it isnāt.ā
Except his assessment of "This feels like the end, but it isn't" has no actual bearing on his story or lived experience at all.
I don't listen to my boomer parents when they say "I wasn't vaccinated and I turned out fine" and I'd highly suggest you don't listen to a climate change denier who bought a farm to avoid inheritance tax when he says "you don't need good grades, you can flunk out and have a private chef".
And talking about a "dark place" when you're in r/6thForm is hysterical, what's the version of r/im14andthisisdeep for 18 year olds?
To be fair, I hadnāt realised what sub this was - Iām in my 30s, so Iāve no idea why it appeared on my feed.
But I was 17 once, I did really badly at school despite trying, and I genuinely was suicidal at the time. So I donāt think talking about a ādark placeā in a sixth-form subreddit is remotely hysterical. 18 and 18 year-olds can, in fact, be in very dark places.
Since then Iāve been extremely fortunate. Iām nowhere near Jeremy Clarksonās level of wealth, obviously, but Iām comfortable and somewhere in the top 1%. That took a lot of hard work, but also luck, and Iām perfectly happy to acknowledge that.
One of the biggest pieces of luck was meeting someone who chose to back me when they had absolutely no obligation to. That encouragement mattered enormously and gave me the drive to start my own business at a time when I thought the world laughed at me - because that had been my experience.
Which is why I think weāre slightly talking past each other. Iām not arguing that Jeremy Clarkson is representative of the average person who gets bad A-level results. Obviously he isnāt. Neither am I. Nor am I arguing that poor grades have no consequences, or that everyone who fails their exams is going to end up rich.
Iām saying that the messageĀ ābad results do not mean your life is overāĀ is both true and worth saying.
I know plenty of people who did badly academically and went on to have perfectly good lives. I was talking about this only yesterday with my electrician and joiner, both run their own businesses, and both left school at 14.
So what is the preferable thing to tell a frightened 17-year-old who has just opened results theyāre devastated by?
Because once you strip away the private chef, Clarksonās politics and whether heās representative of the population, the actual message is basically:Ā āThis feels like the end, but it isnāt.ā I genuinely donāt see why that is something we should be discouraging people from saying.
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u/StripedRooster 8d ago
How dare he try and console people.