It was one of those weeks where one and one just add up to three.
First, I woke up at 5 AM one morning. Groggy, unable to sleep, I dragged myself to the couch and opened a new fantasy novel. I struggled with a phrase on the first page. Then another on the second. I read and read, and by page 24, I was scratching my head so hard it started hurting: “Is it just me, or is this written so badly, it’s barely comprehensible?”
Between the multi-paragraph sentences, needlessly verbose descriptions, endless adverbs, and backwards unwinding of the action, I gave up on The Atlas Six right then and there. I confirmed with several friends that the writing was indeed atrocious, and after some googling, I found out why: It’s a self-published book that became a bestseller because the 15-year-olds on TikTok are all over it. Now, I’m not too old for a Booktok recommendation, but I am too old to read bad, unedited writing. Aren’t we all?
A few days later, my friend Franz sent me a list of the top 100 literary classics, aggregated across a decade of rankings. “How many have you read?” he asked me. I did a quick count. The answer was five. Ouch! Here I was, a writer with ten years of experience, apparently wasting my time on TikTok drivel, yet having read almost none of the all-time greats of English literature. “What the hell am I doing?” I thought.
In that moment, something clicked — and then so did I. I proceeded to Amazon, loaded my shopping cart like a kid on Christmas with an unlimited budget, and hit “Order.” Over the next week, box after box arrived, and while I watched them pile up, I finished two early birds — Albert Camus’ The Stranger and Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Turning those pages felt like taking a big breath through my nose after stepping outside for the first time in days. “Ahhhh! That’s better.”
I’m currently enjoying J. R. R. Tolkien’s Silmarillion, and while I do feel like my literary train is finally heading in the right direction again, the whole incident made me reflect: How can someone who writes for a living cruise right past the most important works in their industry for a decade?
The answer has many parts. For one, there’s the fear of learning getting in the way of earning. Ironic, paradoxical, ungrounded? Yes, but still real. For another, there’s the social media–induced cult of busyness prompting us to stay occupied with the latest, shiniest trend instead of first mastering the fundamentals. And finally, there’s the sheer overwhelm of not even knowing where to find those fundamentals, thanks to the same media, social and otherwise, drowning out the signal while amplifying the noise.
None of this, however, is where the answer truly begins. That would be, in my case, in a small town in southwest Germany, a country where education is governed by each state on its own, not the federal government. And, for various reasons, my state, Rhineland-Palatinate, is “a special one among uniques,” as we say. That means almost every part of my education, from the available classes to the subject matter to the contents and difficulty of our final exams, was up to my school and its teachers in particular.
While that kind of freedom provides ample room to teach students as they individually require, it also creates boundless opportunities to skip not just the advanced stuff but even the basics and, in extreme cases, the act of teaching altogether. A teacher adopting the motto of “If you didn’t cover it, don’t ask about it in the finals” can be a blessing for passing rate statistics but a curse for students’ real-world readiness once they leave the sacred halls of high school. With now plenty of hindsight on my time there, I must say: My teachers chose the easy way out more often than they should have.
I might have been extra unlucky, but somehow I, a German, made it through 13 years of German class without reading Kafka. Without reading Goethe. Without reading Nietzsche, Hesse, or Thomas Mann. English class, which I attended since fifth grade and majored in for the last three years, wasn’t much better. There was no Shakespeare. No Dickens. No Orwell, Brontë sisters, or Oscar Wilde. My only spark of redemption? In 2009, I read The Great Gatsby and presented it to class. I still have my slides. Oh, and when one German teacher gave us a choice between reading Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons and Goethe’s Faust, I was the only vote for Faust. Still proud of that one, too.
Like many people, it took me more than a decade of traditional education to realize that neither school nor college teaches us most of what we really need to know — from how to make, keep, and invest our money to how to manage a household to how to be happy, deal with setbacks, and communicate well. But somehow, it took me yet another decade to understand that even what they did teach me was severely lacking in both breadth and depth, particularly when it comes to the subject now most pertinent to my career: the English language and its literature.
If you’re going to school right now or always wanted a job that lay outside the confines of traditional education to begin with, like Youtuber, freelance programmer, or founder of a beverage company, perhaps you’ve long been aware of the system’s limitations. But if you went to school like me, naively but in good faith expecting it to teach you all you need to know — be it because your subjects had direct relevance to your career or simply because everyone told you it would — you might know: The gaps traditional education left in your brain can still pull the rug from under you years later.
Maybe you’re a chemist who once sucked the air out of a room of PhD students for not knowing who Carl Bosch was — a Nobel laureate and co-inventor of the Haber–Bosch process for ammonia synthesis which, in turn, helps supply half the world with food. Maybe you’re a musician who can’t read sheet music. Or maybe you just don’t know how your country’s election process works, because your social studies teacher never covered it, and even though it only takes a few minutes to find out via Google, you kinda never got around to it. I know! Awkward, but life happens.
I’m not here to laugh at you over those gaps in your knowledge. I’m here to tell you: We all have them. Even those of us who, against the odds, got most of what they needed out of high school and college. And while I wish I had started stuffing the literary holes in my personal plot sooner, I’d like to add one more lesson. It’s a lesson I learned as soon as I left our established institutions and struck out on my own in hopes of making a dollar and a career for myself: Nothing is your fault, but everything is your responsibility.
Whether it’s your finances, your mental health, or the stuff you need to know to do your job well, at the end of the day, somehow, you’ll have to deal with all the challenges no one taught you how to solve. And frustrating as it may be, there’s nothing to gain from handling them badly while pointing at your seventh grade history teacher. You’re here, it’s messy, and you’re best off doing the best you can with what you’ve got.
When it comes to your education — your true education, not whatever you learned or didn’t learn in school — no one is coming to save you. No one will spontaneously send you an email with all the formulas you missed in basic algebra. No one will upload all the quintessential Italian recipes right into your brain. And no one will drop off all the classics of English and American literature at your doorstep — unless you order them.
That’s the heart of the matter: In the end, it must be you. You must learn. You must study. You must seek, and you must find. You must pay with your money. You must pay with your time. And you must pay with feeling embarrassed at times. Education is our individual, lifelong task, and for all its demands, it’s never too late to embrace it and reap its sweet rewards.
Today, I took a picture of my 45-book haul. Two down, 43 to go. This is me, doing the best I can. My name is Niklas Göke. I’m a writer, and, at the ripe age of 33, I finally started reading.
Today, I’m choosing to get the education I deserve. Will you?