You feel like a failure

the price of success

It takes longer to start and stop, writing about failures you are not.

You feel like a failure, because even half a century later, you and your family are learning rapidly at home every day, all the relevant as well as meaningful and fascinating and face-palming happening in the world, turning them into useful understanding to survive and thrive in rapidly changing circumstances.

Yet in this society, success is one step away from not aceing the next major national examination of unchanged and narrow testing, one licence short from plummeting from respectability and status, to becoming a useless piece of human investment. Regardless of the limited practical value of formal, structured knowledge that your certification actually represents.