Grad school pros and cons

Pros:

1. People will respect me and think I’m a serious person.
2. Maybe I can get a job that will allow me to save money.
3. I like learning.

Cons:

1. By the time I finish grad school the world might already be ending, all the jobs will be gone, and I will end up having wasted several years of my life getting a certificate that is actually worthless. (That said, if the world is ending in five years, what would not be a waste of time?*)
2. I do not want to support the grad school industrial complex. I think most masters programs take two years to teach you things that could be learned in mere months for much less money and what we’re really paying for is fancy networking.
3. With the money it costs to go to grad school I could live for several years without a “job” in a South American country. For some reason this would be considered reckless. But, agreeing to pay four hundred dollars a month for the next twenty years of my life to strangers in a bank who in turn pay some strangers in a fancy building to teach me things would be responsible.

*Things that would not be a waste of time assuming that the world is ending/also things that I would do if I lived in South America and didn’t have a “job”: learn how to mend clothes, fix a bike, make a fire, grow food, heal people; get to know your neighbors; anything that could possibly slow the end of the world: food rescue, composting, protecting habitats of animals that are going extinct, participating in local government.