Every morning on the way to my office, I walk past the business school, which is built like a hilltop crusader fortress, replete with battlements, a machicolated inner wall, turrets, crenelations, and arrow-slit windows. Somewhere inside, between accounting and management, there must be a dragon and a mountain of gold.

Headshots of rich and influential graduates flutter around the outside. They’re all smiling. Day in and day out, this becomes unsettling. Sure, it’s part of the business school’s self-promotion (you, too, can be this smug if you study here and make a load of money), necessary marketing perhaps because an MBA typically offers less concrete knowledge than a BS in peace and conflict studies or a semester at sea and because there is not, nor has there ever been, an education requirement for entering most business careers.

To make money, you have to be good at what you do. You do not need a certification saying that you are. You can get that peace and conflict degree, study basket weaving for 15 weeks in Spain, and still join the firm. But no disrespect: management courses surely have things to teach (I took some and learned a thing or two) and to become a certified professional or para-professional in the business world, like a CPA or a project manager or a contracts specialist, you do need the piece of paper. Ergo, the fortress, the pictures, the smiles.

Lots of smiles. They haunt me. One woman in particular has a grin that radiates a kind of dark energy. By any estimation, she seems attractive and smart, but that grin says, I’m clever and, not only that, I’m crooked. More importantly, I’m richer than you. Richer than thou. Richer than god. Study here, my young apprentice, and together we will discover many abilities some consider to be unnatural.

By the time I reach my office, I often find I have to cleanse my aura if I’ve allowed myself to notice that woman’s picture. Bring on the crystals and the sage. I also think about the sullen post-adolescents sitting in their cars along the street—not the shitbox deathtraps my friends and I drove in college, but SUVs, Teslas, Audis, high-end Accords with factory tint, and occasionally a Beemer or a Benz paying homage to the classics—cars that have been bought for the children because no 20-year-old can afford a $43k Tesla 3 in freshman year. Maybe their parents studied crusader management in the fortress.

What are these sleepy, sour-faced kids thinking as they stare at me through their windshields? At least some of them have to be considering the cost of things. How could they not? The cost of their education (having been lectured many times by dad that money is found in crusader castles, not growing on trees), the cost of their sweet ride, the cost of messing around the way they did two years ago in senior year, opportunity cost (when I was your age, I was in the Army and look at me now—what you need is self-discipline, son, not a cruise to Costa del Sol), maybe the lab fee for Basket Weaving 210. Everything costs money. Even money costs money. No such thing as a free basket.

I have no doubt that more than a few of them are picturing their own faces up on the battlements, smirking down at hapless students with all the condescension of success. And even more than the implications that flow from our illustrious school of business, that’s what gives me pause. What does a post-adolescent undergraduate know about what she wants for the next 20 years? For that matter, what do any of us know? We know what mom and dad have drummed into our heads (if we’re even that lucky) and we often fail to understand that they know about as much as we do, which is to say, nothing.

At some point, if they’re solvent enough to buy that new Tesla 3, they did what they were told and got rewarded for it. But what is the nature of such a reward? What does it mean? We know what we’ve assumed along the way. Sometimes, we know or think we know which educated guesses have worked out and which ones haven’t. Usually, we’re blind, expecting the worst, hoping for the best, and hopefully doing our best.

When I was as young as these kids, I had a friend named Chris, who came from a family of classically trained musicians. He, too, had a gift for music and was getting ready for the long uncertain life of the creative artist with an all-consuming vocation that might not earn him enough to buy lunch at Taco Bell. He also had a wisdom that, compared with the insight of most college kids, seemed far beyond his years. Once, he said to me, “Some people get exactly what they want. The rest of us become philosophers.”

I’ve been smiling at that for almost three decades. It’s funny and absurd, especially in the exasperated, road-weary way he said it. Now I’d laugh and say, shit, kid, last year you were a teenager. Try to have a little fun before you say something like that. But I wouldn’t deny the evident truth of it. Though, I might modify it a little after all my years of philosophizing: some people get what they want; some people don’t get what they want; everybody becomes a philosopher. Because I got everything I wanted in my 20s and I’m still asking what it all means.

Just don’t make me go to business school in a fortress. By the time I sit down at my desk and turn on my laptop, I am, once again, infused with the immortal wisdom of Guitar Slim: “The things that I used to do/ Lord, I won’t do no more.”  Preach, brother. For me, it’s not about what I wanted back then. It’s not even what I want right now. Because I acknowledge that I have no actionable grasp of what the world is.

I only have subjectivities and assumptions. I see through the filter of my memories, beliefs, and preferences, many of which are subtly irrational. I try to do the best with what I think I know and keep in mind that, because my knowledge of the world amounts to existential spit and bailing wire, anything other than humility is a failure state.

So you have to be good at what you do. But how do you know you are? Are you making money? Is that the metric? Maybe. Maybe not. When you look in the mirror, who looks back? Do you have any idea? Maybe. Maybe not. Do you even know what you don’t know? The ghost of Donald Rumsfeld was here just a moment ago and said there are unknown unknowns. I believe him. I’m taking it on faith.