My knuckles are still white, and my right palm has that dull, pulsing ache that only comes from a three-minute wrestling match with a vacuum-sealed lid that won’t budge. I failed. The pickle jar is still sitting on my counter, mocking me with its pristine seal, an inanimate object successfully gatekeeping a snack. It’s a ridiculous thing to be frustrated by, but there is something deeply symbolic about a mechanism designed to be accessible that remains utterly impenetrable despite the application of raw force. It feels exactly like the 10:36 p.m. email sitting on my other monitor.

A student-let’s call her Maya-is asking me if she should take a specific research seminar. On the university website, the course description is a masterpiece of academic obfuscation. It uses terms like ‘interdisciplinary synergy’ and ‘methodological paradigms’ across 46 lines of text without once mentioning that the professor is currently on sabbatical or that the lab equipment is from 2006. The system, in its official capacity, has provided ‘information.’ But it has provided zero ‘truth.’

I’m Ethan J.P., and for the last 16 years, I’ve been a debate coach. My job is technically to teach teenagers how to argue about international relations and domestic policy, but my actual job is to act as a human decryption key for institutions that seem to have forgotten how to speak a language humans understand. I find myself spending more time explaining how to circumvent ‘The Portal’ than I do explaining the nuances of hegemony.

We have reached a bizarre cultural moment where we have outsourced the functionality of our institutions to the charity of individuals. We praise ‘mentorship’ as this beautiful, transformative bond, and it can be, but we rarely stop to ask why it’s become the only way to survive. We’ve built these massive, expensive, $56,746-a-year structures-universities, corporate ladders, government agencies-that are so Byzantine and fragmented that they require a personal sherpa just to reach the first base camp. If you don’t have an Ethan J.P. in your inbox, or a cousin who knows the hiring manager, or a teacher who actually answers their phone, you aren’t just behind; you’re invisible.

The Uselessness of Official Guidance

I’ve watched 26 different students this year try to navigate the same internship application process. The official guidance office gave them a PDF. The PDF is 16 pages long and written in a tone that suggests it was translated from a dead language. It tells them to ‘be yourself’ and to ‘highlight relevant competencies.’ It is, for all intents and purposes, useless. It is the unopenable pickle jar of career advice.

When Maya emails me, she isn’t looking for a pep talk. She’s looking for the ‘Shadow Curriculum.’ She wants to know: Does this person hire their own students? Is this credit-hour requirement a hard rule or a suggestion? If I miss this deadline, will the world end, or is the admin assistant, Brenda, actually really nice if you bring her a coffee?

The fact that this information is ‘informal’ is a systemic failure masquerading as a personal networking opportunity. We tell kids that they need to ‘network’ and ‘find mentors,’ which is really just a polite way of saying: ‘The system we built is broken and confusing, so you better find someone to help you cheat the maze.’ It places a staggering burden on the mentors-who are often the most overworked people in the system-and it creates a brutal disparity for those who don’t know how to ask.

I often think about the kids who don’t send the 10:36 p.m. email. They are the ones who follow the rules. They read the website, they submit their forms to the black-hole portals, they wait for the automated responses that never come, and they assume that because they aren’t getting anywhere, the failure is theirs. They don’t realize that the ‘rules’ are often just a facade for a series of handshakes and ‘vouching.’

This is why the work of organizations like iStart Valley is so critical, yet also highlights the absurdity of our current era. We need these hubs to translate reality for people. We need spaces that take the ‘acronym-heavy’ jargon of entrepreneurship and innovation and turn it into a navigable map. But we have to be honest about what we’re doing: we are performing a rescue mission. Every time I sit down with a student to explain that their 3.6 GPA matters less than the one specific project they did for a local non-profit, I am performing an act of institutional sabotage. I am telling them that the metrics they were told to value are largely decorative.

The Intentional Ambiguity of Systems

Why is the system so confusing? Some of it is ‘bureaucratic drift.’ Over 36 years, you add a policy here and a requirement there, and eventually, the original purpose is buried under 106 layers of sediment. But some of it is intentional. Ambiguity is a shield. If a process is vague, it’s much harder to prove you were treated unfairly. If the criteria for success are ‘holistic,’ then the institution can never truly be wrong.

I remember a debate tournament 6 years ago where the judging criteria were so poorly defined that the results were essentially a coin flip. The students were devastated. I had to tell them, ‘Look, the ballot says you lost because of your ‘tone,’ but you actually lost because the judge was hungry and you were the last round before lunch.’ That’s a cynical thing to say to a 16-year-old, but it’s the truth. And the truth, however ugly, is more useful than a lie disguised as a pedagogical standard.

We’ve turned ‘mentorship’ into a buzzword to avoid talking about ‘transparency.’ If we made our systems transparent-if we actually made the website answer the questions in English-we wouldn’t need a standing army of mentors to prevent total collapse. We wouldn’t need to depend on the ‘generous person’ who is willing to give up their Tuesday night to explain how a cap table works or how to apply for a grant.

It also creates a ‘gatekeeper’ problem. If I’m the one with the answers, then I’m the one with the power. Even if I try to be ‘inclusive’ and ‘equitable,’ I am still filtered by my own biases. I might respond more quickly to the student who reminds me of myself, or the one who uses a specific type of professional greeting. By making the ‘truth’ a private conversation between a mentor and a mentee, we ensure that power remains concentrated in the hands of those who are already ‘in the know.’

I think about the 156 hours I’ve spent this year alone just explaining things that should have been obvious. That’s nearly an entire week of my life spent as a human bridge. Imagine what those students could have done with that time if they hadn’t been lost in the woods. Imagine what I could have done. Maybe I would have finally learned how to fix my sink or, god forbid, opened that pickle jar.

Redefining Success and Transparency

In my debate rounds, I always tell my students that the ‘frame’ is more important than the ‘content.’ If you can define the terms of the debate, you’ve already won. Right now, the ‘terms’ of our society are defined by complexity. We’ve framed ‘getting help’ as a virtue, which hides the fact that needing that much help is a symptom of a diseased system.

Maya eventually replied to my email. She thanked me for the ‘real talk’ and said she felt a weight lift off her shoulders. She decided not to take the seminar and instead spent that time working on a project that actually mattered to her. She’s one of the lucky ones. She has an Ethan J.P. in her corner. But as I look at the dark screen of my phone, reflecting my own tired face, I can’t help but feel a sense of guilt for all the Mayas who are currently staring at a ‘Submit’ button, wondering why the world feels like it’s written in a code they weren’t given the key to.

We shouldn’t need heroes to navigate the mundane.

Success should be a matter of effort and talent, not a matter of who you happen to know at 10:36 p.m. on a Tuesday. We have to stop treating mentorship as a luxury add-on and start demanding that the institutions we pay for-with our taxes, our tuition, and our labor-actually work for the people they were meant to serve.

Until then, I’ll keep answering the emails. I’ll keep being the ‘one good adult’ for as long as my patience and my carpal tunnel allow. But I’m going to stop pretending it’s a ‘fantastic’ opportunity for growth. It’s a survival tactic. It’s a rescue mission. And frankly, I’m getting tired of the water being this high.

Tomorrow, I have 6 more meetings. 6 more jars to open. 6 more students who are wondering if they are the problem. I’ll tell them they aren’t. I’ll tell them the system is the jar, and it was sealed before they even got here. I’ll give them the ‘English’ version of the truth, and I’ll hope that one day, they won’t have to do the same for someone else. But for now, the cursor is still blinking. 1.. 2.. 3.. 4.. 5.. 6. Time to hit Send.