The Halfway Mark for a Cultural Capitalist

June 15, 2026

Or also, me riffing off Forms of Capital and all of Bourdieu’s work… This is really random ! Ignore It !

A Survey of the Atmosphere

My first day at Cal was pretty unremarkable, save for what came afterwards. I had bravely decided to participate in a bone-chilling ritual known as sorority recruitment, where each year, hundreds of young girls fight to the death to woo their future sisters into saving them from a fate of solitude and an inability to get onto the Doorlist for frat parties. Approximately a thousand of us were jammed into Zellerbach Hall, waiting as toros bravos before the bullfight. Just as the fight was about to commence, a petite blonde in a Brandy Melville tank and long, swaying skirt took the podium and announced: “Ladies! I am SO excited to welcome you to fall sorority recruitment. But before we begin, a land acknowledgement…”

I later dropped sorority recruitment, but this was enough to show me that this was indeed one game I could play here: optimizing to become the ultimate white-liberal-sorority-affiliated-wife-of-a-VC-with-three-kids-at-nueva.

Many more thoughts here

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Some more here

To stay or to go!

I truly appreciate the effort of my many mentors across the university and across my discipline to show me around the academy. To have people care as deeply as they do about the success of an otherwise irrelevant undergrad is astonishing to me.

I do not come from anything at all, and indeed every waking moment is surreal. I should not have done anything with my life if we are to judge by the withered artificial turf and mouldy, leaky windows of the place I called home.

Cal truly expanded my worldview as a girl with no capital, zilch, nada. I try not to feel excruciating pain every time I encounter a game that requires you to have made the correct decisions in the prior subgames, but!!!!!!!!

I do often feel that I am not accomplishing enough, that there are more salient issues at hand, i.e. the whole existential risk from AI thing, and that maybe those things can seemingly be accomplished by dropping out or at the very least not giving my life to the academy. I don’t know if I want to trade my meagre yet hard earned little slice of institutional cultural capital (that is at the verge of losing its economic value) just yet. How do you convince your mother that school is not for you if she didn’t have the choice to go or not to go?

The dropout option thus seems to be doable only if you’ve already accrued a considerable amount of cultural capital that can readily be converted to economic capital at the snap of a finger.