I increasingly observe that many Chinese students are still tightly bound to a life path that is assumed to be correct: undergraduate → master's → even doctorate, and they must first read enough to qualify before truly entering the job market. But in an era where AI is rapidly compressing knowledge gaps, skill acquisition cycles, and even rewriting definitions of ability, I often wonder: is spending 15+ years systematically learning a knowledge system that may be quickly becoming outdated, while having almost no real market experience, a rational choice, or is it a form of self-consumption packaged by social consensus?