Konbini Ossan Volume 2 Chapter 27 — Yuichi Otsuki’s Past Story

When I was young, I was a child far more intelligent than those around me.

And perhaps because of that intelligence, even as a child, I developed a bad habit of looking down on others.

I thought, Being unintelligent is such a restrictive and unfortunate thing.

I never want to end up like that.

I had been thinking like this for as long as I could remember.

By the time I hit puberty, those thoughts had twisted into something darker.

Why is it that guys dumber than me are the ones who get popular? I'm clearly the superior one, so why do women flock to those idiots?

I resolved this question with a selfish and arrogant hypothesis:

Surely, the women who gather around idiots are also idiots. That's why they can't understand someone intelligent and superior like me. Only fools can gather with other fools.

That was the kind of foolish thinking I clung to.

Eventually, I began placing my hopes in university.

Surely, it’s a place where much smarter women gather than in high school. Then, there must be many who can understand me.

Surely, someone as intelligent and exceptional as me will finally be popular.

Believing that, I decided to go to university.

Of course, part of me also wanted to go to university to expand my knowledge and become smarter.

But just as much, I hoped that going to university would finally make me attractive to women.

But reality was harsh.

Fortunately, in the end, I did manage to date a few women.

However, none of those relationships lasted, and I was always the one who got dumped.

In fact, I never even got to the point of having sex — not even once. I gradually became isolated even at university.

By this point, I had begun to understand through experience:

Being smart alone doesn’t make you popular.

Someone who looks down on others for being less intelligent could never be chosen as a partner by someone they don’t even know.

University, though more open than high school, was still a place filled with strangers who didn’t know about my flaws.

That was the only reason I managed to get into relationships at all.

But that’s all it amounted to. Once they learned the truth about me, they would reject me every time.

By then, I had no redeeming qualities left besides knowledge.

[Smarter than others. Superior to others.]

Only that belief remained as my last source of self-worth.

So I continued attending university, driven only by a thirst for knowledge.

I enrolled in unnecessary courses without planning to graduate and skipped required classes to immerse myself in reading.

I believed that as long as I was more intelligent than others, success would eventually follow.

But the reality that awaited me was a part-time job at a convenience store — after several years of being a NEET.

After six years at university, I was left with two yellow cards: academic probation and dropping out.

That meant I couldn’t even land proper interviews with companies. And the ones I did get? Rejection after rejection.

There were hardly any companies that would even consider interviewing someone like me who hadn’t graduated.

Maybe things would’ve been different if I had connections.

But someone like me, who had isolated himself with elitist beliefs, had no such ties.

That’s when I learned the hard truth about my own worth.

And so, I fell into the NEET life.

After several years of that unproductive, degenerate lifestyle, I eventually started working as a convenience store clerk.

——————

E/N:

I do not condone such attitude. Maybe till high school since you're still a kid, you don't know the world. Even then, it's an attitude that drives people away.

But, once you're in college, be prepared to meet actual people, exchange ideas, grow a personality and broaden your network.

Truth to be told, I used to be like Ossan when I was a kid, I loved getting praised. But as a consequence, I lost a lot of my friends. I regret it but now I have a broader perspective.

Anyway, enough yap, it's sad that, Ossan, who had a lot of potential, wasted his youth 😔. Stay tuned!

——————

Previous       Table of Contents       Next