I've been pontificating about what kinds of posts I want to make with this account and the thing that comes to mind often is half-remembered books that strike me like lightning bolts in the dark of the night.

Being the shadows of the cave wall of my own sheltered but also kind of neglectful childhood, they're the sort of thing that I had no idea how much shaped me. At least until years later and then suddenly I'm like, "Oh, that's where I probably where I got that" and have to do dishes in the middle of the night to explore the memory before I can sleep again.

Right now I'm thinking about How to Eat Fried Worms and the way I saw it as a child. It felt like such an unusual choice for required group reading. I thought, "This is clearly a boy book, it's about eating worms!" Now, I'm not so sure. It's a boyish premise, but the conflict in the plot is a kid having a life-changing trial of delayed gratification. In the contest he faces 

• the monotonous toil of a task drawing on despite having a set endpoint

• visceral disgust being punctuated by the knowledge he can simply walk away at any time

• peer pressure to quit by people who stand to profit from his failure

• backstabbing by peers who, when all other obstacles fail, decide to cheat in order to subdue him

My dude, he wasn't having a childish contest of eating filth. That child in the story was working a 9-to-5 job. What was this story actually preparing us for? As kids? Damn, Daniel.

Since growing up, I've had a pretty combative relationship with the concept of resilience. It was something I had to self-teach and once I got it, I wasn't letting go. It also was a shackle holding me in situations where I should have GTFO'd way before the point I decided to stop eating worms. In late stage capitalism it's obviously become a powerful cultural tool to manipulate people into exploiting themselves. However, divesting yourself of it in an attempt to stop being exploited leaves you a wreck of a person.

I don't know for sure where I got my propensity to grit my teeth through discomfort or how to hold on to that virtue in a society that would turn it into my destruction. But I loved that I had it and there were triumphs along the way that often came in the dark of the night, on the eleventh hour before a deadline, after somebody else's focused attempt to move goalposts, after I had already done the complete extent of what I could do to make the shit I was eating palatable, after I had completely broken the way I think about pain to accommodate a work style where the worse things get the better I perform.

All those things were events that happened in this kid's book about eating night crawlers, so I have a pretty strong suspicion.

TLDR: OP is baffled and astounded how children's literature has morals and capitalism exploits our best qualities like an abusive partner