I once had to write an in class pop quiz + essay on a book we were supposed to read for school, and due to some ambiguity on the syllabus I had not realized we were supposed to read the whole thing. I thought we were only supposed to read the first chapter.
I got almost 100% on it. And this was not a trivial quiz either, there were detailed questions about plot events involving a character I had not been seen yet, and the essay was asking for personally interpretation of deep philosophical themes in the story.
But despite being able to bullshit my way through the entire thing, it actually taught me a great deal. Because honestly, I normally the kind of person who would have read ahead in a book anyway even if I only had to read the one chapter for class, but I didn't because I hated the book. Despite the supposedly deep philosophical themes, I thought it was shallow and vapid and going to be about an extremely predictable narrative that commonly masquerades itself as deep but really refuses to engage with reality at all.
And I was totally right. But I had to draw on my deeper understanding of themes and literature, themes which inform our politics and social environment we substantial degree, to be able to predict that from what little I had read. Bullshitting that essay and getting back an A caught me to trust my understanding of the work way more than reading it actually would have.
It taught me to trust my dismissive evaluation of the book, it taught me to trust my understanding of the material, it taught me that so I really can just say that this text is not worth engaging with and read something more important. I learned that I could be confident in saying to adults that know, it's not that deep, this philosophical theme you are obsessed with is actually pretty shallow, and frost that evaluation even in the face of them telling me I just don't get it yet.
This isn't to say that secretly all bullshit assignments are good and you should learn a ton from them. No we should have actually been reading a story with more real depth to it, or we should have been dissecting the story from the framework of understanding that sometimes concepts which present themselves as deep are not that deep.
But you do learn something bullshitting assignments. Not as much as you would be learning with a better class or better material, but something. And because life is going to be full of bullshit and some things you have to bullshit, that's a good skill to have.
And more importantly, it teaches you whether you can trust your evaluation of something's depth. Because oh let me tell you, were there assignments I bullshited and did not get a good grade on. I did not get a good grade on my high school science project because I did not take it seriously enough. I learned that there was something real and meaningful to the assignment beyond what I saw in it. I bullshitted a Shakespeare memorization assignment once, by cram memorizing it right before, and learned that the kind of intense focus and mechanistic mental image needed to hold lines in your short term memory like that is antithetical to good presentation.
You can and should offload and ignore bullshit as much as possible in your life, But first you need to learn what's actually bullshit by engaging with bullshit.
