I can trust that I know myself, at least, better than anyone else does. From this sovereignty flows firm convictions about improvement and happiness, about the manifest desires and ambitions that power my core, and how they instantiate and tie together the actionable principles on the surface. I am whole, and I must accept that. I cannot learn in part, I know only complete assimilation. I do not condone indefinite quarantine - every datum eventually gets discarded or reaches core. This is the sincerity of my thought, the monolithicity of my relativism, the justice of my ways.

Do you ever get the feeling that the company was friendly and all, but seriously causing you brain rot?

The writer talks about how graduate school is not a decision to be taken lightly. The part I really like is here:

Academia, especially in the humanities and the social sciences, is a total culture. It colonizes most aspects of your life. You are never not an academic--the little mental tape recorder is on all the time, or it had better be if you want to be good at this life. Anything is grist for my mill as a teacher and a scholar, and that is as it should be. Graduate school is, if anything, even more totalizing than this. It gets into your pores.

I guess it really isn't that bad in the sciences. I have met dedicated students, but not too many people who connect what they learn to the world around obsessively, which I tend to do sometimes. I think graduate school just isn't that total for most students in science, although for what reason I am not quite sure. Maybe it has to do with the fact that you can get a normal job with a science degree, or maybe it is because science is so well funded that there is a wider range of motivations among its practitioners.