too many Daves

Without getting all fruity and yoga class, the trick is finding balance. Work is a grind. There can be a dullness to it. When, in those moments of tedium, when you feel useless and cosmically bored, when you wonder why you’re here, when you question Isn’t there more to being alive than this?, in those moments, to be able to return to fragments of your education, to remember what Hesiod said about beekeeping or what Jung said about synchronicity, to be able to draw on different parts of your mind and activate the link between what your brain knows and what your body knows, and how both can stand to learn so much more, to being able to make sense of the small and real in front of you and the huge and real around you, this is what will help get you through the days, shifting work, in its finest moments, from a grind to a glory.

I’m writing this to you because you are the victims of this enormous cheat … Every year, fewer and fewer of you read newspapers, speak a foreign language, understand the basics of how government and business actually work, or have the energy to push back intellectually against me or against each other. Or know enough about history, literature, and science to do it effectively! You spent your school years with teachers paid less and less, trained worse and worse, loaded up with more and more mindless administrative duties, and given less and less real support from administrators and staff.