The 8-fold Path

The ironic thing about academia is that you need to be very disciplined to be successful. And yet, if I were disciplined, I probably wouldn't have entered academia in the first place. You have to be driven, self-disciplined, even obsessed with your subject. You have to go out and blaze new intellectual trails. You have to immerse yourself in the extant literature. You have to eat, drink, piss, and shit your subject matter (unless you went to harvard, in which case, you'll get a job even if your only publication is your skid-marked whitey-tighties).

But if I were capable of that sort of dedication, I probably would be out saving the world or making gobs of money. The reason I went into academia in the first place is precisely because I am too lazy and incapable of dealing with stress to make it at a 9 to 5 job, much less a 9 to 9, high-stakes professional job.

This irony presents itself to me as I try to study for my first giant qualifying exam. I vacillate between thinking of myself as some kind of noble, spiritual resister of the capitalist culture of greed and self-glorification that has such a life-killing grip on modern industrial society and thinking of myself as a just a lazy shit whose neuroses are going to wind up wasting my many opportunities for happiness, notoriety, and success.

I was once an ambitious person. I wanted to be important, and I believed that I could do it. I really believed that I had some grand destiny out there somewhere. Now, half the time, I don't know if I really want anything, and I believe myself to be fairly incompetent. Where did that ambition go? Where did that confidence go? I don't know. I am lightly tethered to this existence. I just watched a documentary on the Buddha...he, too, was lightly tethered, but something tells me he knew something I don't. The first noble truth: life is suffering. The second noble truth: suffering has a cause. The third noble truth: suffering can be stopped. The fourth noble truth: there is a path that leads to the end of suffering. That path lies in the realization that there is no self...it is our attachment to ourselves that leads to suffering. But, if Buddha is right, that realization leads to peace, to joy, to contentment. Easy for him to say...he didn't have student loans to repay.