Life is good when you are young and have a body which is capable of loving, climbing, jumping, feeling. But the body decays much faster than the mind and soon you are old and you tire of those physical joys. To ward off the eventuality of this middle age depression, which is obvious to anyone because of parents and grandparents, we spend our youths in pursuit of intellectual things, accomplishments, things we can still enjoy when we are fifty.
In the pursuit of these intellectual things, accomplishments, we neglect ourselves and instead of loving, climbing, jumping, feeling, we tear out our hair and seek forced solitude so that we might turn in a problem set, finish a paper, please a professor.
I recognize that I take an especially anti-intellectual stance in this paragraph, denying the possibility of emotional revelation in academia, but, eh.
