Freedom & Education

This is mostly a quote, but I'm posting it here because of its pure relevance to my life at the moment, and because it's one of those situations where someone else has said precisely what I would like to say:

"This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted: You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship . . . Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it J.C. or Allah, Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things--if they are where you tap real meaning in life--then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth."
--David Foster Wallace

This is from his 2005 Kenyon College commencement address, which was recently turned into a book. An interesting article about the book itself is here, and worth checking out.