Reminds me a bit of David Foster Wallace's famous speech... the idea that the real reason you should strive for education is to control and understand your thoughts? Which is hard - how often I find I am on auto-pilot and then hours later I am in the wrong place with work or trying to solve a problem and didn't even notice. Or worse, a bias puts me in a bad mood and then I am stuck there because I don't pay attention to how this time its different / not the same.
>The really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.
>That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
>The really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.
>That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
Full speech: https://www.butwhatfor.com/david-foster-wallace-this-is-wate...