Existential Crisis Week
ON MY MIND | The Empty Promise of Academia
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“Just because you fight for something doesn’t mean you have to have a philosophical justification for it.”
By what was then the twelfth week of this semester, I had grown accustomed to 98% of the inane phrases which were tossed casually — as casually as one might toss a molotov cocktail — into the collective consciousness of my English/Comp Lit seminar. The ratio of neural/motor energy devoted to jotting down whatever convoluted statements followed the words, “This is important,” from one of professors’ mouths (it’s one of those rare two-professor courses) versus scrolling through Facebook and answering emails had gradually shifted in disproportionate favor of the latter. But this sentence, uttered by an undergrad whose name I had not yet committed to memory (and probably never will), forced me to whip my head up in bewilderment and scan the room for any signs of incredulity which might mirror my own. Here, let me play it back for you:
“Just because you fight for something doesn’t mean you have to have a philosophical justification for it.”
My eyes flickered from the seated students to the professor standing at the front of the room. My professor paused, smiled, nodded, laughed, and agreed: “Yes, I guess you could say that.”
I wrote it down, appending seven question marks to the quotation.