I could have written this a week ago...

But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before...

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance - which his growth requires - who has so often to use his knowledge?

...The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

*QP

The amount of work I have put into my projects is infuriatingly small. I fear two terrible fates, and I don't know which is worse. On the one hand, I may continue with this level of effort through the end of C-Term, earning grades and CDRs and doing an injustice to the whole learning process. What then can I expect for any career I may lead? Will I find much the same empitness of value? That any tiny amount of work, with a good cover story, will be rewarded as equally as giving my all? What motivation is there to put in effort when honeyed words work just as well.

On the other side of the coin is the possibility that sooner or later my line of bull will fail in school. And what will happen to me then? Will I fail my projects and have to start anew with funds I don't have? Will my grades plummet and such action be threattened with the chance to redeem myself? Will I be capable of doing so?

I feel like an Astronaut on an expedition to the sun, meeting failure of one kind or another regardless of success. Or is that the point?