I think I'm really thinking about quitting...

I think I'm giving up on the idea that there is ever a place where thought is really taken seriously...where it is recognized or rewarded on its merit...

I wish I would have known all of this before I would sought after this life...

I thought about it in much more romantic terms, I guess...people develop original ideas...those ideas percolate...and people get recognized for original ideas...

But this has just been too hard...

Life is like this classroom run by the average students...there's no teacher...and being bright is something to treated with suspicion...the rules...meaning comformity, of course...are more valuable than thought...thought is dangerous...unless it negates our own freedom to learn and grow...

I just need to do something less meaningful, I think...something with no stakes...so I won't care about it...or myself...

Something where...when I abdicate my responsibility to think for myself...which is what everyone wants everyone else, to do, when they say that they'd rather get their way than give people the freedom to think...a place where I don't feel so irresponsible for doing so...

Maybe politics...that seems to be a place where most people want their representatives to do what they're told and not what their consciences dictate...noone takes responsibility when things go badly, of course...because noone's ever responsible, right?...if citizens demand it...and things go wrong...well, then, it's those damned politicians...and if politicians make decisions and things go wrong...well, they were just doing what voters wanted...

It's a cozy relationship, isn't...it's kind of a classic love/hate relationship...citizens and politicians hate one another...but they're always doing what one another want...it's just that noone wants to take responsibility for the stuff that goes wrong...

I don't know what I want to do, frankly...there's no job that I really love, right now...certainly not my own...

And that's the way that it's supposed to be most people over 35 would tell me...

Work is supposed to be something you hate until you die...because if you liked it too much...then it wouldn't be work...

Don't you love the circularity of all that?...

And in the meantime...high-minded purposes just make you stick out, too much...

Mediocrity imposing itself on excellence...that's what life is...

And there's no way out of that...

You know...if that's true...I don't want to live this life...I'd rather commit suicide than live with that sorry state of affairs...

I don't know...I don't think I can do this...this conformity thing...this, "Leave your brain behind and let us to the thinking for you"...I don't think I can do it...this "Don't worry about making intelligent judgments...worry about doing what you're told" business...I just don't think I can do it...

Is it any wonder, then, why people so irregularly follow the rules?...

Because it involves setting aside a higher responsibility...

Thinking for yourself...

And what an awful world it would be if people stopped thinking...so that they could follow the rules better...

I think humanity should be careful of what it wishes for, right now...what foolish fantasies about life that it has...

It just might get them...

And I don't care what anyone says, any more...

I'm not following the rules for the rules sake...

I'm not going to do what people say...when it's bad for me or someone else...just because they say so...at least not more than I already do so, for the sake of compromise...

Noone is God...none of us...and why we perpetually think we are, I will never know...

I'd rather give up my soul than to sell it...

And that's all I want, really...the freedom to live by my own conscience...and not have others perpetually pressuring me to take up their bad decisions with them...and to not have others constantly rationalizing why they do so, for good or for bad, just because they're too scared to take responsibility for their own choices and decisions...

I'm feeling really disillusioned, right now...

Because I'm growing to believe that a world where people can live by their own consciences...

And as a consequence...have stronger consciences...

Will always be made impossible by the petty and weak amongst us...who are just too scared to allow something like that to happen...no matter how much stronger it would make all of us...

I'm going home...I'm tired...I'm depressed...and I just need to lie down...to take this resignation and defeat I'm feeling, right now, to go down a lot easier...

This is what a lot of people said they wanted...

For me to just give up...

Not to be persuaded...or to have a change of heart...or a change of mind...

But to just give up...and do what I'm told...

Maybe it's time to give them what they want...

Ben