She crowed this statement with obvious pride, throwing her head back and letting her hair rest against the window. The train rattled and swayed and she moved with it as she settled into silence, allowing her body to relax until it matched and melted into the frequency of the vibration surrounding us. Her grin was at least as wide as her face - euphoria this thorough can warp well-known natural laws - and it set her eyes on fire.

But that fire wasn't burning hot enough for my tastes, and her off-hand outburst - a perfectly fair one, following a harrowing examination that is definitely best left in the past as an anxiogenic memory - left me feeling irritated without understanding why. My friend is an intelligent young woman who has put forth an incredible amount of effort, but I couldn't seem to accept the thought that she had earned a period of mental rest, a break from serious contemplation that might well lead to a state of permanent intracranial comfort. Now, with a few nights' ruminations behind me, I can offer an explanation:

Everyone I've met lately seems to feel this way, whether or not they've faced such an exhausting academic hurdle, and it leaves me wondering when my turn will come. The idea disgusts me.

It's practically our generation's mission statement, isn't it? There's no way it started with us, but it's so incredibly all-pervasive at this point that it's hard to ignore. I don't know if it's the drugs, the pathetic employment situation, or just the happy forces of societal entropy, but we're up to our protruding monkey brows in it. I hear it everywhere, offered in relieved and joyous and curiously toneless voices: How nice it is to have reached the other side of all of that arduous learning! Here we are, free to enjoy the remainder of our lives without that irritating and wasteful burden on our time and our hearts! We'll hang our degrees up over our beds, but when we knock them down again with the slamming of our bedposts, we'll barely notice. Onward, onward.

Onward to what, though? If prom, convocation, or the first day of the first salaried position marks the developmental climax of a human life, then that human's author is a pretty shoddy novelist with no sense of pacing. I talk to people at my office and in my "after-school" life who have degrees in all sorts of fascinating and complex areas, but they talk about television instead. I ask them what they do outside of work, and there's a disturbing pause before they provide harmlessly generic responses. Most have hobbies, but if I probe a bit, I notice that they haven't furthered them or tried out any new ones in recent memory. They're artists and academics and generally clever people, but they've already been caught by inertia, that thought that once the formative years are over, the mind is formed. (This idea is not limited to people who've been to university, of course; I use that example because those are the people I spend most of my time with. I'm sure you can see it happening everywhere, except maybe in people who never had that spark at all. People born without art are a different tragedy entirely.)

I have to amend my earlier complaint: this change disgusts and terrifies me. I tried my best to float along in neurological neutral after completing my last degree, but within weeks, I was back to performing mental experiments and devouring novels and creating weird art and doing research on blood chimeras and basically creating a whole lot of noise inside of my head. I wasn't wedded to the idea of continuing on in academia, but the brainless alternatives being offered will never be satisfying. That having been said, my creative output has tapered down painfully, and I find that though the wild ideas still churn up from wherever Coyote has hidden them, the desperate drive to splash them across my life's canvas has suffered due to inflexible work hours and the need to sleep.

There are two sides to me: the one which is content to drop into a quiet cycle and watch the world from behind closed windows, and the one which still trembles with excitement at the thought of manipulation, destruction, and constant growth. That second piece is so much stronger that I can't believe anyone can deny it for long, but the fact that so many can deny it so easily for years at a time makes me wonder if that decay is inevitable.

If you live for seventy or eighty years and only make a conscious effort to learn new things for the first twenty (if that), what the hell are you doing with the rest? Developing a career, buying some GICs, procreating (oops, there goes the degree, lost behind the bedframe), paying for other people's futures, and then wandering off into the dim cacophany without ever having achieved anything beyond the furthering of the species. I certainly support this furthering - I'm not a member of VHEMT, thank you - but I don't see why adults should have to glaze over into mediocrity in order to support the next generation. That's not really why they do it, of course; they do it because it's easier. But I just don't understand: Why do we decide that the three or four traits we've identified ourselves with since we were adolescents are capable of carrying us through to eternity? Why are people so unwilling to push their minds, their personalities, and their souls (should they believe in them) as far as they can go? How can the wide and smooth freeway ever be a better route than the forest that surrounds it, when there's no rush to get anywhere, anyway?

I don't want to stop thinking. I don't want to think of being blank as being the reward for my work. There's nothing wrong with shutting off the higher computations and simply absorbing as much of the world's sensory information as possible, I think, but shutting off those computations and one's receptiveness to new things is just so... disturbing. Fuck that. Don't fall into the trap of life's lacunae, those edited omissions that leave your text pockmarked and incomprehensible; why not focus on creating the most robust personal story you can?