The ridiculousness of academia was a recurring theme in my thoughts today as I was bombarded with an especially hefty amount of information and work. I realize that this opinion is both circumstantial and biased, but that doesn't mean that there isn't some truth to it. Some of the things that we are forced to study really are applicable to our lives. This is true for some career aspirations more than others, but, for example, none of us can say that after we graduate, writing will cease to be a valuable skill. However, estimating a series of numbers in ten different ways and finding bounds on the limits of our approximations, and testing convergence and divergence of a function's series, well that is just an unnecessary headache. The benefits: perseverence, a sense of logic, a contribution to both the graphite and the notebook industries. But is it worth the sheer misery induced in so many calculus students? Another example is Death and Dying. There are some very valuable life lessons to be learned in that class, and the perspectives of different existential philosophers are certainly interesting. But why must we write and be graded on a paper about it? I guess what I'm noticing is that as we advance in school, our different studies are taking one of two directions: either they are preparing us thoroughly for our future (for example, ap physics for engineers, or foreign language for those who want to travel), or they are becoming less and less applicable to it. Now, I suppose I could just get over it, live in the moment, and try to remain interested in our lessons, no matter how much future value they hold, but sometimes, I really just don't want to care about calculus.