Summary

Wallace states that a danger of an academic education is that it can habituate over-intellectualization and abstraction rather than practical focus on immediate concerns. He specifies that this pattern of thinking can distract from being aware of one’s own mental and emotional tendencies. Wallace states that it is important to exercise conscious choice over what one chooses to pay attention to and how one chooses to construct meaning about one’s experiences. He warns that it is very dangerous to completely lose control and awareness of how one interprets and emotionally reacts to one’s experiences. He states that the real value of a liberal arts education is learning “How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and...