A:
Well, I mean, that's the thing, right? That's the thing that people don't understand about addiction, or eating, or depression, or grad school, or whatever.
B:
Haha, I appreciate your clustering there.
A:
I'm serious! People, and I think TV and movies and everything do society a real disservice here, I really do, people think that hard decisions is a matter of determination, you know? It's like, in the movies, doing drugs and addiction or whatever is presented as a sort of contest of wills within a rational being, you know? Sometimes, it's like literally a sweaty alcoholic looking at a bottle, or walking past a bar, and considering his options, and it's like, they present it, you know, not literally, or whatever, with an angel and a demon on each shoulder, trying to convince the guy, but this is the problem: the guy is rational! They show the guy being rational, or at least as rational as he normally is, as anyone else, and that's not being honest. That's not true, it's not the way it is. If it were real, if they should've how it really was, the angel and demon would be just running around inside the guy's brain, just tearing it up in there, rearranging things, and wiring neurons as they see fit, you know? And the guy wouldn't know! There is no guy to know! That's the thing, the "guy" or whatever, he's just patterns of neurons with electricity in them, you know? So how could he know that his neurons are being rewired? It's fundamentally different than reading reviews of two movies to decide which one to rent, right, it's fundamentally different. The angel and demon are not reviewers! They are not present arguments to a mind! They're changing the substrate with which the mind evaluates arguments! And the real kicker is, the real kicker is that the angel and the demon are rewiring each other too. And themselves! It's just rewiring, it's all being rewired and the idea that the guy is actually evaluating this decision, evaluating anything at all, is just totally phony. It's like, you never actually consider a piece of cake, and then decide to go for a jog instead or eat Dannon's new Yoplait healthy yogurt or whatever people do in the yogurt commercials. It's not a demon saying Cake and an angel saying Jog and a Yogurt, and you smiling self-satisfactorily and blowing the demon off your shoulder, and he flails around in the air and then lands with a thud while the angel looks smug. I wish that's what it was! I do! But it's not, it's the demon going right into your brain, right where you are, and making you think, and you're genuinely thinking this right, now, as genuinely as you think anything, and you think, you actually think, you have the thought, "You know, I went for a jog yesterday" or "It's just a small piece of cake" or "I'll go for a job tomorrow." You actually think that. And it's not really a demon or anything, of course, it's just your brain rewiring itself.
B:
And where does grad school fit into this?
A:
Well, it's like, Ok, everything thinks grad school is Hard, right? You heard that, I heard that, and you went in thinking, "Ok, this is going to be hard." And your conception, at least my conception, and I assume your conception too, was it would be TV-Hard, you know? Movie-Hard. A rational battle between Sticking With It and Giving In, Tossing In the Towel. And the grounds this battle would be fought on, you know, are "I'm really tired but I need to stay up with my officemate another four hours to get this paper submitted" or "Nothing is working right now, and a gruff but understanding post-doc buys you a cup of coffee and encourages you to stick with it a little longer" or "A mean old professor yells at you presenting your paper at a conference and you have to stick by your guns." But that's not it, that's not what's hard. What's hard is getting up in the morning and thinking, "I hate this, I hate every part of it." You know? Or seeing your friends get jobs and be happy and go out, and you think, "This was a mistake, and everyday I spend here just compounds it." Or, you know, "I genuinely don't believe what I'm working on, it's all garbage, it really is." And you're actually thinking this, you know? You're not hearing a little devil say it, and you're not evaluating it, you're genuinely thinking those thoughts, just like you think, "I'm hungry" or "Those are cool shoes" or "I can't wait till I get till NetFlix sends the next DVD of It's Always Sunny," you know? They're real thoughts. That's what's hard, that's what's hard about it.