Money

I've been studying on and off now for the last couple of weeks., alternating weekly between classes. This week I'm on Evidence and CrimPro. I finished going through the crimpro materials once through last week and I'll go over them again later around Wednesday or Thursday, and I feel pretty confident for the most part about that stuff. Evidence, on the other hand, is taking me longer to run through, though the course as its being taught by the professor seems easier than some of the professors friends of mine are taking. Its difficult to find any passion for this stuff and after more than a year of this, I've pretty much given up trying.
Finals are in less than two weeks from today, and I feel pretty calm for now. Last year, at this time I was a complete wreck. Couldn't eat, or sleep, and I had a constant knot in my stomach, and the general feeling that my life was miserable and that I was doomed to complete and total failure. Things didn't turn out that way. I ended up doing pretty well first semester, better than I did second term. But I still don't know if I think that it was ultimately worth the aggravation. Second term, I wasn't as completely panicked and approached exams with a more measured attitude. I did a bit poorer than first term and that was unfortunately just enough to drop me out of my scholarship money and greatly affect my standing in the class and short term job prospects. Still, though I'm somewhat bitter, in comparing the two experiences, one marked by an near miss of a total mental, physical and emotional breakdown and the other by a more even keeled, balanced approach, I still think that presented with the choice again I'd take the latter even though that laid back attitude may have contributed to my lower grades.
The problem as I see it is that peace of mind just isnt valued enough in today's society. It gets pushed aside in the single-minded pursuit of wealth, which itself is more illusory a goal than truly attainable. And though there may be those people who understand that its ultimately a zero-sum game between wealth and happiness, most are blind to the reality that too much of an emphasis on one almost always comes at the expense of the other. I think its a function of misguided American values, which originally laid the foundation for it with the exhaltation of the so called "puritan work ethic" which emphasized the virtue in slaving away at something at the expense of all else. As if the product of one's labors is somehow worth more than the man himself.
Having been to Europe, I came away with the impression that the culture there places a higher value on quality of life than we do. And quality measured not by how much one has, but on how one uses what they've got.
I always found the expression "wasting time" somewhat perplexing. Of course time is the one thing you cant buy more of, and so it makes sense to value it. But how does it logically follow that to make the most of it, one has to do anything. What makes "accomplishment" more valuable for the time spent than not having "accomplished" anything, having just let time elapse naturally. And so you rarelyt hear about those who stop and take the time to think for awhile about what kind of life they'd like to pursue. We're simply encouraged to follow the herd. Its a simplistic picture of a complex situation, I know. But how many people do you know who give even the slightest thought to what it is that makes them happy, why so and whether their efforts in life are truly directed toward that end. Really, its well worth the time.