I wish this could be published, in exact duplicate, in the Crimson:

But working at a law firm isn’t any harder than, say, laying tar, or standing on your feet selling cell phones all day. It’s just more highly valued. It’s smart early investments and a host of material and internal advantages that lead to one man’s labor earning hundreds of thousands, while another man’s barely pays the rent. But it’s hard to argue that attending an Ivy League school where you smoke a lot of pot and pretend you understand Focault is more taxing than entering a service sector job right out of high school. The professional class just likes to pretend that it is in order to lay a patina of virtue and ethics over what are, in fact, amoral decisions of the market.

I’d love to see a study comparing the frequency during a day with which a Harvard student complains about the miserable amount of work needing completion compared to the frequency with which a day laborer, or an itinerant farmer does. No doubt, sitting for hours writing essays is mentally taxing. But it’s also an enormous privilege. In the absence of any real perspectival beacons of reality, though, we drift off into assuming that it’s merely an onerous burden composed of one shade of misery and another of martyrdom. Which, in turn, helps us in our eventual not-giving-a-shit about the fact that we’ll make hundreds of thousands of dollars doing things which, in the long run, are no more essential to the market than day laborers or itinerant farmers.