The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

My roommate and I had a really good talk tonight about rusty subjects. An old baptist preacher who kept me from blinking. Teenagers with so much power they were never away of. I’m so glad high school is over, but is it? I used to do things for different reasons—for God because of friends, for friends because of God. Every thought in my brain these days is about my future. My insecurities and intimidations with the real world. i like where dfw writes that the opposite of freedom is that feeling “of having had, and lost some infinite thing”. In the vaguest way that’s exactly how I feel. Because I’m not even sure what I lost. I just know I don’t have it anymore.