David Foster Wallace once argued that this is the whole point of a liberal arts education in perhaps the best defense of this tradition: I submit that this is what the real, no‑bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: 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 day out.156
