I technically finished a few years ago (year and a half, to be exact) but I could never stand to be outside the academic atmosphere of university. All I can manage is my summer jobs, and anything more would drag me down far too much. As such, it's been back to university for me, and will always be as such. With some luck I'll be starting graduate work in Classics next year. And after that... hopefully eternity in the university setting. I do eventually want to teach, so such a desire is actually realistic, just to add.
Not to mention that I consider the university setting the 'real world', and those outside mostly just living in shadows. Heh. Well, see, if you're living for just working, or else working just to live, and having other things on the side... I don't know, but the entire nature of what people call the 'real world' to me seems all too much as being slaves to such routine as shadows the mind from contemplating truth and reality. For the most. There are exceptions, but I'm very much inclined to think that 'out there' as it were is less real for that it is more grounded in the stuff of life... but that that stuff isn't actually the truest reality. Philosophy and study is. As Seneca would say, only the Philosophers (that is, those who study Knowledge) are truly alive, only they, in the contemplation of life, truly have life. People will often tell those sorts to get a life, or to start living in the real world, without understanding a whit that it is in fact quite the opposite, and when the end of it all comes it will be the philosophers who will either die happily knowing to have spent their life to full measure (or else rail against losing all that they have... but those wouldn't be stoics, heh), whereas it is those of the 'real' world more inclined to regret because, rather than learning and training themselves each day, they have put off developing themselves to the point that they never do. When their life ends, they have nothing to show for it, for the most, only a long life. That is what I see as the peril in the real world.
Of course, we all have our jobs to do. I'm not denying that. And people can be knowledge inclined in any setting, not just university. But that is where it is, primarially, and unfortunately what people, as a whole (that is, the hoi polloi) consider for real is certainly not that which is realest. Most never know the joys of Homer; nor the beauty of philosophy. A pity. Though, of course, Seneca was right: it is better to laugh at the foolish vanities of the real world than it is to weep at them. As leaves are the generations of humanity, to paraphrase Homer. But some of us leaves do better with that brief span than others. We are all given that high potential, of course. Just some choose not to make use of it, and rather flit about in vain endeavours never aiding them a bit of truth. That is my cause for railing against that all. And I see it, all too much, in my present society. This damned affulent culture here in my city, where people can make a heck of a lot of money because of the oil industry... all that which they consider to be real. And in the end what has it gained them? Nothing. Usually they lose it all. But Seneca, and Homer... these things aren't to be lost. That's why I'm staying in university, and fend off the real world with my sharpest sabre, and it will only have me at my last despair.
