The great thing about the Internet is that there's enough people out there writing stuff that eventually you can find someone who says exactly the right thing to make your point for you, better than you could make it yourself.

I linked a few posts ago to Rob Neyer's piece on the corrupt amazon.com user review system. There's a baseball message board website, Baseball Primer, that has discussion threads on articles about baseball from around the web. It's a great site. A really great site.

Anyway, the thread on Neyer's piece that I linked to devolved, coincidentally enough, into a discussion about law schools and law students -- you can read the thread starting here and scroll down to comment 68 to see where the law school stuff begins.

If you scroll to comment 98, you'll find this:

Summering in NYC was one of the true highlights of my life. Nonstop drinking and partying, very little responsibility, and enough disposable income to make you really dangerous.

This is great. In less than 30 words, this quote captures what frustrated me most about the summer. For too many people, this really *was* one of the highlights of their lives. Too many associates told us to cherish the summer, because it doesn't get any better than this. That it's all downhill from here. That it was the best time of their lives.... And that's great. But it's not me. Nonstop drinking and partying, very little responsibility, and enough disposable income to make you really dangerous just isn't all that thrilling to me, and it's not going to be all that thrilling to the people I want to be around. If this is all that there is -- if we can't aspire to something more fulfilling than this as a highlight of our lives -- then why bother? I want to do something better than this. I want my life to mean more than this. Nonstop drinking and partying, very little responsibility, and enough disposable income to make me really dangerous sounds pretty empty to me. And if that's one of the true highlights of my life... then what a sad life I've lived. And if the ethic in the industry is that this is the highlight of a young lawyer's life, then... well... I don't know.

I know there's a flip side. I know I'm overthinking it. I know they're just trying to make it fun for us, and the intentions are not bad ones, and it's a nice experience to have, and we should be thankful and just accept it... I should appreciate it more. I do appreciate it. It just feels empty to me. I know it doesn't to everyone. And that's fine. But what can I do?