‘Oh, a PhD in the humanities. How… quaint. You know, in my day, we used to consider the humanities a finishing touch — something one studied in order to have taste, not tenure. But apparently now it’s a career path. A long, meandering, underfunded career path that ends in a small office with flickering fluorescent lights and a stack of ungraded essays taller than the Washington Monument.

Don’t get me wrong — I appreciate the intellect. I do. Reading Foucault before breakfast and Derrida before bed must be very invigorating, in a self-inflicted misery sort of way. But really, darling, must every act of thinking be so performative? You spend six years parsing the politics of the spoon in nineteenth-century dining culture, and somehow, at the end, it’s still the university cafeteria serving you soup with a plastic one.

And the writing! Endless writing. “I’m revising my chapter,” you say. “I’m restructuring my argument.” What that means, of course, is that you’re sitting at your desk at two in the morning surrounded by cold coffee and anxiety, moving the same sentence back and forth like it’s a chess piece that might someday win you a fellowship.

But perhaps that’s the point, isn’t it? To suffer beautifully. To endure, as all great humanists must, the exquisite agony of understanding the world too deeply while being paid too little to live in it. You quote Hannah Arendt at dinner parties and call it praxis. You build your identity out of footnotes and drafts and call it becoming.

Still — there is something noble about it. The stubborn belief that words matter, that thinking can still move the world an inch, that the humanities humanize. It’s impractical, exasperating, and gloriously unnecessary — which, of course, is precisely what makes it art.

So go on. Get your PhD. Just don’t come to me when you can’t afford a new coat because you spent your teaching stipend on archival photocopies. After all, as they say in your world — the pursuit of knowledge is priceless. Which is convenient, because it certainly doesn’t pay.’