On Dropping Out of Law School

-- By MatheusEleuterioMirandaDias - 22 Apr 2024

I came to law school looking for certainty. A stable job, a good salary, and most of all, a way to resolve the post-undergrad limbo of “what the fuck am I going to do with my life?” Never mind that I didn’t know the first thing about having a practice or of being an advocate. Sure, I had been a paralegal at a large firm for a few years, but that just showed me that many lawyers are glorified paper-pushers.

I now see that my coming to law school was a fool’s errand. Not because there is no certainty to be found, but because I’ve always been drawn to the uncertain. (Those who don’t know me deeply would balk at that assertion, taking my generally methodical nature to indicate quite the opposite.)

Plato’s Forms always struck me as a simplified bore of our world, imputing to the concepts around us a “truth” when none exists. By contrast, my mind revels in Nietzsche’s world. At the risk of tooting my own horn in associating myself even slightly to that genius, my first encounter with his work found me feeling less alone in the world.

It wasn’t that he expressed what I thought. It was that he put into words what I had at that point only been able to feel. He turned into essay what I thought was my complete inability to connect to the world around me in any tangible way. Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos may have described my state best:

"Even in familiar and humdrum conversation all the opinions which are generally expressed with ease and sleep-walking assurance became so doubtful that I had to cease altogether taking part in such talk. […] My mind compelled me to view all things occurring in such conversations from an uncanny closeness. As once, through a magnifying glass, I had seen a piece of skin on my little finger look like a field full of holes and furrows, so I now perceived human beings and their actions. I no longer succeeded in comprehending them with the simplifying eye of habit. For me everything disintegrated into parts, those parts again into parts; no longer would anything let itself be encompassed by one idea. Single words floated round me; they congealed into eyes which stared at me and into which I was forced to stare back-whirlpools which gave me vertigo and, reeling incessantly, led into the void."

Those around me seemed to speak about X, Y, or Z with ease while I was often paralyzed by trying to deconstruct the meaning of their words. Did they assume I understood each word in the same way they did? Were they not transfixed, as I was, by the flimsy tool we call language?

What is a word? It is the copy in sound of a nerve stimulus. But the further inference from the nerve stimulus to a cause outside of us is already the result of a false and unjustifiable application of the principle of sufficient reason. If truth alone had been the deciding factor in the genesis of language, and if the standpoint of certainty had been decisive for designations, then how could we still dare to say “the stone is hard,” as if “hard” were something otherwise familiar to us, and not merely a totally subjective stimulation! We separate things according to gender, designating the tree as masculine and the plant as feminine. What arbitrary assignments!

Medication has turned paralysis into fascination, which is much more manageable. But I’m still drawn to the uncertain, to the grays as opposed to the black and white.

I’ve come to law school for the wrong reasons. This much I have realized. Could there be, then, a more legitimate reason for my being here? Is there something more profound than creature comforts (international travel, expensive scented candles, fine dining) that should keep me here?

Eben has said that those who should be in law school either love justice or hate injustice—or something along those lines. If I’m honest with myself, I don’t think that I love justice or hate injustice enough to earn $60,000 a year. (There are two exceptions: animal welfare or LGBTQ rights. I would be content earning less than $60,000 for those two causes. But pursuing that would mean dropping out of law school anyway: public-interest positions are notorious for not sponsoring visas, so I would eventually return to Brazil, with a useless law degree.)

No: if I were to pursue a career without regard for money, I would get an MFA in Creative Writing, as a former professor once suggested. Getting published is a hit-or-miss kind of business, so I would likely need to find a relaxed 9-to-5 job that would give me time to write.

Or maybe journalism? I don’t fucking know. Which is part of the issue, and what landed me in law school in the first place. I’ve become the exemplification of the classic liberal-arts-to-law-school pipeline joke.

Is this progress? It feels like regression, like the last five years since college have been a complete waste (what’s more likely is that this is the sunk cost fallacy in action). At the end of the day, it is progress to break from the plan of just being a lawyer with a job.

I’m reminded of Nietzsche’s interpretation of eternal recurrence. Perhaps I should consider what path to take next by evaluating how content I would be with my actions recurring eternally. Would I be proud of them?

As Kundera put it, einmal ist keinmal.

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