So one of the podcasts I subscribe to is "The Best of YouTube", and one of the most recent ones was a video with a voice-over of a lecture by Alan Watts. My attempt at a transcription is below, and the video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siu6JYqOZ0g

What makes you itch? What sort of a situation would you like? Let's suppose - I do this often in vocational guidance of students - they come to me and say well, ummm... We're getting out of college and we haven't the faintest idea what we want to do. So I always ask the question, "What would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life? Well, it's so amazing, as a result of our kind of educational system, crowds of students say, "Well, we'd like to be painters, we'd like to be poets, we'd like to be writers, but as everybody knows you can't earn any money that way." Another person says, "Well I'd like to live an out-of-doors life and ride horses." I say "Do you want to teach in a riding school? Uhhh, let's go through with it. What do you want to do?" When we've finally got down to something which the individual says that he really wants to do, I will say to him "You do that. And, umm, forget the money." Because if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living - that is to go on doing things you don't like doing. Which is stupid. Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way. And after all, if you do really like what you're doing - it doesn't matter what it is - you can eventually turn it, errr, you can eventually become a master of it. It's the only way to become a master of something. And then you'll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is. So I don't, don't worry too much, that's, everybody's, somebody's interested in everything. And anything you can be interested in, you'll find others. But it's absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don't like in order to go on spending things you don't like, doing things you don't like, and to teach your children to follow in the same track. See what we're doing is we're bringing up children and educating them to live the same sort of lives we're living. In order that they may justify themselves and find satisfaction in life by bringing up their children to bring up their children to do the same thing, so it's all retch and no vomit - it never gets there. And so, therefore it's so important to consider this question: "What do I desire?"

He's someone I really wasn't familiar with until just the last couple of days, but I looked him up because he seemed so eminently sensible. I guess I react strongly, on an emotional level, to the above, while being highly uncertain how I feel on an intellectual level. I guess I need to sit down and consider it for a while. I dunno.