Notes from: This is Water by David Foster Wallace
"Learning how to think" really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.

...the old cliché about the mind being "an excellent servant but a terrible master."

If you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the subsurface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: the only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. This, I submit, is the freedom of real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted: You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't.

The kind (of freedom) that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able to truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. That is being taught how to think.

The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the "rat race" - the constant, gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.