Practice

I've thought before that law school was probably good prep for law firm life -- you get assigned all this crap to absorb with very little guidance, you have authority figures who feel free to yell at you in ways unacceptable in most walks of civilized life, you are booked for every solid minute of your life and you disclaim your unavailability to non-law school friends through the "I'm in law school, it's busy" line.

Now I'm thinking that preparing for the bar is also a good preparation for the first few years at a law firm. You get up early, put out some work only to find out later, when you check with an authority (model answer, mid-level associate), that you knew even less than you thought (which wasn't very much to begin with). Your work consists of going through mind-numbing material for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours. Your desk is your dining table. If by chance your friend convinces you to take a dinner break, you keep looking at the clock, because every minute you sit there chatting is a minute longer you have to stay up working. There's an inexorable deadline and time will have to expand for you to complete all the work you have to do in order to meet that deadline.

Above all, you are motivated by fear.

You have this nagging feeling that it doesn't have to be this way -- for anyone, really, because the inhumane system hurts everyone, and for yourself, because you didn't have to go to a law firm, you didn't have to go to law school -- but in a way, it feels as inescapable and hopeless as the tickity-tock passage of minutes, each one bringing you closer to death.