Life is about constantly banging your head against the wall against stuff that just sucks. Or as Krugman calls it, battling cockroach ideas:

Sometimes I get comments from people accusing me of repeating myself in the column; no doubt I do make the same arguments multiple times. But that’s because people keep forgetting!

A parallel observation: Middle management is often about seeing the same meme keep resurfacing again and again and having to respond to it again and again. Working with kids you often see the parents committing the same fallacies over and over again.

Meanwhile, intellectualizing on stuff often means sorting things out and dealing with implications and the truth as a consequence of having arrived at some cerebral judgment or another. Life is about the seesaw; academics is about describing the seesaw.