[Simone Weil] says that there’s something extremely important about habituating yourself to waiting for the idea or the insight to come to you, rather than just expecting constant, steady, upward production. Because when you’re 10 years old, and you’re struggling with a long-division problem, and you’re waiting to try to see the truth, you’re developing this kind of skill and expectation that the truth is gonna meet you. –Meghan Sullivan, interview with David Brooks (“What is the Good Life?” The Atlantic, Sept. 13, 2026)
In an interview with David Brooks, Meghan Sullivan, co-author of The Good Life Method, based on a popular course she teaches at Notre Dame, confessed that when she encounters a writing or thinking block, she recalls Simone Weil’s advice. Weil, a French philosopher and political activist, wrote an essay called “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies With a View to the Love of God.” In it, she argues that “boring homework assignments” are essential, and they shouldn’t be made more exciting. There’s great value in the intellectual struggle, she contends, and in the “expectation that the truth is gonna meet you.”
I like this very much. As a former teacher and lifelong learner, I’ve seen this expectation play out in the most unlikely circumstances and, sometimes, with the most unlikely candidates. I recall sitting in my Generative Transformational Grammar course (yes, this was actually a required course for English Ed majors!) on the University of Nebraska-Kearney campus. The chalk board was filled with sentence diagrams that stretched from end to end, top to bottom. Based on algebraic theory, this grammar confounded many of us. Even our professor would occasionally stop–chalk in hand–scratching his head as he reviewed the work he was diagramming. Because I’d long ago dismissed myself as “math challenged,” I was an unlikely generative transformational grammar fan. But I began to love the struggle of accurately diagramming even the most complex sentences. I worked feverishly, expecting that the truth of each sentence and its parts would reveal itself. And when it did, it was glorious.
Quoted in Hannah Marder’s article, “Gen Alpha Teachers Are Sharing The Disturbing Things They’re Witnessing From Students, And I Am Concerned For The Future Of Humanity” (BuzzFeed, July 26, 2026), an anonymous college professor laments the surprising educational “deficit” he frequently finds in his students:
. . . so I get these students four years downstream. The specific deficit surprises people. It’s not intelligence, and it’s not even knowledge exactly. It’s stamina: the ability to stay inside a hard problem for 20 unassisted minutes. Every friction point in their entire information environment has been optimized away, and now the deliverable itself can be generated on demand. So the muscle that grows during ‘This is hard, and no one is helping me yet’ never develops.
If Simone Weil were alive and present, I’m confident she’d advise this professor to stay the course, letting students “stay inside a hard problem for 20 unassisted minutes.” She’d argue that if we truly want to help these students, we’d refuse to rescue them. She’d argue for friction points, for difficult assignments with complex problems. And she’d contend that we serve our students–and citizens–best when we help them develop stronger intellectual muscle.
Muscle-building is, indeed, hard work. But as grueling as intellectual muscle-building can be, it can also be exhilarating. Solving problems, discovering solutions, and finding the truth is pretty heady stuff. As my writing teacher and mentor, my dad always encouraged me to keep writing, even–and especially–when I believed I was going nowhere. If you stick with it, he said, you’ll eventually write yourself into something surprising and infinitely more valuable than your original draft. He wasn’t wrong. For me, and I suspect most writers, the struggle is painfully necessary. When we give up too easily, we leave the best ideas on the table. We leave little possibility that the truth is gonna meet us. We offer our readers milktoast when we might’ve served steak.
Recently, I read “The Brutal Harvard Class That Suddenly Everyone Wants to Take,” an Oct. 28, 2026 article by Pamela Paul in The Wallstreet Journal. The title alone gives credence to Weil’s advocacy for intellectual struggle. Paul reports on Harvard students who are clamoring for an opportunity to build cognitive muscle in a course titled Humanities 10:
Hum 10, as it’s commonly known, has become the surprise hit of Harvard’s academic lineup and something of a campus institution. Demand to get into the class has surged, fueled by word-of-mouth from “Hum Alums” who talk it up on social media. Applications (essays required) shot up 40% this fall with 180 incoming freshmen vying for 90 spots.
This course, Paul writes, is “distinctly old school.” The curriculum begins with The Odyssey, followed by James Joyce’s Ulysses, and ends with The Iliad. There are also assignments from Montaigne, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Baldwin, Dante, and Plato. The student applicants express their desire to tackle classics they might not read unless required and their need to repair “frayed attention spans.” When students not enrolled in the course encourage them to “just Chat” the required reading list (use AI to summarize and explain the books), Hum 10 students refuse.
Hum alum Ellie Powell told Paul that “It’s the only class I took at Harvard where people would call each other out for not having done the reading. You didn’t want to disappoint the seminar by being the one person who didn’t read or whose comment really didn’t add to the discussion. We all felt like we were building something, and that was a remarkable feeling.” And speaking of a remarkable feeling, Paul describes a Hum 10 class where the professor stood at the whiteboard explaining the philosophical foundation of Jane Austen’s Emma. To her class of 90 students, she finished by asking, “What will become of Emma–and what will become of you?” At this, the students burst into applause, Paul writes. To think these students read an entire novel, sat through a 75-minute lecture (and undoubtedly took copious notes), and then burst into applause at the end of their teacher’s presentation is pretty remarkable. Is this heaven? No, it’s Harvard!
As I think back on the midterm elections and the months of political campaigning that preceded them, I confess that the glossy flyers stuffed into my mailbox daily did little to help me meet the truth. Nor did the tsunami of texts I received or the commercials that monopolized the airwaves. I understand that sound bites, name-calling, and catchy derogatory slogans have become today’s preferred political tools. And I understand that political debates are more about out-yelling your opponents and pandering to your political base now. But I’d like candidates to genuinely struggle with the complex issues. I’d like them to think and talk more insightfully using indoor voices, embracing the struggle, and developing the “skill and expectation that the truth is gonna meet you.” And I’d like to think we’d meet them in this struggle. I’d hope we’d take our cue from Hum 10 students who can sit and actively listen for over an hour, wanting to be challenged by difficult problems and rejecting shortcuts to their solutions.
Granted, not every political candidate resorts to name-calling. Not every candidate offers quick answers for truly complex problems. But when confronted with tough issues, I’d like to hear more of them admit they’re not willing to give up their expectation that, through continued intellectual struggle, they can offer better solutions and ideas. And when they experience chalkboard paralysis, as my grammar professor did, facing a difficult problem and momentarily getting lost in its complexity, I hope I’d give them grace. I hope I’d embrace the reality that truth-seeking is fraught with fits and starts. And I hope I’d embrace the intellectual work of joining the fight, of wrestling with opposing perspectives and weighing evidence. For as Weil argues, “there’s something extremely important about habituating yourself to waiting for the idea or the insight to come to you.”
As I was writing this, I remembered a kind of shorthand I developed as a young adult when I began to write poetry more seriously. I look back on these notebook paper drafts where underlined spaces appear between lines or partial lines of words. These spaces marked my willingness to wait, my expectation that, with trial and time, the truth was gonna meet me. I was habituating myself to the practice of waiting for an idea to come to me. Leaning into my dad’s encouragement, I wrote with the conviction that, if I kept at it, I’d write myself into something worthy of the struggle. Over the years as I’ve finished a poem, I’ve felt the genuine joy of a 10-year-old who solves a difficult long-division problem.
I may not have the intellectual muscle of the Harvard Hum 10 students. And I recognize my need for continued cognitive conditioning. Even so, I press on. There’s much value and joy in the intellectual struggle.
