When you first arrive in graduate school, it’s all about the work. The dream of scholastic glory is still alive, so you’re ready to focus on your studies and finally become the expert on the sexual fantasies of 17th century Russian peasants that you’ve always wanted to be.

For those of us who are commencing the long, arduous trek to a doctorate — and all the respect it commands — we know why we’re here. We are here to immerse ourselves in knowledge. To bathe in obscure facts until their musty odor suffuses our ever-so slightly ill-fitting clothes.

The ill-fitting clothes are, of course, the natural corollary to such youthful obsessions with work. We arrive having rejected the strictures of convention (good dress-sense, happiness, success, etc.) in order to more fully embrace the joys of learning.

To fully immerse oneself in academic struggle, one has to sacrifice certain things; for example, dignity and self-respect.

This is not quite the price it seems; after all, if everything goes according to plan, glory (of a sort) awaits you at the end. Which is to say that if you put in the time, a lifetime of success is within your grasp, or something like that.

Unfortunately, it’s all a lie. No one bothers to point out that, actually, very few of us achieve what we set out to. A willingness to give up the instant gratification of living above the poverty line is not enough. (Yes, yes I know we don’t really live below the poverty line, but given I can no longer afford to pay the masseuse for the happy ending, I feel impoverished.)

In all probability, whatever your goals are, whatever you hope to leverage your P and h and D into, it ain’t gonna happen.

Eventually the realization of this deep truth will hit. Typically, this takes place after you’ve invested slightly too much time to consciously acknowledge what a terrible mistake you’ve made. So instead, we embrace sophistry.

Ah, sophistry. Such a delightful word — big shout out to dictionary.com’s “word of the day” — it lies at the heart of how we deal. We lie. We lie to each other and we lie to ourselves.

Now, before I dwell on details, it would only be fair to point out that there are some brave souls out there who, on realizing that this graduate school business is mostly a sham, leave. I salute you.

Sadly, though, not all of us have such strength of character, so we subtly shift our goals instead. Work no longer has primacy. Rather, we look at these five (or six or seven or eight or nine or 10 or 11 or 12) years as a chance to Improve Ourselves.

We stop and take stock of our meager lives. We decide that we are grown-ups now and we’ll goddamn behave like it. We’ll learn to drink wine. We’ll flock to those social dance classes. We’ll stop hooking up (as if we ever did) and start going on Dates. How mature.

Then there are the attempts to build the body beautiful. Looking in the mirror one day, you may decide that the developing adipose belt is really not that attractive.

Or perhaps as you are flossing one morning (incidentally, flossing, a big conspiracy on the part of the military-industrial-dental complex, doesn’t do anything) you will glance in the mirror, and it will finally hit home that geek chic doesn’t exist: You need to work out.

And so, we launch ourselves into programs to turn our pasty, scrawny, ill-shaped bodies into those Adonis-like (or female-equivalent) figures that grace the pages of glossy magazines.

Like our abortive attempts to reach intellectual heights, these attempts at Improvement are doomed. If you haven’t become the person you’re going to be by now, you may as well give up on any hope of getting there.

Instead, I suggest bitching continually. Perhaps in a column for The Daily.

So, I noticed that in last Friday’s paper, The Daily selected a bunch of columns (presumably representing the best we have to offer) for the pre-commencement issue. I would be flattered that they chose one of mine, except they picked the only one of the year that I didn’t actually write. All of which means that my extraordinarily delicate ego is in need of a massage. So email me at navins@stanford.edu.