>kind of talking about every essay, ever? Absolutely not. Only the bad ones. An essay is an argument with yourself. If you take the explicit position that you

>kind of talking about every essay, ever? Absolutely not. Only the bad ones. An essay is an argument with yourself. If you take the explicit position that you should ignore your doubts, as this author does, then what you are putting on paper is your personal confirmation bias. My hobby horse is not christianity, my hobby horse is the thing that he has insanely distilled from christianity as the part worth keeping. The author had a bad experience as a teen applying to elite colleges for no other reason than because he was supposed to, and the conclusion he should be drawing from this observation is so obvious that you might not even notice that he doesn't.