Reading others' experiences and yours is just reinforcing my notion that for any given idea there will be a school of thought that takes that idea to the absolu

Reading others' experiences and yours is just reinforcing my notion that for any given idea there will be a school of thought that takes that idea to the absolute extreme. If the school of thought becomes famous you'll eventually wind up with a group of people boosting it simply out of some kind of sense of taste. I am not a Buddhist, but I have some trouble imagining that what the Buddha intended to create was something for people to get all aspirational about acquiring, even if it is a skill rather than a material possession. I also think most things, pushed to the extreme, tend to become their own opposite.