“Over the past few weeks, America\u2019s colleges have sent another class of graduates off into the world. These graduates possess something of inestimable value. Nearly every sensible middle-aged person would give away all their money to be able\u00a0to go back to age 22 and begin adulthood anew.<\/p>\n
But, especially this year, one is conscious of the many ways in which this year\u2019s graduating class has been ill served by their elders. They enter a bad job market, the hangover from decades of excessive borrowing. They inherit a ruinous federal debt.<\/p>\n
More important, their lives have been perversely structured. This year\u2019s graduates are members of the most supervised generation in American history. Through their childhoods and teenage years, they have been monitored, tutored, coached and honed to an unprecedented degree.<\/p>\n
Yet upon graduation they will enter a world that is unprecedentedly wide open and unstructured. Most of them will not quickly get married, buy a home and have kids, as previous generations did. Instead, they will confront amazingly diverse job markets, social landscapes and lifestyle niches. Most will spend a decade wandering from job to job and clique to clique, searching for a role.<\/p>\n
No one would design a system of extreme supervision to prepare people for a decade of extreme openness.<\/strong> But this is exactly what has emerged in modern America. College students are raised in an environment that demands one set of navigational skills, and they are then cast out into a different environment requiring a different set of skills, which they have to figure out on their own.<\/p>\n Worst of all, they are sent off into this world with the whole baby-boomer theology ringing in their ears. If you sample some of the commencement addresses being broadcast on C-Span these days, you see that many graduates are told to: Follow your passion, chart your own course, march to the beat of your own drummer, follow your dreams and find yourself. This is the litany of expressive individualism, which is still the dominant note in American culture.<\/p>\n But, of course, this mantra misleads on nearly every front.<\/p>\n College grads are often sent out into the world amid rapturous talk of limitless possibilities. But this talk is of no help to the central business of adulthood, finding serious things to tie yourself down to. The successful young adult is beginning to make sacred commitments \u2014 to a spouse, a community and calling \u2014 yet mostly hears about freedom and autonomy.<\/p>\n Today\u2019s graduates are also told to find their passion and then pursue their dreams. The implication is that they should find themselves first and then go off and live their quest. But, of course, very few people at age 22 or 24 can take an inward journey and come out having discovered a developed self.<\/p>\n Most successful young people don\u2019t look inside and then plan a life. They look outside and find a problem, which summons their life. A relative suffers from Alzheimer\u2019s and a young woman feels called to help cure that disease. A young man works under a miserable boss and must develop management skills so his department can function. Another young woman finds herself confronted by an opportunity she never thought of in a job category she never imagined. This wasn\u2019t in her plans, but this is where she can make her contribution.<\/p>\n Most people don\u2019t form a self and then lead a life. They are called by a problem, and the self is constructed gradually by their calling.<\/p>\n The graduates are also told to pursue happiness and joy. But, of course, when you read a biography of someone you admire, it\u2019s rarely the things that made them happy that compel your admiration. It\u2019s the things they did to court unhappiness \u2014 the things they did that were arduous and miserable, which sometimes cost them friends and aroused hatred. It\u2019s excellence, not happiness, that we admire most.<\/p>\n Finally, graduates are told to be independent-minded and to express their inner spirit. But, of course, doing your job well often means suppressing yourself. As Atul Gawande mentioned during his countercultural address last week at Harvard Medical School, being a good doctor often means being part of a team, following the rules of an institution, going down a regimented checklist.<\/p>\n Today\u2019s grads enter a cultural climate that preaches the self as the center of a life. But, of course, as they age, they\u2019ll discover that the tasks of a life are at the center. Fulfillment is a byproduct of how people engage their tasks, and can\u2019t be pursued directly. Most of us are egotistical and most are self-concerned most of the time, but it\u2019s nonetheless true that life comes to a point only in those moments when the self dissolves into some task.<\/strong> The purpose in life is not to find yourself. It\u2019s to lose yourself.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “Over the past few weeks, America\u2019s colleges have sent another class of graduates off into the world. These graduates possess something of inestimable value. Nearly every sensible middle-aged person would give away all their money to be able\u00a0to go back to age 22 and begin adulthood anew. 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