Young People Need a New Framework for Navigating Their Lives
It’s a familiar story: a 21- or 22-year old prepares to graduate college. They probably participated in extracurriculars, explored their interests on- and off-campus, and even held an internship or two. They’re smart, and they’re ambitious. There’s only one problem. They don’t know what the hell they want from their lives. And if they did, they wouldn’t know where to begin.
Henry Kissinger once remarked that the absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously. That isn’t the problem these talented young folks face. They are inundated with a litany of great opportunities: graduate school, management consulting, investment banking, religious life, politics, marriage, moving to a new city, staying put with their family. But they lack a framework for adjudicating between the truly awesome routes their lives could take.
They’re frightful that they will make the wrong decision. They’re afraid that their trajectory in life could be sabotaged by a poor choice made in the bloom of their youth. So they make the worst choice possible: they make no choice at all.
In an era of nearly unlimited choice, we find ourselves paralyzed. Which job do I choose? Which career do I pursue? What sort of life do I wish to make for myself? These are not easy questions. We are empowered to make these life-altering decisions, equipped with insufficient knowledge and little wisdom. In turn, many of our peers opt for the sort of nihilism that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Implicit in all of this is what the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks dubbed the “morality of the market.” In the absence of clear pathways in life, and the sort of formative moral and religious institutions that past ages were replete with, our capitalist, consumerist culture fills the void. Understanding ourselves as autonomous, self-maximizing economic actors, our moral world is steadily deformed.
We implicitly view our life and career choices from this perspective, pursuing jobs, experiences, and opportunities with an eye to tangible outcomes; things that can be consumed. This framework conceptualizes human fulfillment in terms of consumption. The more we consume, the more fulfilled we are. Happiness equals consumption, and consumption equals happiness. This atomistic understanding of the human good has rendered us wealthy and miserable.
We are not unlike Smaug, sitting upon the world’s riches, alone in an ornately decorated cave. We try to content ourselves with the golden artifacts we possess, but when these fall short, we hope Amazon comes quickly to deliver our next purchase. But we are restless. And we are miserable. And more of the same will not dig us out of our hole.
Instead of defaulting to this consumerist framework, we should start looking at our choices -- particularly those of us early in our careers; in the dawn of our lives -- with an understanding of how we wish to be formed.
As James Q. Wilson documents in his brilliant analysis of bureaucracies and organizational arrangements (fittingly titled Bureaucracy) we are molded by the structures around us far more than we realize. Discussing successful managers, he says "they were people whose views and skills had been shaped by the organizations in which they spent their lives." This sort of formation is easy to see in organizational analysis. When a federal agency hires a lot of engineers -- people formed by an engineering school and the defining limits of the discipline itself -- the organization will approach problems and create solutions fundamentally differently than they would had they staffed their organization with environmental activists.
Similarly with all the institutions, organizations, and traditions we encounter and spend our time with throughout our lives. A married man is a different sort of person than an unmarried man, shaped by the duties and responsibilities concomitant with having a wife and, if he is so lucky, children. A religious woman is a different sort of person than a non-religious person, held to standards of ethical conduct but also the life-giving, soul-forming context provided by worship and community. The employed person is a different sort of person than the unemployed person, more conditioned to routine, likely more results-oriented.
It is not that any one of these options is the best path for everyone. There are better options than others, surely -- all roads do not lead to Rome -- but the promise of our time is that we all have more freedom than ever to choose how we are formed. And each of us will contribute in new and brilliant ways to our own and one another's' flourishing through our diversity of paths. But this relies upon our conscious recognition that we are being formed whether we like it or not: either by a consumerist culture that leaves us unfulfilled, or more promising alternatives.
We can begin this journey by beginning to ask the right sorts of questions. What kind of person will this job help me become? How will this religious tradition form my soul? What sort of human being do I want to be? These are not light questions. They are tougher to ask -- and sometimes more difficult to answer -- than narrow considerations of income, dream houses, or sensual pleasures. But man, they will be worth it.
Now, we can’t be blind to market considerations. We live in an individualistic, market-based society, and we probably wouldn’t want it any other way. Most of us can’t afford to ignore economic realities, and in this sense, we are bound by convention. But we can transcend the market-dominated morality of our time and place by building our lives through conscious self-formation.
Shedding our consumerist conception of life and career navigation will come with certain tough lessons. One of them is an acknowledgement that no amount of wealth, pleasure, or worldly satisfaction will satiate our voracious appetites. We must lift our gaze beyond the conventional consumerism of our times and up towards the heights of a life well-lived in the context of healthy formative institutions and overlapping ties of mutual obligation and love.
As moral philosopher Leon Kass wrote, we are living out the Chinese benediction, “May you live in interesting times.” This has left us discontent and disoriented. But we should hold out hope for these interesting times, not least because they give each of us the opportunity to participate in what is a distinctively human act: to reflect, and then to choose. So, let us choose well.