The quote of today comes from former Yale professor of English William Deresiewicz, interviewing one of the most privileged and talented young people America now has to offer.
One young woman at Cornell summed up her life to me like this: “I hate all my activities. I hate all my classes, I hated everything I did in high school, I expect to hate my job, and this is just how it’s going to be for the rest of my life.”
From William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. (New York: Free Press, 2014), p. 11
Whatever this young woman lacks, it ain’t intellect.
Iago Faustus,
Here in Asuncion, Paraguay one of the most elite high schools is the American School Association or ASA which brings teachers from the US and Europe. Very expensive to get in there. But once there you are in a very privileged environment. A CV with ASA opens doors to highly paid jobs. Take care of yourself. Raúl
“Whatever this young woman lacks, it ain’t intellect”
…except she isn’t using her intellect. She is legally an adult and can choose to do other things. If she hates everything she has ever done, she could at least choose to do things she merely dislikes instead. If she hates everything she could imagine ever doing, why does she stay alive?
Well, remember that she did get in to Cornell, which isn’t a charm school. It seems to me that she has roughly three paths to follow: (1) the status-quo path of completing her Ivy League education and going thence into law, medicine, finance, or consulting, which means misery, (2) suicide, or (3) somehow finding a real vocation and pursuing it, which means (most likely) a plunge in socioeconomic status into at best some sort of shabby bohemianism, along with alienation from family and friends. Intellect aside, she has, if she’s like the Ivy League students I taught once, had life experience and education that prepare her for (3) only slightly better than they prepare her for going to live on the moon. Since most people aren’t constituted for suicide, my guess is that she’ll end up in (1).