"I love my life," Bobby said to me, slumped in my friend Kevin's tattered couch. "I'm happy every day. I've got it good."
Bobby isn't a complicated guy. I mostly know him as a crazy, slightly gray-haired guy I would randomly encounter when I was lounging uselessly at Kevin's. Last I heard, Bobby was still at his old job, still making homemade moonshine, still a huge Duke basketball fan. Bobby was a simple guy, sure--no philosopher, no student of law or politics or culture or even human nature.
But I think he was on to something.
Smart, educated Duke people are good at a lot of things. They're the ones working atop the steel-and-glass pillars punctuating city skylines, the people making the world move, the people who live for the future, always on the way to the next triumph.
Smart people don't make homemade moonshine, generally. They also aren't very good at making themselves happy.
Most of us are raised to believe that the calculations we make in life are important, that we should always look ahead. While in high school, we look to college. While in college, we look to grad school or getting that perfect job. There is a hostile numerology to it, from the SAT to the MCAT, the LSAT, the GMAT, the omnipresent rankings of everything that dictate the loci of prestige. Most people I know think their script is already written, the next five years mapped cautiously as a chess master's moves.
I have this conversation regularly: "I'm going to go work for this big law firm, make all this money, pay off my loans and then--then I'll do what I really want to do."
To have that choice puts one at the pinnacle of privilege. But the mere fact of that privilege doesn't mean it can't be a trap. A script can be a comfort. But when followed blindly--followed like a fixed course tighter and narrower than a race track--it can be a terrible constraint.
Rarely do I hear smart people talk like Bobby, about how happy they are in the moment. When I think of smart people, I think of success, of wealth, of the sinecures afforded by platinum degrees and gold-plated skills. But I also think of conversations, in places that only such people go, in ivory towers most only dream to climb, about depression, fear and loneliness. Smart people are some of the saddest people I know.
One of the script's most bitter casualties, I've found, is love. That same tendency--to do what your head, rather than your heart, says--to drive yourself by numbers and plans and calculations, can also be applied to love. By the end of this year hundreds of airport goodbyes will have meant the end of relationships, most for good reasons. But some of them won't. They will happen because people are afraid of themselves, afraid of deviating even inches from plans that rarely have space to be shared with someone else.
The casualty isn't just the love of people, but of what you do. Popular sentiment seems to be that three, or five, or 10 years mortgaged to some marginally appealing career is an acceptable tradeoff, an investment in an imagined future where the script just stops being. Even one year out of college, that sounds crazy to me. The ripest time for plunging into what you love is when you're young, when you're free. Youth is not wasted on the young. It's just too often sacrificed to what passes as common sense.
To me, the greatest privilege you ever have as a retiring Chronicle editor is getting to write your "senior column," your final send-off. I called mine "Living life as art." This was my favorite part:
"Art means passion for whatever you do; personal, near-religious zeal for your practices. It means having intense, reckless enthusiasm for your career and for life."
I never imagined, when I wrote that column, that in one year I would work for a men's magazine, act in two plays when I'd never acted before or find myself editing another publication, all while being in law school. And, those things notwithstanding, that I'd still find myself regretting the times I really stuck to the script.
Whatever your plans are, whatever future you imagine, don't be afraid to change, to toss the script for at least a moment. Don't be afraid to love madly and fail spectacularly, to clutch at a thousand dreams at once. Do everything in your power to love every day like it is your last. For no matter how strict your plans may be, your script will never be finished, never be written well enough. You don't have to live your life like Bobby, or live your life like an artist.
But that doesn't mean you can't learn something from them.
Jonas Blank, Trinity '01, is a former editor of Recess.
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