10:31 a.m. - 2005-06-06
I believe David said it best...
Ben Cape sent me this great article by David Brooks who writes for the New York Times. This snippet pretty much sums it up, wouldn't you say? When I read it, my heart swelled with that feeling of "Ah, someone older and wiser has just aptly articulated what has been happening to me." See what you think. Oh, and if you didn't know, Brooke and I are writing a book and some of it is sort of about this kinda stuff.
"Places like Washington and New York attract large numbers of ambitious young people who have spent their short lives engaged in highly structured striving: getting good grades, getting into college. Suddenly they are spit out into the vast, anarchic world of adulthood, surrounded by a teeming horde of scrambling peers, and a chaos of possibilities and pitfalls. They discover that though they are really good at manipulating the world of classrooms, they have no clue about how actual careers develop, how people move from post to post. And all they have to do to find their way amid this confusion is to answer one little question: What is the meaning and purpose of my life? Their elders tell them to take their time and explore, advice that is of absolutely no comfort. Failure seems but a step away. Loneliness hovers. They often feel stunted and restless (I haven't moved up in six months!), so they adopt a conversational mode - ironic, self-deprecatory, postpubescent fatalism - that masks their anxiety about falling behind. Fear of the unknown sends thousands back to law school, but others plunge into the precarious world of entry-level jobs. In college they were discussing Dostoyevsky; now they are trapped in copy-machine serfdom. They spend their days amid people with settled careers, but they teeter on the cliff's edge. The internship ends in months, and then what?"
