The
pressures today to get into a good college or university in the U.S. are
enormous. In order to achieve this goal,
many high school students not only work super hard to get a 4.0 grade point
average (or as close as possible), but they also fill all their free time with
all sorts of extracurricular activities designed to show that they are
well-rounded people. Sports activities,
art and music lessons, orchestras and bands, social clubs, honor societies and
after-school and summer jobs.
Competition to get into the top colleges and universities is ferocious,
and many students are afraid of allowing themselves too much down time. And the competition is based on a single line
of reasoning. A student has to get into
an excellent college or university in order to get into an excellent graduate
school in order to make the contacts that will allow him to get into the high-paying
high-status jobs. And anything less than
succeeding in this pathway of personal advancement is considered a
failure. Schoolwork, sports, art, music,
social clubs, honor societies, jobs, all have to be carried out perfectly in
the minds of these students in order to stay in good standing with their
schools and employers.
And
the result of all this pressure – both external and internal – is a lot of
mental health issues among these young people.
Anxiety, depression, drugs, alcohol, delinquency, suicidal thoughts and
suicide. A lot of students with serious
psychological issues. It has never been
quite like this before. And the question
is why now.
Most
young people in America are growing up with a level of ease and comfort unheard
of in past generations. This level of
ease and comfort is derived, among other things, from the modern technological
devices that make their lives more frictionless. Everything from electric can-openers to
cars. The ease and comfort is also
derived from the modern consumer technology that makes life more mediated. Movies, television, video games, computers,
smartphones, and tablets. All this
modern technology leads to greater difficulty for people to make and receive
organic imprints in order to feel alive, and also to greater difficulty for
people to preserve imprints in order to create a surrogate immortality and
prepare for death. Because opportunities
for making and preserving imprints are scarce, young people are kept in a
prolonged adolescence with more and more preparation for adult life required,
so that they won’t have to provide competition for the adults by taking away
opportunities for leaving imprints.
In
such a situation, the main person available for leaving meaningful imprints is
oneself. And they have to be strong
intense imprints in order to feel meaningful.
And the main sources for these imprints lies in the preparation for
adult activity: the education and the extracurricular activities. Grades, of course, are part of the public
record. But grades and the collection of
extracurricular activities have an outsized effect on students who, in today’s
world, have no other meaningful way of measuring their self-worth. This is particularly true as many life
activities outside of the larger educational
experience, and in particular recreational activities related to screen
technology, become more frictionless and more mediated. Fewer and fewer things that require any
meaningful participation.
It is
true that there are external imprints to be preserved by a good student record
starting with grade school and ending with jobs in the top firms or
organizations in a given vocational category.
But if one doesn’t get into the top schools or get jobs in the top firms
and organizations, is one to be considered a failure? Of course not! But for many students, getting into the top
schools or the top work situations is the only thing that matters. And the stress doesn’t go away once one gets
into the preferred places. Then one has
to constantly worry about if he is worthy of being in a top school or job, and
if he is good enough to stay there.
Again for these students, fighting for incredible excellence is a way of
generating abrasive friction within themselves and pulling themselves out of
the numbness they feel from the frictionless mediated living environment in
which they dwell from the experiential vacuum.
Therefore, for many of these students, being content with good but not
top-notch schools and good but not top-notch job positions is out of the
question. Such life situations would not
provide the abrasive friction these students need to pull themselves out of
their numbness and feel alive. It’s
either total excellence or the living death of the experiential vacuum.
In
order to succeed today, a student cannot permit himself real down time. He has to constantly be busy in order to
accomplish success on the linear discrete path he has defined for himself. But without down time to reflect on himself
and his situation, he becomes like a robot that has been programmed to do tasks
perfectly, a machine that sets off to perform its tasks with minimal tolerance
for deviating from certain expectations.
So does a robot have the reflexive awareness to really enjoy and
appreciate its successes? I think
not. In the same way, students today
trudge on, constantly on the move. The
only deviation they seem to allow themselves is the deviation of depression
that results from experiencing significant deviations on their road to success
or significant failures.
And,
of course, living in depression as a result of failure is, in a sense, similar
to the external world, the frictionless mediated world of their daily
lives. One is an internal experiential
vacuum, the other is an external experiential vacuum. But the latter is something that students are
trying to escape by creating an ongoing tension-pocket of their nonstop
academic and later vocational treadmill.
And creating a tension-pocket state of being is just as important to
these students as trying to make and preserve some meaningful imprints, both on
themselves and on a world which does not have many experiential spaces for
making and preserving meaningful imprints.
Ask assembly line factory workers about the meaningful imprints that
they are preserving.
Only
with blind ambition does one have the opportunity to make and preserve
meaningful imprints according to the agendas of these students. Only with blind ambition can one generate the
internalized abrasive friction to feel fully alive. And only with blind ambition today is one
able to generate the level and quality of internal stimulation to be able to
pull oneself out of the numbness, the experiential vacuum of modern
technological society, and still remain functioning and successful within the
external world. The problem is that the
stress created by the abrasive friction that is internally generated can be so
destructive. And this is why so many
students today are succumbing to so many different pathological psychological
symptoms. And given the expectations that
develop within them in order to fight numbness, the treadmill of modern
ambition becomes a treadmill that is very difficult to get off.
© 2019 Laurence Mesirow
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