Too Close to Comfort

Warning: This column is intended to induce existential discomfort in the reader. And if it does, I must admit that I will be quite pleased!

Why aren’t we all appalled by how many of us take our 17 years or more of education and sell it off to the highest-paying corporate bidder? Perhaps a few of us have excuses for such behavior, but it’s impossible to see the overall trend as anything but morally reprehensible. When you get down to it, the majority of us are coming from comfortable backgrounds and taking comfortable routes through our four years here on the way to even more comfortable post-college lifestyles.

When I say comfortable backgrounds, I don’t mean we all grew up in mega-mansions with pimped-out Mercedes in our driveways. I simply mean that the overwhelming majority of us didn’t really have to grow up worrying about the basics—food, water, shelter, etc. If we did, we probably wouldn’t have made it to Harvard.

Most of us tend to take the comfortable routes to the diploma while we are here as well. Sure, a lot of us work hard, but there is a certain security in all of it because we are almost always in pursuit of some well-established objective—the A, the elite extracurricular position, or the prestigious job. We let our filled-to-the-brim schedules direct us from class to meeting to practice to rehearsal, and at every break in between we are connected to our cell phones, our iPods, our laptops.

Such busy-ness gives us the false impression that we are trailblazers when, for the most part, we are meekly taking well-trodden routes. Most of us simply go with the flow—abdicating control of our lives to the conventional prestige we pursue and to the technology that effectively keeps us too distracted to ask the uncomfortable questions about where we are really going and why. Between our work-hard/party-hard lifestyle, any time or energy for actual solitary reflection is lost—as is any moment for original thought and conscious direction of purpose.

And thus many of us unsurprisingly head to posh post-graduation destinations. We are so busy thinking about the micro rather than the macro that we get to senior year without a clear purpose of why we are here and who we want to be. While some of us mindlessly pursue the status symbols, the more passive amongst us ambivalently follow along, soothed by the potential for easy money and the fact that “everyone is doing it.” Trained to be technicians–-people who think very creatively, but within specific parameters—we are content to sell off our brainpower to corporations, political parties, and law firms. Plus, between the money the firms will offer and the hours they will demand from us, we will continue to be able to live in secure comfort—still lacking the time to question ultimately what we are doing with our lives.

We might even contentedly take pride in giving to charity every year, being the “good person” within the system, working at one of the “good firms” that has a minority recruitment program and doesn’t kill arctic seals. But at the end of the day, most of us are going to be walking out of the air-conditioned office, zipping home in the chic sedan, living comfortably while others in this country struggle to put dinner on the table. I don’t care if you vote Democrat. Many of us do about as much good as most Northerners did when they waited for a civil war to threaten their way of life before demanding the end of an unjust system. The passive Northern businessman was just as bad as the plantation owner.

To be fair, certainly some of us do come from backgrounds where we need the Goldman Sachs job to pay off loans or to support our families. Maybe a few of us actually do need the McKinsey business experience in order to start that nonprofit that will save the world. But most who take such paths don’t have these excuses. Many of the future I-bankers assure us that they will head to public interest work after a couple years instead of to Bentleys and the B-school, and maybe they’ll have better luck than the overwhelming majority of first-year law students who say they want to fight for justice and work for anything but a corporate firm. (Close to 80 percent at many of the top schools end up doing just the opposite.)

But no matter what the case, we must all confront to what extent we are taking a cowardly route through life simply because of its comfort and its seeming security against life’s uncertainties. To some degree we all take such routes, but some of us, weakly, never look in the mirror to see. Perhaps some of us do have good hearts but really can’t imagine life without Volvos and Venetian vacations. (Maybe that’s why so many head to medical school!)

And why can’t we, especially those of us from the more comfortable backgrounds, consider taking a slight risk to move beyond our comfort zone and try making an act of true generosity? Don’t you think that we, who at least have had the chance to pursue some of our own dreams, should struggle beside those who never really were given the chance to dream in the first place?

What if, for example, we all spent at least a few years trying to do some good as a teacher or community organizer in an at-risk neighborhood instead of going off to the elite firm? What if, to take it to another level, we committed our lives to eliminating “at-risk neighborhoods” altogether, to changing the odds so poor kids don’t have to beat them?

That would be true generosity. It might not be the most comfortable road to take, but it might just give us an opportunity to make the ridiculous amount of money invested in us worth it.



Henry Seton ’06 is a social studies concentrator in Adams House. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.