Yes, the United States has a culture. For those of us living here it may seem
transparent, but there are ways in which we part company with even our most
comparable countries. One of them is our
love of competitions, which are not only central to our educational and
vocational experiences but pop up in group recreational activities. There is something about needing to know who
is the best that gets our interest.
While we may bewilder Canadians, western Europeans,
Australians, and northeast Asians by competing at choral singing, ranch chores
(rodeo), and even ballroom dancing, we are taking that to a further extreme by
inventing entire lives based around it – and those choosing that regimen are
the worse off. That is the thesis of
Daniel Markovits’s “How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition,” in the
just-released September issue of Atlantic.
Markovits, a Yale law professor whose article is planned to
be released in book form, exaggerated – most Americans know little firsthand
about the things of which he wrote. But
for those regretting not being in what has been called the 1%, he offered a
look at the underside of how they got and stayed there. And it’s not pleasant.
Have you wondered about the lives of those with the
half-million-dollar-and up salaries in “finance, management, law, and medicine”? Per Markovits, they now split off in
preschool, when they prepare to “apply to 10 kindergartens, running a gantlet
of essays, appraisals, and interviews,” which is repeated with “elite middle
and high schools” that “commonly require three to five hours of homework a
night,” all focusing not on “experiments and play” but instead on “the
accumulation of the training and skills, or human capital, needed to be
admitted to an elite college and, eventually, to secure an elite job.” From there, these one-percenters “work with
unprecedented intensity,” for example, if they are large-firm lawyers,
producing 2,400 annual billable hours (calling for 70-hour weeks), or, if
bankers, putting in 20-hour day-and-night combinations. Those ultimately successful, per sociologist
Arlie Russell Hochschild, survive a “final elimination” by being “still able to
maintain a good mental set, and keep their family life together.” And eventually if they want they can retire,
after which they will probably spend much time, money, hope, and effort helping
their descendants do as they did.
Although this program, which despite Markovits’s use of the
word, is not truly meritocratic – per my post earlier this year with oboes and
Guatemala in the title, the type of merit is also critical – it causes
problems. It endangers three areas most
would call key to a generally successful life:
happiness, sex, and longevity. It
may provide its practitioners with net worths unknown without entrepreneurism
or large inheritances, but with, until the work ends, little opportunity to be enjoyed. Per the author, it forces even very young
people to stick to their preordained plans at the expense of exploration and
self-discovery, in the process “exploiting” themselves and “impoverishing”
their “inner lives.”
Of such choices for themselves and their children, it is
easy to see the appeal, especially for Americans, who, even those of lower
family education and incomes, have long heard about “making something” of
themselves, and, if particularly smart or capable, of getting to “the
top.” Winning such long, massive
competitions can provide powerful self-esteem and eliminate any fear of having failed
or underachieved. Being without any real
possibility of financial failure has its advantages. However, I suspect the truly smart people,
with vision of wider scope, know that excelling in this way is not the best
they can do. There is more to life than
that, and those in the tracks described here are missing it, completely and
permanently.
Evaluating our success is open to great debate. Even if we agree on who was better than whom
and by how much, one simple truth still applies: those winning rat races are still rats.
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