I came to this spot with honest intentions of writing solely about a 21-year-old baseball phenom, but it's clear I'm instead in one of those dangerous places — fueled by pleasure reading, that rarest of things these days — where larger thoughts are intersecting with smaller ones.
If you came here looking for a dissection of a swing, a pleasant talk about OPS or even just a fawning hero's welcome … sorry, this is not that place.
And so: I'm reading "Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life," a scathing critique of the current elite university education system and the perfect (but perfectly bereft of true direction or soul) students it is churning out these days. It is written by William Deresiewicz, a former Yale professor. I am not done with it, but I can already tell it is excellent.
One particular passage early on struck me:
"A former student sent me an essay he wrote, a few years after college, called 'The Paradox of Potential.' Yale students, he said, are like stem cells. They can be anything in the world, so they try to delay for as long as possible the moment when they have to become just one thing in particular. Possibility, paradoxically, becomes limitation."
In the larger context of life, I see this paralysis of possibility playing out on a daily basis — even with myself. The world has become so large and so small at once that there exist limitless choices. But within those limitless choices comes the infinite chance that you might pick the wrong thing. So we have become a nation (and I imagine it extends beyond our borders) of dabblers, poking our toes into the water long enough to get wet but not long enough to go for a swim. And we have become a nation that covets a herd even at a time when we've never had more freedom.
It is felt in something as mundane as deciding where to have dinner or what to do on a particular evening. We are afraid to fail, and we are afraid to appear anything less than perfect. We constantly compare ourselves to others because Twitter, Instagram and Facebook give us that kind of instant feedback and comparative one-upping space. Sure, you had a nice weekend. But did you have a nice enough weekend? Because a lot of people ate well, drank well and traveled well. Are you really that cool? Are you afraid to admit you might not be?
And so we sit, sometimes, frozen — grabbing onto whatever we can hold, going all-in only on sure things, trying not to get left behind — and surely terrified. For students — who have been prepping for big things their whole lives by working themselves to the nub without understanding at all what they're working toward — Deresiewicz finds this manifests itself in passionless careers that check all the right boxes for a middle-to-upper-middle-class existence. Because school hasn't been providing knowledge; it has merely been providing a track.
