We live in an abundant and prosperous age. In the United States and many other Western democracies, there is a ton of stuff available: cars, food, furniture, cell phones, etc. That includes things that we don’t normally associate with the word stuff, like air conditioning and clean running water. That’s the chief success of capitalism, along with its close companion rising standard of living. If you could choose any time in world history to live, you’d be historically illiterate if you picked any time other than the past 50 to 100 years. Despite today’s manifold flaws, we’d all much rather have access to antibiotics and the internet than the alternative.
But with all this stuff comes consequences. One such consequence is our rising political polarization, which is unlikely to come about without social media, which in itself is impossible to emerge without the internet. Another consequence is air pollution, which, though better than it was 50 years ago, still has deleterious effects on nature.
Perhaps the most underestimated consequence of our abundance is a corresponding uptick in utopian or wishful thinking. With our ever-increasing living standards comes a you-can-have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too mentality. What I mean by this is that we forget there are trade-offs in life. This oversight leads people to think that there are few limits on their own happiness, and that they can live the life they’ve always wanted without having to pay much for obtaining it.
I think my generation suffers acutely from this unwise and reckless form of thinking. I also think, however, that it’s at least partially a learned mentality. I suspect that utopianism is in some ways hard-wired into human beings, since that tendency has emerged countless times throughout history. But our current society and my generation in particular seem especially prone to falling into this trap.
There are several manifestations of this type of thinking, including a propensity to believe in some version of Socialism or, on the right, a so-called Catholic Integralism. But the one I want to address in this newsletter is a much more subtle yet pervasive kind of thinking. At the risk of coining a decidedly non-euphonious term, I’ll call it “I-want-it-all-ism.”
I-want-it-all-ists were told throughout their childhoods that their happiness was predicated on the job they obtained upon graduation from college. When they were kids, they were peppered with the phrase “if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.” That meant they were eager to find the vocation that appealed to them on a spiritual level. At the same time, they heard the phrase “money isn’t happiness,” which they were often too naive to realize was uttered by people for whom money was little too no object. And so they set out to discover careers that appealed to their senses of pride and morality, without much regard to the financial outlook of those jobs.
This mentality also drove their college choices. They wanted to go to decent schools with nice campuses that were filled with peers with whom they felt a moral kinship. They also wanted a good bang for their buck, but they preferred a sense of belonging and, often, the networking opportunities or prestige factor associated with expensive private schools. Moreover, since they wanted jobs that gave them satisfaction, they often pursued programs of study that conferred this same feeling of happiness upon them. As a result, many of them took out unsustainably large amounts of student debt to spend on degrees that weren’t exactly lucrative in the job market.
When they entered the job market, they were not thrilled. Despite the fact that many of them landed jobs in the types of careers they had a fondness for—social work, community organizing, teaching—they became disappointed at the trajectory of their personal balance sheets. Since lots of them were raised in relative luxury, cutting back on goods and services they were used to consuming felt like they were being cheated out of the life they deserved. After all, they thought, they were doing good in the world. Shouldn’t that be enough for them to also be financially sound? It didn’t help that their friends who had studied engineering and computer science were making six figures mere months after graduation. That divide often led them to rethink the choices they made when they were younger, and to ponder their childish attachment to doing what felt right.
The I-want-it-all-ists that I’ve been describing certainly don’t represent all of my generation. Many of the people who wanted a morally fulfilling career recognized early on the trade-offs involved. They made intelligent choices about where they went to college, knowing that it would be harder for them to pay off those debts with their less-lucrative careers. On the other side of the ledger, many of my generational cohort rejected the idealist notion of doing what gave them happiness and made more pragmatic choices regarding their college majors.
I confess that my own idealism led me to make choices that I probably would not have made had I been thinking more realistically about the future. When I was in college, I switched majors three times. I went in undecided, switched to economics, then to finance, and finally settled on political science and economics. While I enjoyed my college experience and loved the intellectual rigor of my chosen fields of study, if I had to go back, I’d stick with the business-centered degree. I’ve now had the experience of two post-college jobs that have paid a less-than-satisfactory wage. Don’t get me wrong: That experience has been remarkably valuable, and this second job in particular—which was always intended to be a short-term commitment (as it is for everybody in my organization)—is likely to open up many doors to more remunerative opportunities.
The difference between my youthful idealism and my more seasoned pragmatism can best be seen by my eagerness to entertain those more profitable enterprises. Especially since moving to the D.C. area, I’ve come to realize the hollowness of the phrase “money isn’t happiness.” Of course, that’s true to a certain extent. Another form of idealism is to think that making a ton of money has no side effects. But having enough money to not have to worry about paying the bills is its own form of contentment.
The I-want-it-all-ists could only emerge from our current level of societal wealth and well-being. In the 1500s, you had very little choice in occupation unless you were some important person’s son. It’s much better to live in the present than it is in the 1500s—or the 1800s, the 1200s, or the 1300s BC, for that matter. I’d rather have the problem I just described than the alternative ones that came before the emergence of capitalism.
But that doesn’t mean those problems don’t exist. It’s important to keep in mind that filling the heads of naive children with unrealistic notions of what a career is can have consequences on those kids’ dreams. Perhaps we ought to be more pragmatic in setting expectations for the next generation because, no matter how much we may wish otherwise, life is all about trade-offs.
good one. when a plane is taking off, and the pilot suddenly realizes that he can't get off the ground, he can abort the flight - as long as he has enough runway. you have enough runway. until the end.
and even then, more runway often appears. ask jimmy buffett. he died last week and you would assume that's the end of the runway. nope. he released a song friday night. hahah. in my arc of receiving third party pay, i've had 10 jobs - only half of which were in the field i am now and the last of which i've had for 21 years - and it didn't start until i was 40. i never thought i had runway. i did. one interesting behavior i see from young people (who may possess i-want-it-all-sim) is that they think when they get a degree, that they are at the end of something. they couldn't be more at the beginning of something. we're all at the beginning of something. for you, just ask a 30-year old. for me, i just ask a 90-year old. i agree that the manifestation and foundation of i-want-it-all-ism probably starts at home and social media is the steroid. as usual it's up to us to change it.