"In recent years, essays lamenting the culture of overwork—and the superficial, self-centered, self-destructive busyness that development from it—have become a genre unto themselves. Ostensibly, these essays are about manageable subjects, subjects about which it’s possible to have a single opinion, like higher education, parenting, or “mindfulness.” But they are also about another, larger subject, which, in its glacial, impersonal force, seems to transcend opinion. That subject, more or less, is modernity...
That’s not to say that Deresiewicz’s essay doesn’t tell us something important about élite colleges. It puts into relief the stresses they are under, and the sometimes impossible demands that we make upon them as modern people looking for comfort in a changing world...
Deresiewicz makes a mistake in ascribing to his students, as personal failings, the problems of the age in which they live. He finds their practical striving distasteful, and complains that they “dressed as if they were ready to be interviewed at a moment’s notice.” Who cares how they dress? In “The Waste Land”—a poem that is about, among other things, modern busyness—people seem superficial, hollow, disengaged, and exhausted. But the problem isn’t their individual choices; it’s the age, which shouts, at every opportunity, “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME.” Inside, they are as alive as ever—but in ways that are “not to be found in our obituaries / Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider / Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor / In our empty rooms.”"
Did college/study ever do this? Maybe for wealthy white men, reading about themselves, engaging with the texts that created the ideas of masculinity, whiteness, and capitalism. But does that exist for anyone else? And honestly, that sounds... stifling.
FB: "Perhaps it was once the case that, during the four years of college, you could build a self by reading books. But things are no longer so straightforward, because we have an ambivalent relationship to the knowledge of the past."
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