Posturing

Everyone is a miracle.

I sat in the car on Friday with a friend from Freshman year who was telling me that he’s burnt out. He’s taking sixteen credits of Econ and balancing two jobs, which I think could burn out the best of us. Regardless, we had an interesting conversation as a result of his exhaustion that I’ve been thinking about this week.

Just as background, my friend is super smart. We’re talking change-the-world genius smart, which I don’t say lightly. He’ll head to law school in a couple of years, probably at UChicago or Yale or somewhere crazy like that—hence his law internship and the RA job that we work at together.

I am grateful that my friend is smart, and I am excited for him to go to law school. The world needs brilliant people to go to law school and be who they are. I am also conscious of the fact that if the entire world were only people who were brilliant in the way that law school demands, and those people all actually went to law school, the world would be a very different place.

I used to know someone who always commented on how people were trying to “market themselves.” He would insist that the only reason people buy a certain item of clothing or water bottle or whatever was to “market themselves” as the kind of person who would buy that specific item, as if human beings were commodities attempting to sell themselves to an audience.

I think in some ways society has structured itself that way, specifically with the rise of social media. I don’t think my friend is attempting to “market himself,” by any means. He doesn’t even have Instagram. I think he is making a conscious sacrifice of his time and energy to make the world a better place. I do, however, think that there is something to be said about being a young adult (or even just a person) in an age of extreme individualism and competition.

Look at me! Love me! Look what I’m doing with my life!

My friend is unique in the sense that he doesn’t do what he does to appear a certain way to a group of people. He does the things he does because that’s who he is and because to get where he’s going he’s got to be where he’s at.

We’re funny in the things that we praise, in the individuals we see as “successful,” the careers we see as “worthwhile.” We praise lawyers who go to fancy schools. We follow influencers who run nonprofits as if that is the way to change the world. It is one way to change the world. It is not the way to change the world, especially when we focus more on the person running the non-profit than the non-profit itself. We need brilliant lawyers; we also need brilliant non-lawyers: moms, and friends, and teachers, and gardeners. There is more than one way to be good, and the best kinds of goodness are not always well-known or public.

My mom made friends with a woman who found out she had brain cancer just after she canceled her health insurance. The woman had immigrated from Vietnam, and when she moved to the States she didn’t have a car, so she walked home from work. Every day on her walk home she helped a man carry his groceries. When he died, he left everything to her (not knowing that she had cancer), and she was able to pay her medical bills, which were over a million dollars. She had never even been to his house.

Can we just exist, and love loudly, and live quietly, and talk to our neighbors, and walk the dog? And why is there always something to prove? Why does there always seem to be something better when what is good is right in front of us?

Technology both aids and preys on connection in a way that nothing else can. I missed one of my friend’s weddings over the Summer because I was not using Instagram. Is this really our world? My main concern is that the longer we spend online, the more we see people as caricatures of themselves, and the less we see them as the real thing. Despite what is curated on the internet for me to see, the people I love are living beings who physically exist and laugh and cry and feel embarrassed, and all of them are miracles.

I would love my friend as a lawyer, and I would love him as a scientist, and I would love him if he chose to quit school and become a poet, because the value of a person is not dependent on their job, or their social media presence, or who their friends are, it just is. What an absurd concept, that one person is worth more than another, that a person’s worth could be dependent on factors so extraneous to them.

It’s the same deal for the goodness in the world. It would be silly to assume that the only goodness in existence is the goodness we see. In fact, I’m much less worried about the appearance of goodness. Goodness does not require recognition to exist. It just is, and we have the privilege of noticing it or participating in it, or creating it.

I told my friend to slow down and take a break over the Summer. Law school will still be there in two and a half years, or in three years. He’ll still be himself (a miracle!). He doesn’t have to prove anything, the world will keep moving forward, and there will be ways for him to be and do good without taking sixteen credits and working two jobs.¹

1. I don’t know whose art I put into this post, I just loved it. I would give them credit if I could, but I just want to be clear that it’s not mine.