boot-camp

From the excellent new york times article greg sent ("Looking beyond the brass ring"):


"You can be good at a lot of things or bad at a lot of things, and it has virtually no impact on whether or not you are good at life."

[...]

"A lot of success early in life can be a real liability — if you buy into it. Brass rings keep getting suspended higher and higher as you grow older. And when you grab them, they have a way of turning into dust in your hands. Psychologists have all kinds of words for this, but the women I know seem to experience it as living life with a gun pointed to their heads. Every day brings a new minefield of incipient failure: the too-tight pants, the peeling wallpaper, the unbrilliant career.

Many, I think, never figure out how to handle the emptiness that comes when the rush of achievement fades away, or the loneliness — the sense of invisibility — when no one is there to hand out yet another "A." The fact is: when you are narrowly programmed to achieve, you are like a windup toy with only one movement in its repertoire. You're fine when you're wound up; but wind you down, and you grind to a halt."

[...]

"They'll have to realize that — no matter what our culture shrieks, no matter what their college counselors push them to do in the name of achieving "well-roundedness" — they can't be all things to all people, at all times, and still have something of meaning left over for themselves."

And taken from the harvard admissions website, something that made me shudder:

"It is common to encounter even the most successful students, who have won all the "prizes," stepping back and wondering if it was all worth it. Professionals in their thirties and forties - physicians, lawyers, academics, business people and others - sometimes give the impression that they are dazed survivors of some bewildering life-long boot-camp."





It's something that's cropped up a lot in my conversations recently -

If we're the survivors, nay, winners, of the great Singaporean paperchase (and now rat-race), why are most of us just so damn unhappy? How is it that on most days we feel like we've been blessed so abundantly in so many ways, with so many talents (that have been duly recognised), yet seem to lack that particular bit of basic skill called 'getting through life' that no one ever told us was important? Are we lacking a crucial bit of wiring here, or is it just that that bit of us is hopelessly atrophied?

It's when you have everything and you realise that you still feel down in the dumps that you know you are well and truly screwed, I think. (I don't feel that all the time, obviously.. but some days, yes, I have to say I do.)