“Ever since Jobs stepped down as Apple CEO, the video of his 2005 graduation address at Stanford has been in wide circulation and has been unavoidable since yesterday. It's a nice enough sermon. It's the usual litany of American banalities about being yourself and chasing your dreams and never ever ever settling for anything less than a universe bent and hammered into the shape dictated by your utterly unique authentic will. It's more or less the message the lithesome young contestants of "So You Think You Can Dance?" weekly impart to their fans in TV-land because they can't think of anything else to say. … As an undergrad I was an art major. Frankly, few of my fellow art majors were talented enough to make a living at it, even after four (or more!) years of training. Sure they loved art, but in the immortal words of Tina Turner, "What's love got to do with it?" "Find what you love and never settle for less" is an excellent recipe for frustration and poverty. "Reconcile yourself to the limits of your talent and temperament and find the most satisfactory compromise between what you love to do and what you need to do feed your children" is rather less stirring, but it's much better advice.”

Did Steve Jobs Give Good Advice? – Will Wilkinson at BigThink

I love this argument, for the same reason I loved Will Wilkinson’s post about David Foster Wallace.  I’m not ragging on Steve Jobs, the guy was obviously an incredible human being who accomplished orders of magnitude more than I’m likely to.  But his advice, along with the standard, upper-middle class, liberal arts school “live your dreams” etc. sloganeering, seem like a sure fire way for most people to feel like a failure.  

And totally unnecessarily and unwarrantedly too.  If the average person’s models for how they should live life are the exceptional, then, by definiton, most people are going to find themselves wanting, and tiny steps from feeling like their life was a inauthentic failure.  

In one way its great that I, along with most of my peers, grew up being told “you can be anything you want” and “reach for the stars” and “never give up.”  It gives you (me) a sense of empowerment, and sometimes encourages me to change in ways that are painful in the short term, but maybe worthwhile in the long run.

But at the same time, I think this can be damaging and dooming too.  The flip side of the thinking is that things like compromise, and unescapable-tedium, and satisfying-and-secure-if-also-sometimes-boring love are all failures, things that only people who aren’t crazy or brave or bold enough would settle for.  And I think that a) few people could sustain a life of never compromising, loosing, or giving up, and that b) the world would be a horrible, social-status battle ground if more people actually succeeded at living that way.

I just turned 28 and I’m not confident that I’ve figured anything out well enough yet to give advice.  But after spending the better part of the last 2-3 years feeling bummed and like a deep-failure, I think one actual, worthwhile thing I’ve learned is that its an awful strategy to take this kind of “always be yourself” mentality too seriously.  It seems like it has to lead to you (ie me) thinking of your shortcomings and non-ambitious personal characteristics and moral failings, or character flaws, instead of, you know, just a preference.

Its good to applaud and admire Steve Jobs and those sorts of folks for doing incredible things that we all benefit from, but its wrong and terrible to beat yourself up for not being the same kind of person.  And if I kept Will Wilkinson’s “Reconcile yourself to the limits of your talent and temperament and find the most satisfactory compromise between what you love to do and what you need to do feed your children” quote in my head more often, I think I’d make that mistake less often.

Geeze, let me get off that soap box for a second…

“IF YOU start feeling good about America, run don't walk to Adam Gopnik's damning New Yorker feature on the land of the free's penchant for imprisonment: For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States. Absolute quantities can be misleading, but the trend in the incarceration rate is equally unsettling. As Mr Gopnik reports, "...in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that." Read Mr Gopnik's essay and see if you don't agree that "The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life." But what if locking away all these people has made America notably safer for those of us on the sunny side of the razor-wire? Mr Gopnik, drawing on the work of Franklin Zimring, a law professor at Berkeley, tries to debunk the idea that mass imprisonment accounts for more than a small part of the remarkable decline in America's crime rate over the past several decades. While I'm sympathetic to Mr Gopnik's argument that a combination of improved policing tactics and ineffable changes in the culture account for the greater part of the decline in America's crime rate, I'm even more impressed with Christopher Glazek's argument, set forth in a fascinating n+1 essay, that once we've accounted for the all the undocumented crime terrorising the denizens of Lockuptown, the crime rate is not really so low. Mr Glazek writes: Statistics are notoriously slippery, but the figures that suggest that violence has been disappearing in the United States contain a blind spot so large that to cite them uncritically, as the major papers do, is to collude in an epic con. Uncounted in the official tallies are the hundreds of thousands of crimes that take place in the country’s prison system, a vast and growing residential network whose forsaken tenants increasingly bear the brunt of America’s propensity for anger and violence.Crime has not fallen in the United States—it’s been shifted. Just as Wall Street connived with regulators to transfer financial risk from spendthrift banks to careless home buyers, so have federal, state, and local legislatures succeeded in rerouting criminal risk away from urban centers and concentrating it in a proliferating web of hyperhells. The statistics touting the country’s crime-reduction miracle, when juxtaposed with those documenting the quantity of rape and assault that takes place each year within the correctional system, are exposed as not merely a lie, or even a damn lie—but as the single most shameful lie in American life. Unfortunately, there is little hard data on the Lockuptown crime rate. According to Mr Glazek, the federal government did not gather data on rape in prisons until just last year. Yet this data, based on official prisoner complaints, is sure to severely undercount the reality of sexual violence in America's prisons. It can be extremely dangerous for a prisoner to get a reputation as a "snitch". In any case, prison authorities seldom do anything about it. Indeed, the authorities seem to accept, and sometimes even affirm, that the savage violence is simply a part of prison life, as do ordinary Americans who chuckle guiltlessly at prison-rape jokes. As Mr Glazek puts it: [Prisoners] are the victims of an ideological system that dehumanizes an entire class of human being and permits nearly infinite violence against it. As much as a physical space, prisons denote an ethical space, or, more precisely, a space where ordinary ethics are suspended....[In prisons] anybody is free to commit rape and be reasonably assured that no state official will notice or care (barring those instances when the management knowingly encourages rape, unleashing favored inmates on troublemakers as a strategy for administrative control). The prison staff is above the law; the prison inmates, below it. Far from embodying the model of Bentham/Foucault’s panopticon— that is, one of total surveillance—America’s prisons are its blind spots, places where complaints cannot be heard and abuses cannot be seen. Though important symbols of bureaucratic authority, they are spaces that lie beyond our system of bureaucratic oversight. As far as the outside world is concerned, every American prison functions as a black site. What is America's crime rate, really? If America's penal system as a whole amounts to a crime against humanity, maybe that ought to count for something, too.”