Two hundred years ago, hardly anyone had any choice of profession. They did what their parents did, which, for most people, meant farming. The opportunity to “find one’s calling” is one of the great luxuries of the modern age, or so it appears. Thus, when people like me complain about the lack of satisfying job opportunities, it seems very reasonable to see a kind of spoiled pickiness in these complaints: “Oh, so you’ve looked around and every industry seems vapid? Well, imagine if you had no choice but subsistence farming!”
This sounds very reasonable, but in fact it is mean-spirited, and the way you can tell is that it’s always said with a certain glee. (Why are we so eager to dismiss the very grounds of other peoples’ unhappiness, to deny that they have a right to be unhappy? It is a strange world where this is a common habit. Perhaps it is a world in which everyone feels that their grip on their own personal experience is terribly tenuous and goes about looking for reasons to dismiss other people’s, under the confused notion that only one experience can be valid. I think that’s just the sort of world it is.)
Shall we not say, rather, that one of the most striking characteristics of modern life in so-called “developed nations” is that one is surrounded by choices and all these choices seem rotten. If you are not inclined to dismiss the observation and the observer in one fell swoop, there are two conclusions you might draw from this: (1) that choosing something is irreducibly different from being bound to it, and one who has many choices can never know the ancient light-heartedness and sorrow that come of simply doing what one must, but is always glancing back and sideways and second guessing and thinking after all that he might try something else, and this state, once one has entered into it, is escapable only through some unforeseeable disaster; (2) that all the choices really are rotten. I say unto you, we should draw both of these conclusions.
A great deal is made the limited options available to those in poverty, the lack of access to resources and opportunities. Accordingly, new initiatives are proposed: job-training programs, free preschool programs, college-readiness programs, free universal internet access, etc. These proposals all refuse to notice what ought by now to be obvious: that more choices generally make people more unhappy; and that what we are trying (and mostly failing) to offer poor people access to is the same dystopic menu of meaningless white-color jobs that we ourselves gaze upon with bleak and bleary eyes.
This is all very gloomy and no doubt I am an incurable preacher of gloom and nostalgia, but let me end by returning to something which I mentioned parenthetically: the precarious hold that people have upon their own personal experience, as if, at any moment, this experience might be blown away by some more valid one, might be shown to be only a delusion they are suffering from. As if there were some mystical higher ground from which one could look down on the subjective world and see it for only a little world within some vast… vast… vast void, I think. It could only be a void.
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