There are several interesting things that happen as people move from the college years to their professional 20s.

Let me start with the premise that college is the Mecca of idealism, and in many ways, idealism of a somewhat selfish variety. People dream big in learning environments that reward asking big questions with little in the way of personal set-backs. By saying selfish, I am not trying to say that people don’t have genuine dreams of wanting good things to happen (e.g. “I want international public health projects to flourish”), rather, I am arguing that such goals are often rooted in the self-reference (e.g. “I want a job at Partners in Health”). These pursuits give us meaning, and we’d like to think in our heart of hearts that their success is dependent on our involvement.

For example, while this might be a cynical way of looking at the following statistic, I have a hard time explaining the record enrollment in Teach for America from the 2009 graduating class (16+% of Yale’s 2009 graduating seniors for example) solely as a function of a massive increase in the number of people deeply concerned with education. Rather, I start by assuming people are interested in living a PERSONALLY meaningful life, and TFA has grown in exposure as a route that meets those criterion. This idealism is optimistic in college in that such needs can be partly fulfilled when one envisions one’s future life in these roles, apart from any actual involvement.

Fast forward a few years. Recent graduates are now neck-deep in their first or second job, and along with this often come some feeling of misalignment between reality with the past’s idealistic expectations. Not everyone will be the rock-star investment banker that they thought they would be… nor will everyone get to marry the cutest girl in their high school because that girl gets to choose only one spouse (usually)… and not everyone will have the salary or leadership opportunities they envisioned. Others feel a similar misalignment between their idealist goals (e.g. educational reform) and the resulting desired outcome. To use the previous example, TFA teachers, many of whom are my close friends (and family), begin to see the way in which the systems undergirding problems like educational inequality are difficult to move, and thus their individual pursuit of meaning/ purpose a bit blocked. At the very least, their agency in accomplishing this goal seems minimal.

So what happens to this group psychologically/ existentially, and how is this same world experienced differently? Though depressing for me to admit, I believe these experiences tend to push people from hopeful idealism to negative cynicism. To ease the tension between goals and outcomes, we lower expectations so our small contributions don’t feel so meager, or sometimes stop pursuing a goal all together. I can’t help but wonder if these reactions– let’s call them naïve optimism and negative realism– are the only ways forward, or if there might be a third way.

Let’s first consider if these two options are really that different at their core. I would argue that, though very different in behavioral manifestations, these ways of viewing the world share quite a bit in common in terms of motivation. Specifically, at the center of each impulse is a radical centering on one’s self, a radical sense of the necessity of finding PERSONAL meaning, achieving PERSONAL enlightenment, living with a tangible personal purpose. In his fascinating book “Saving God: Religion after idolatry,” Princeton philosoher Mark Johnson argues this self-oriented worldview emerges primarly from the structure of our consciousness:

Constantly finding oneself at the center, one finds oneself to be privileged– as something to be protected, as something to be prized. Thanks for our extended self-consciousness and our capacity to articulate what we find, what we in the higher animals merely an organizing form of animal self-protectiveness now becomes something more. It becomes a more or less explicit deliberative theme, a default starting point in one’s practical reasoning: one’s own interests just seem paramount (2009: 86)

When the self is radically important, optimism reigns when these goals seem achievable (college), and pessimism takes the stage when obstacles emerge (the professional 20s). I can almost hear Ernst Becker screaming out from the grave… “Can’t you see what I have been saying all along… your life is often a work in self-promotion, a project emerging out of your deep down fear of death, the death of all meaning.” The ancient sages roll over in their tombs, “Why didn’t you listen” asks the writer of Ecclesiastes, “when I said vanity of vanity, ALL is vanity!”

But hold up, before all seems lost. Might there be another way? Might there be a way to live between the tension of idealism and realism? Do we have to close our eyes to reality in order to dream? Johnson continues later in the book:

There is an experience– some would say it is a metaphysical experience; some would say it is inchoately religious- of being, as Ludwig Wittgenstein once put it, absolutely safe. (Wittgenstein appears to have had experiences of this sort when, as a medical orderly in the trenches in WWI, he was in danger of being shot, gassed, or blown up. Marcus Aurelius, another man of the trenches, describes a similar experience in his Meditations). Part of the content of this experience, as opposed to the content of its subsequent interpretation, is that no matter what happens, everything that is fundamentally precious will remain intact (p. 110).

Is not this the way forward, between the false forced dichotomy of idealism and realism? Specifically, it is not by achieving everything we expect for ourselves that we break free of this tension, but rather we grow by a fading of the self from the forefront, where we can finally stumble upon this realization that ‘everything precious’ often includes things outside the self, and thus is worth pursuing apart from our potential personal gain.  Is it not only with this posture that the TFA teacher can sit back and passionately engage rigid structures of educational injustice, even though their role in that change might be small? Is not this the only way to have the mind of the realist, and the heart and soul of a romantic?