Terry McMahon's Awesome Blog

I love getting life lessons from famous people. I also strongly recommend going up to New Hampshire in midterm election years, because that's when presidential candidates first visit small groups and linger around afterwards, giving regular folks a real chance to talk to future noisemakers. In August 2002, I saw Howard Dean at Hermano's Restaurant in Concord. His speech was great: he was talking about real issues that everyone else was ignoring, and his record in Vermont is both successful and creative. What struck me, though, was a curtain-raiser article in the paper that morning about Dean's life and career, mentioning that he had spent a winter in Aspen, doing nothing but skiing and holding down some unloading-trucks sort of job.

So that's what I asked him about: should I go spend the winter skiing after the 2002 elections? First he said, "Well, if you're going to go skiing, do it in Vermont." He was still the governor. Then he said, "Listen, I actually learned as much from a year skiing about what I didn't like as I did about what I did like. But it was a great experience, and listen, you're going to be working hard for the rest of your life. Take some time for yourself and get a better sense of who you are."

Good advice, and it all showed up on C-Span too. (You can buy the tape!) Today David Brooks, whose last column I ravaged, as you may recall, makes a similar point in a more extended way:

The most interesting part of this Deep Throat business is Bob Woodward's description, in Thursday's Washington Post, of the state he was in when he met Mark Felt. He had graduated from Yale and was finishing a tour in the Navy, but he had no idea of what he wanted to do with his life. He was plagued by "angst and a sense of drift," and stricken by "considerable anxiety."
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Places like Washington and New York attract large numbers of ambitious young people who have spent their short lives engaged in highly structured striving: getting good grades, getting into college. Suddenly they are spit out into the vast, anarchic world of adulthood, surrounded by a teeming horde of scrambling peers, and a chaos of possibilities and pitfalls. They discover that though they are really good at manipulating the world of classrooms, they have no clue about how actual careers develop, how people move from post to post.

And all they have to do to find their way amid this confusion is to answer one little question: What is the meaning and purpose of my life?

Having said that, though, I'm thinking less of Bob Woodward and David Brooks and more of the people I know from the 2002 graduating class. I always believed that you more or less graduated, got a job, and stayed in that job until and unless you found something else you wanted to do instead, that is, lots of opportunity and free-flowing movement. I never expected that post-college life was actually like The Graduate (without the plastics, or, I guess, the sex with neighbors), but here it is: literally everyone I know from that year either went straight to grad school or has spent an extended amount of time unemployed and listless, usually at home and with no apparent prospects. Again, this has happened to literally everyone who didn't go straight through to graduate school.

I find when discussing this with people that the operative word is "momentum." Your life, especially through college, seems to be thrusting you towards some happy, wealthy and fulfilling future, and then a few things don't go your way and all of a sudden you're stuck nowhere with nothing on the horizon. The idea of losing and trying to regain momentum, first off, seems to describe the feeling pretty well. Plus, it illustrates the gravity of the situation: you have plenty of people like Bob Woodward, who, as Brooks points out, went through this phase and turned out to be the hero of Watergate and now frightens White Houses into telling him all their secrets for no political benefit. (OK, that's another post.) In contrast, though, when you enter this kind of phase, you're not sure whether it really is a phase, or maybe this is where your life starts to slowly decline.

I don't think it has to be that way. I take all the chances I can get to recommend Stephen Covey's guide for life, the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, but in general, stepping out of the rat race is the perfect time to reevaluate who you are and where you're going. It's tough because having a good attitude doesn't always solve your problems, and taking the chance to catch up on baseball and video games isn't necessarily going to get you a job either. But if you can remind yourself how many people get into the exact same situation and calm down a bit, the time off can turn out to be a momentary and corrective blip.

Still, it's tough: when you lose momentum, it's hard to imagine anything else, and when you're back on track, it's the last thing you want to think about. Kudos to Bob Woodward and David Brooks for bringing it up. It's like A-Rod going to therapy for playing for such a shitty baseball team: it happens to everyone, and it's nothing to be ashamed of.