Envy is Ignorance, Imitation is Suicide
At least half your waking adult life is spent in the office. It’s no wonder that the very first question we ask people when we meet them as adults is ‘what they do’. There is no explicit reference to a job, but we all know what the question gets at. An individual’s professional track of life should be parallel to their life track as it shows what we’ve chosen to do with a major chunk of our waking days, revealing interests and possible personality traits. Looking at the beginning of the professional track of life, for many of us starting immediately after our college graduation, we should choose a path that matches our interests and serves to develop both our sense of self and our skills as much as possible. But a social aspect of our lives gets in the way: competition. And with that competitiveness comes a driving jealousy of those people that have “made it” which gives birth to an internalized minimum acceptable level of success. A person’s future is path-dependent, influenced by everything in our present, especially ourselves.
The post-graduation job search engulfs college juniors and seniors. There’s an unspoken pressure to find a job as soon as possible and have it be just as impressive. The need to get a job after college is not financially crippling, many can afford to further put off paying school loans thanks to assistance from family. That’s not the strongest push to find employment. A social clock tells us it’s the proper time to get a job because everyone else is doing it and time is ticking, in reality, it just feels that way. That pressure is a real feeling with real consequences but is a human construct, it only has power and meaning because we allow it to. This pressure to behave in certain ways at certain points in our lives will repeatedly nudge us when it’s time for marriage, a promotion, kids, and retirement amongst other things. There’s an indirect social stigma attached to being the one that has still not attained what you should have by now.
There’s an attraction towards working for the largest firms, the ones with names that everyone knows. They may be able to pay more and have formal internship and training programs, but this doesn’t make them the best fit for everyone. Coming from a prestigious school like Middlebury and paying the startlingly high tuition that we do, it seems logical that we, as prospective employees, would raise our expectations of how much our labor is worth. Therefore, we align ourselves with the Amazons of the world.
Who’s working for Goldman Sachs or J.P Morgan, Deloitte, or Apple? Who has the highest salary or the most power and influence? Who cares? Today’s college students are collectively hooked on a small bundle of corporations we “need” to work for instead of looking for a place we would be best off. It would be nice to be completely ignorant, but is that really possible? We are apt to follow the masses and compete with each other for a select few positions in the finance, consulting, and marketing fields with the big-name brands. What do we really want to do? How would we behave without the pressure of money, expectations, and status? Is it too late to change the trend? We know comparing our accomplishments and failures to others’ isn’t “healthy”. But is it possible to focus on ourselves and ignore the gossip?
It’s funny how primitive we think and act in some scenarios. If you are walking around a crowded block and everyone were to duck down and put their hands over their heads, you bet your ass you’ll find yourself instinctively doing the same. Why? You’re not sure in the moment but you knew it was the “smart” thing to do, even if in reality this mob behavior of those around you ended up just being a social experiment and there was no real need to duck for cover. If everyone else is doing it, it must be the smart thing to do. That thought is dangerous.
Psychology experiments have placed ten people in a room and shown them two lines, one very obviously longer than the other. All but one person is in on the experiment and have been instructed to give the wrong answer to the question. The subject of the experiment, unfortunately, abandons all reason in answering the question and conforms to the group consensus at an alarmingly high rate. Something in our brains rationalizes the majority’s decision by default, even when the group’s actions are so obviously corrupted. So, when one of your parents asked you if you’d jump off a cliff if all your friends did, the truthful answer is yes at least 50 percent of the time.
There’s a lack of self-trust and agency today. Submitting to the group is a basic survival tactic. If everyone else is ducking for cover then we immediately “know” that there is something dangerous coming from above. In modern times this basic survival response is counter-productive a lot of the time. In Self Reliance, one of his many famous essays, Ralph Waldo Emerson writes:
There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.
The term “self-reliance” in and of itself means to trust yourself; know what you can do and act confidently to progress towards your goals. Ideally, we would trust ourselves enough to delegitimize the corrupted group consensus that is trying to deceive us, telling us that the shorter line is longer than its obviously longer counterpart. Emerson’s line “that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide” tries to stunt our self-conceived, internalized pressure to be as materially successful as those golden standards we have come across.
Fixating on what others have, wanting what they have to the point that you actually feel pain via jealousy, and following others’ paths is to deny yourself the ability to attain what you want. Preoccupation on others’ endowments is to lose focus on your own path, your own unique talents, and your own agency. Everyone has their own path; that path is undetermined but influenced by everything, especially yourself. The individual is path-dependent. You decide your own future by working with what you have to the best of your ability. Envy is ignorance. Those who have struck gold based on their own agency should not be imitated as a means to an end. Wanting what the successful have isn’t progressive but wanting the journey they went through which triggered their prosperity is. The way these successful people have struck gold is valuable to learn from, but a cheat code that matches the DNA of how these people made it halts all valuable self-development from the copy-cat. Following someone else’s path with a differently personalized skill set leaves gaps between actual ability and ability to succeed. Imitation is suicide.
Now is it really that shocking that people are being attracted to the big names in banking, consulting, and marketing even when many of them can’t give a concrete answer to why they want to work in these fields? I’ve asked a few finance-leaning underclassmen a very typical interview question: why are they interested in finance? Many a time their first response has been nervous laughter. I am not trying to imply that nobody has a genuine attraction to these fields, many do. Family involvement in these fields may have sparked intrinsic motivation. They may perceive themselves as having more agency in these jobs, being able to make a difference in some way either by financing environmentally progressive projects, bringing attention to projects or products with entrepreneurial vision, or solving intricate problems that’s high-powered firms are snagged by.
These jobs pay well generally, at least in the long-run. But is work a means to an end? If over half your adult life in your early years is put towards your profession, you should have some personalized reason for being attracted towards your job instead of everyone else is doing it so it seems smart. Your job track and your life track should be parallel, complementary paths. Personally, I think many people take a job for status and money, as is a result of our social environment. It’s a shock that there isn’t a wave of attraction towards working for firms that lobby for the tobacco and sugar industries.
Do college students soon entering the real world see employment, especially as financial and marketing analysts, and strategic consultants, as a means to accumulate wealth and status or as a large chunk of their daily life? Do we take jobs to gain an income and be able to buy a nice house in the suburbs with a huge backyard and take extravagant vacations, living life like an overly ideal person from a commercial? “Making it big” and enjoying life aren’t one in the same necessarily.
Follow your interests, play to your skill set, develop yourself, and live in the process. Don’t watch MTV’s Cribs or Kim Kardashian and Dan Bilzerian’s Instagram stories and fixate on how lucky these mega-celebrities are.
A comforting saving grace is seeing that entrepreneurship rates are high, and start-ups are trending like never before. A counterculture of people doing what they personally find meaningful and worthwhile exists. Material satisfaction is only skin deep. Find your own path. What matters isn’t what you can see, it’s how you feel.
