Schaff: The avoidable oppression of story control

All across the University young people are thinking about the future and their places in it, and they’re feverishly biting their nails. All across the University young people are thinking about the future and their places in it, and they’re feverishly biting their nails. Despite their good intentions, students should not only realize that these worries are self-destructive, but should also cast away the idea behind these worries as the fraud it really is.

The weeks following spring break can be especially tumultuous for a large swath of college students, especially soon-to-graduate seniors and internship-aspiring underclassmen. That’s because only a short round of exams and essays stands between us and summertime. The weather that awaits us will be a blessing, though the implied responsibility is anything but.

As college students, we’re assaulted with career expectations from external and internal sources in a continuous, almost inescapable fashion. Our modern environment demands that we actively write our life stories with not just the next page in mind, but with an advance on the next 10 chapters. As authors of our own destinies, we’re tasked with designing and implementing a precise sequence of activities that would logically produce that one special day in the future when, amid flowers blooming and birds chirping, our vocational dreams come true.

But as it painfully dawns on so many of us, especially toward the end of March, the gears of our career pursuits can’t handle loose wrenches — to lose out on that essential summer internship, to be passed up in that audition or to fail to find that desired post-graduation job can deal heavy blows to our sense of “story control.” And it often gets even worse when we tie our coincidental shortcomings and our neighbors’ successes to individual immutable characteristics, like intelligence or worthiness. Gaining perceived control over one’s life might feel empowering in some contexts, but doing so unleashes the great risk of sustaining severe, perhaps unrecoverable, damage to one’s dignity.

When storyline deviations threaten our dignity — as they may for Pitt students now looking at spending the next summer, year or couple of years at home instead of at a  dream job or internship — we employ innate mechanisms to contain the blowback. It’s called reducing the cognitive dissonance. But dismissing admissions officers as blindfolded pigs or casting remaining options in the rosiest of lights only serve as incomplete palliatives; they don’t prevent future deviations from getting to us, and they still leave us with smoldering feelings of guilt.

That is, unless we radically change our perspectives.

There’s a way a student can liberate himself from the lifetime of suffering that storyline deviations would otherwise assure — he can simply give up his sense of “story control.” That’s not only because it’s hurting him; the popular idea that we pilot our ship of significant life events (including career events) reflects widespread delusion. “Story control” is a Class-A fallacy.

Relinquishing “story control”-thinking may seem to fly in the face of human nature. We’re primordially disposed to assign all sorts of explanations to the world’s phenomena after they occur, regardless of evidence. When these phenomena involve our own fates, we draw causal lines back to our virtues, on the one hand, or to our vices, on the other. Such ex-post narrative thinking can work for proximal, input-output phenomena like making a bed or taking a midterm. But it falls apart for phenomena that involve interactions between multiple systems, like job placement (contrasted with the controllable work that produces good test grades, getting hired at a particular firm depends much more on unpredictable, exogenous factors like the perceived state of the economy, weather patterns, what the interviewer had for lunch, etc.). As much as we’d prefer (and believe) otherwise, we must live out much of our storylines without doing the writing ahead of time. Those looking for the rightful author should get their hands on a roulette wheel.

Pitt students dealt a bad hand in this job and internship round (and those with royal flushes, since their luck could run out) would not only comfort, but also help themselves by seeing traditional long-term planning for what it truly is: a foolish venture. Too many young people are investing substantial emotional capital — and, in especially desperate cases, identity — in distant career plans, and they’re consequently dooming themselves to a life-long psychological pummeling by all-powerful mother chance, who so often rips plans and planners apart. Except perhaps as a loose hypothetical exercise or to survive conversations with particularly dull people at parents’ dinner parties, long-term planning isn’t worth it.

Throwing away plans doesn’t mean packing up and seceding from society. A distinction must be made between planning and preparing, as it’s foolish to do the first and foolish to neglect the second.

Since the bulk of life’s deciding moments constitutes gambles of unknown probabilities, the way to prepare is to engage in a lot of positive gambling. Positive gambling in this sense doesn’t entail wagering grandmother’s doll collection against the chance to win big if oil prices go up or down. It means actively exposing oneself to every last opportunity for chance to turn in one’s favor — betting on as broad and deep of an education as possible, attending professional conferences with potential graduate mentors, even retiring shyness so as to party with fellow students who might be future co-workers.

In the end, strength of character or identity should not be defined by the success someone plans for himself, but by how he behaves today, with or without job, internship or graduate opportunities. That’s because, it should be stressed, successful people don’t wield some advantage in character or identity. They either luck out early on, or they just play the game more often. With this in mind, downtrodden Pitt folk might find solace in repeating the phrase, “I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life, but I know I’ll be me, ferociously.”

This column took inspiration from Nassim N. Taleb’s “The Black Swan,” which discusses the impact of chance on our world. Write Matt Schaff at matthew.schaff@gmail.com.