For the idea of a world

The webcomic, "A Softer World," expounds:

There ought to be a word for the things we do, not because we want to, but because we want to be the kind of person who wants to.

To be comical, it adds: "In bed."  In bed or beyond it, we strive to live up to our idea(l) of ourselves, to perform that persona.  In the age of facebook and chosen identities, that seems particularly true.

And there ought also to be a word for the things we do, not because they make sense, and not because we want to, but because want to want to (yep, not a typo), because they would make sense in the kind of world we want to inhabit.  It's the feeling that makes you act "against your better judgment" (whatever that means), when you kiss someone spontaneously, or choose to walk through a "bad" neighborhood.  Your gut nags: "Wait, be careful!"  But your brain says, "No, I refuse to acquiesce to the fear, the caution, the profiling.  That's not the world I want to live in."

For the idea of a world.  Maybe not the world we have.  But the world we can sometimes imagine.

So here's a question I got in recent interviews: "What made you want to teach in a maximum-security prison?"  And what should I say?  Curiosity?  Social justice?  Or: For my idea of a world, a world in which people do not leave vulnerable others to rot away in prisons.

Is this new world, too, a kind of performance?  If we perform it enough, will we create it?

(I shouldn't write blog posts on Friday nights.)

Social animal

Law school's a grind. But even with a competitive curve (where my academic success depends on others' failure), it does not have to be the ruthless me-first environment it's presumed to be.

David Brook's essay, "Social Animal," in the New Yorker reminds me why that's so important.  It's an antidote to my past reflections on the pursuit of happiness. I wrote that happiness is not all it's cracked up to be, that we should stop treating happiness as an end.  It eludes those who seek it, so ignore it if you can.  Treat it as the byproduct of a meaningful life.  Yep, just try to live a meaningful life.  But what is a meaningful life?  And its corollary (dare I ask): What is the meaning of life?

David Brooks, citing social psychology research, takes a crack at it:

Intelligence, academic performance, and prestigious schools don’t correlate well with fulfillment, or even with outstanding accomplishment. The traits that do make a difference are poorly understood, and can’t be taught in a classroom, no matter what the tuition: the ability to understand and inspire people; to read situations and discern the underlying patterns; to build trusting relationships; to recognize and correct one’s shortcomings; to imagine alternate futures.

Brooks illustrates the point through an archetype, named Harold.  Snippets:

[Harold] didn’t dazzle his teachers with academic brilliance, but, even in kindergarten, he could tell you who in his class was friends with whom; he was aware of social networks.

By the time Harold was in his mid-twenties, he was well on his way toward a happy and fulfilling life, and the building blocks of his happiness had little to do with the lines on his résumé. ... According to research by Daniel Kahneman, Alan B. Krueger, and others, the daily activities most closely associated with happiness are social—having sex, socializing after work, and having dinner with friends. Many of the professions that correlate most closely with happiness are also social—a corporate manager, a hairdresser.

Harold had the sense that he had been trained to react in all sorts of stupid ways. He had been trained, as a guy, to be self-contained and smart and rational, and to avoid sentimentality. Yet maybe sentiments were at the core of everything. He’d been taught to think vertically, moving ever upward, whereas maybe the most productive connections were horizontal, with peers.