Anti-Manchild Project #2: Make the Right Comparisons

This is a goal that will have no real end, and despite this blogpost, has no real beginning either. It is a principle that through this project I have to try to adhere to. The only difference is that now I am going to attempt to make more of a conscious commitment to it. Some of you might ask how I can avoid becoming a manchild without making comparisons. After all, unless I look at where others are and feel bad about where I am, how can I be motivated to change my ways at all? There is truth in this, I am not acting in a vacuum after all. There are people all around me in different places on their journey through life and we cannot help but compare one another. If it was not for the existence of manchildren who have gone off the deep end of responsibility, this project would not be underway.

Yet, I have to be careful about which comparisons I make. Otherwise, I am liable to get distracted, or worse, beat myself up for being something that I can never be. It is like height. There are people taller than me and there are people shorter than me. There is nothing I can really do about it, except maybe start a secret society devoted to committing hate crimes against Tall-Americans so that they are scared into leaving. Or I could just hang around Danny DeVito. Likewise, through this journey, I have to remember there are goals that really are not that important to me and so when others achieve them, there is no reason to feel left out or upset. For instance, I do not want a car or a lawn. Those things just scream maintenance to me and represent a loss of income that could be better spent on nice socks and wine.

This weekend I went to my brother’s graduation at Carnegie Mellon University (put a hyphen in there as you may wish).  It was your typical commencement, except they had a prayer and made us say the Pledge of Allegiance (which I thought was strange for a school that salivates over having a campus in Qatar). Through the event, I felt the acute pain of countless comparisons. Not only did I feel like I was falling by the wayside because he already has a job, but I was around a sea of people receiving doctorates for doing that work with soaks up society’s accolades even if society does not understand it. Overall, the message I got the whole time was “praise for entrepreneurs and engineers, the rest of you can go to hell.” On top of it, I was supposed to feel some sort of awe for Aron Ralston, the imbecile who lost his arm in between a rock and a hard place. I think it would have been better to have a Congolese amputee speak to us, who did not have a choice to risk her health for excitement. But at least he was an engineer in a previous life…

Such is the treatment the liberal arts student and graduate receive. It starts in elementary school and goes on for the rest of our lives because someone decided that what we do and what those in the sciences do are mutually exclusive. This has been to everyone’s detriment, but it goes on. So much is made of math and science and our scores in those subjects. History? Civics? Writing? Culture? Who needs those things that cannot be measured? Who needs the people who devote themselves to studying them? Let those subjects atrophy. What matters is that everyone knows their calculus. Their constitution? It is better for us all that they do not.  

Yet, I am not a scientist, nor a mathematician, and was never born to be. Their role is not my own. I cannot compare myself to them, it is foolish. I can only measure myself up to my ability to contribute because the rest of us graduates do have a role. Even if we are not entrepreneurs in business, we still matter. I must remind myself that society needs us too. Why? Because we are the glue, we are the connections that link the parts of every organization together and join each organization to one another. We the liberal arts graduates are the explainers, the summarizers, the proofers, and the exchangers.  We who were taught to connect and draw sources together by citation and paraphrase are always needed. Others may have the data, but we are the sentence makers.

I have to keep my eye on the real prize, which is independence, living on my own and on my terms. If I can achieve that, the rest is irrelevant. Other people will earn more than me and others will earn less, but if I can earn enough to live on my own, it does not matter how much I get. This is especially true if I spend less than everyone else. One can gain their independence and just as surely blow it on a major purchase. It is what most people in this country end up doing for one reason or another.  I have to avoid the comparison game that measures a person’s life in terms of how many zeroes come following after their name. It is difficult because in this country it is a national pastime and often substitutes for real dinner conversation or journalism. We list and we rank and we feel all the more miserable for doing it.

Everyone else has their road and their track, and I have mine. I just need to get away from everything that tries to convince me I am in a race. As soon as you are in a race, you start obsessing about nothing but shortcuts.  And if I feel bad for wanting to be a writer and a poet and nothing else, I must remember that I am writing for that part of me that is in other people. The hope is that what I write can resonate in a cinderblock prison in the city with a generous curfew, or the padded cell of a gilded cage hung high in the country, if it is any good. I must remember that plenty of people have used their “practical” knowledge to great harm and that so many of our breakthroughs are really fixes to previousbreakthroughs, then praise us poets for making nothing happen.