Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

The concept of work has evolved from just a way to put food on the table and a roof overhead, to a primary source of pleasure and satisfaction in the ideal life. While there are some advocating returning the focus closer to the family and our internal emotional well-being, for the vast majority of us work has become not just a means of survival but a major portion of the purpose and meaning of secular life.

It's become the fashion over the years to tell children they can be anything they want to be. On the surface this advice would seem to encourage children to look beyond their apparent horizons and not to let apparent obstacles keep them from achieving their dreams. But does this politically correct mantra really result in empowering children's ambitions and aspirations, or just set them up for yet another crushing disappointment when they discover that in the adult world just wanting something isn't enough? Does encouraging inner city kids to aspire to unattainable greatness instead of modest real improvements result in them escaping the limitations of their surroundings, or does it just compound the pervasive malaise and pessimism of the ever growing numbers of the downtrodden hopeless on the fringes of society?

There is some truth to the saying that we enjoy most doing what we do best. There are of course some individuals who thrive on a steady diet of overcoming intractable obstacles, but for most of us, the primary results of an endless struggle to overcome obstacles are frustration, excessive stress, and early burnout. For most humans, this indicates that our greatest potential for pleasure and satisfaction will be found doing those kinds of work for which we are individually best suited, not those that provide the most attractive rewards.

Success in the real world tends to have at least a loose correlation with the appropriateness of the individual for his occupation. The media delights in inspirational human interest pieces of how someone entirely lacking the skills or physical characteristics normally assumed necessary for a given occupation has overcome incredible obstacles to pursue their dream. Amputees become sports figures, deaf composers write music their ears will never hear, paraplegics become world explorers, etc. While I wouldn't want to detract from the individual triumphs of the obsessed, on the bottom line they have to be truly exceptional to both overcome their substantial additional obstacles and perform in their chosen profession equal or better than those not facing the same additional obstacles.

It is also an increasingly undeniable aspect of our rapidly changing modern life that nearly all of us will experience a variety of occupations during our working lives. Gone are the days when a child could expect to spend his life working in the same mill at which his grandfather spent his working life. In the modern world, those who embrace change as a new opportunity tend to be substantially happier with their lives than those who only grudgingly respond to the changes life forces on them.

The concept of an old style liberal education was to give every student at least a taste of a wide variety of potential interests. It was hoped that being exposed a mixture of art, science, literature, and sport would spark hitherto unsuspected talents and interests, and thereby help the student find his place in life. Unable to even impart the most basic functional skills, today's version of a liberal education bears little resemblance to a broad-based impartial survey, and does little to prepare children for the important decisions before them.

At the same moment we're telling children they can be anything they want to be, we're limiting their available choices to largely nonviable alternatives. Consider where young children get their heros and ideas of what they want to be. Pre-video generations were largely limited to the people they saw around them or read about in books. Firemen, policemen, postmen, railroad engineers and cowboys were long time childhood favorites, with the comfortable if not as impressive alternative of becoming a farmer like their parents as an ever present anchor in reality. While there have always been exceptional individuals with major impacts on society, few childhood fantasies involved becoming another J.P. Morgan, Edison, or Watt - the super stars of their age. In rural or small town life, most of the possible professions visible to children were for the most part available to them in reality if they tried hard enough.

With the development of modern communications technologies like TV and the cinema, the worlds of children have been exponentially expanded. But while the media could be introducing children to a wide variety of exciting (to adults) career possibilities, the overwhelming focus is on the aberrations of media superstars. Instead of role models that have a place within the realities of most viewers, we're today bombarded by the hero worship of celebrity athletes, super models, and super human crime fighters.

One of the many problems with most modern role models is that they are more the result of intentional image creation by an entire organization than the innate talents and abilities of the individual. Perhaps the most insidious aspect of media promoted role models is the little appreciated factor of just how much of the image is entirely an artifact of the media itself. Consider the massive distortion of sport stars. Back in the days when sporting events were played before local audiences, the value of each player to society was very limited. Filling the entertainment market for sporting events required significant numbers of players in every locality. While the pay might not have been all that good, the odds of actually becoming a professional athlete for a talented child were still at least within the realm of possibilities.

With the huge audience expansion provided by the media, millions of viewers can now watch the same game played by only a handful of athletes, with the entertainment value of each player being vastly increased while the total demand for athletes has been proportionately constricted. Children are relentlessly bombarded by the fact that professional athletes have been elevated by the media from low paid game players into extraordinarily over compensated super stars.

Not surprisingly, wanting to be a professional athlete has become one of the most common dreams of the children of the video age. But while the media puts a great deal of effort into cultivating the irrational hero worship and mass identification with its stable of stars, it studiously avoids the uncomfortable truth that the odds of achieving the dream of becoming a professional athlete have dropped to worse odds than winning the lottery.

Perhaps most importantly, the role models visible to children in the past tended to be active participants in building and maintaining a free society where the individual still had some rights and value. The police and firemen were there to actually protect the lives and property of the citizens. Being a good sport and playing fair was as important as winning.

Today, the heroes children are offered "succeed" almost entirely based on their willingness and ability to break the rules and violate the basic concepts of a free society. The "best" TV cops are those who willfully - or at least negligently - destroy the most private property or cause the most harm the society around them. The "greatest" sport stars are those most willing to violently abuse the other players, the spectators, and anyone they meet on the street. Far from being paragons of respect and virtue, the "heroes" of today are as much to be feared as the "bad guys".

At the same time as bad sports and villainous good guys are being lauded as heroes, the true pillars of civilization are demonized. Scientists are portrayed as dangerous crazies determined to put the welfare of those around them at risk in their obsessive desire to play god. Engineers are either incompetent bumblers or soulless functionaries in the service of malevolent masters. Businessmen are uniformly greedy villains so consumed by their avarice that no crime against the innocent is beyond consideration if a profit can be gained. Is it any wonder that legions of frustrated children dream of impossible futures while society starves for engineers and scientists?

Today, as a natural result of the elevation of the rights of the criminal above the rights of his victim, children are taught to fear most of the adults they meet in real life. It's become fashionable to deal with fear by trying to turn the source of that fear into an object of scorn and mockery. We mock death by reducing it to plastic glow in the dark skeletons and wallowing in gorefest movies where violence is reduced to a spectator sport. Children reduce their fears of the adults around them by rejecting them as role models and withholding their respect. Parents, teachers, and authority figures in general compound the confusion of children by abandoning their own self respect and proper roles in a vain attempt to cultivate the child's affection - falsely believing that they can recover the respect they've lost by bribing the child with undeserved privileges and elevated status.

Empowered by the deferential treatment by adults and the often repeated message that they truly can be anything they please, many children approach adulthood fully convinced their dreams will be their future. Convinced that they are destined to be a sport star or other such illusionary goal, they've wasted and ignored all of the more reasonable alternatives they've been offered. Unfortunately for these unsuspecting new adults, the artificial privileges and illusions of childhood are only temporary. As they come into their own the stage is set for a disillusionment far greater than learning the truth about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. What more crushing realization could anyone suffer early in life but to suddenly learn on becoming an adult that none of their dreams have even the slightest possibility of occurring, and that they'd already wasted their best opportunities to chose a better future.

An increasing number of children turned adults fail to recover from their first exposure to the cold hard real world. Denied their expected easy life of sport or other illusionary occupation, the step down into the severely limited menial labor options available to those who have failed to develop any real world marketable skills can seem doubly abhorrent. Is it any wonder that an increasing number of young adults turn to the real world easy money available in the alternative economy?

So it seems to me that the advice we give to children shouldn't be that they can be anything they want, since that advice all too easily leads many to emulate directly or indirectly society's most degenerate role models. Instead we could counsel our youth to ignore the false world of the media, and explore their own inner selves to discover who they are and thereby what they can become. Further they should be strongly encouraged or even forced to sample as wide a variety of life's real world potentials as possible to learn where to place their first foot step on life's journey - with the full expectation that their next step might be in a totally different direction.