We all want to make some kind of mark on the world, to leave something behind that shows that we were here and we mattered. Few would argue about that. The real issue is what kind of mark we want to make. In recent years, young people have increasingly described that mark in monetary terms—so many want to be a millionaire, or a billionaire even.
Indeed some recent college polls asking students what matters more to them when they graduate—getting a lucrative job or one that contributes to the world—have found two-thirds of them wanting the money, a complete reversal from the 60s and 70s when a similar majority wanted to do good for the world.
These polls may be deceptive; there’s no mistaking a new interest in positive action—shown in the thousands who march to stop global warming or fill halls and stadiums for Bernie Sanders. But college faculty don’t deny the way their institutions are changing—emphasizing the earning power of their graduates rather than the quality of their contributions—and this change has come in part from popular demand. Even the new emphasis on volunteering while in high school or the early years of college seems in some ways more like resume padding than altruism.
If that’s the case, and if these young people feel that what will bring them happy lives is heavy pocketbooks, the research suggests they are sadly mistaken. Tim Kasser and other psychologists have gathered reams of data showing that students with materialistic ambitions rather than service goals are consistently less happy as adults. This doesn’t suggest you can’t be rich and happy, not at all. It does suggest that if your goal is to be rich—rather than to contribute to a better world—the odds are you will be less happy than if you chose the road less traveled.
When the mark we want to make is monetary, there can never, it appears, be enough of it. There’s always somebody out there who is richer and the rat race to accumulate is always yours to lose.
My personal hero, the late environmentalist David Brower, used to speak a lot to young people. I remember a time when he addressed a group of them in the late 80s,
an idealistic team of students who were working to save Mono Lake, an amazing ecosystem in Eastern California that was dying because Los Angeles was taking all the water that flowed into the lake.
WHAT KIND OF MARK
DO YOU WANT TO
MAKE?
By John de Graaf
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