The Safe Path in Life

Alexandre Yersin

Our parents want what is good for us. That is a different thing from what is best for us. 

The best jobs now available in America did not exist when The Phantom went to college. The new best jobs involve computers, sometimes programming, but mostly they require seeing the world differently, through new eyes.

What school systems from grade school through college provided, at least in the Phantom's generation, was discipline. They provided content, "facts" a "knowledge base" so the students could learn what had come before, so as not to have to reinvent wheels, but the pathway forward would require students rejecting what their parents and teachers taught.  

Professor Andrew Hacker asserts the pathway to Princeton did not prevent students at that jackpot school from regressing to the mean, from doing no better or even worse than their parents. The pattern, he implies, is a set of parents who had to make their own way, who had to struggle, who then provided an easier way for their less intensely competitive children, who did not have the fire in the belly and who regressed to the mean. 

That does not comport with individual stories the Phantom knows. Driven, "gunners" fought their way into Princeton, but like all eager to please young people, they had difficulty rejecting the hands which fed, so they followed conventional paths, to law school, med school, traditional business, and none of those destinations offer as robust a return any more.  Even those gunners who attained Goldman Saks discovered they were caught in a pyramid, making lots of money at first, but then winnowed out after a few years in that hyper competitive  cauldron.

As Dylan said, "Your old road is rapidly aging. Please get out of the new one, if you can't lend your hand." The old roads are no longer the best paths.

The wisdom in these words was never fully apparent to the Phantom, but it is becoming  clearer, with time.

What the parents wants for his child is a recognizable path toward a secure future. Go to law school, get a job, we won't have to worry about you. 

Except of course, law school no longer means a job.

And medical school means only a very middle class job now, in America, except for the top 25% of medical school graduates. Medical school graduates are now following in the footsteps of law school graduates--they are bailing out of the profession for which they've been trained and going into more promising careers.  

Looking at the mid life status of his sons' friends, the Phantom is stunned to see the kids he thought had fallen off the cruise ship to stardom were the ones who actually became the stars, while those who remained on board are mired in "careers" which provide a steady paycheck, but it is not clear for how long.

It is instructive to look at life stories, such as you can apprehend them. Alexandre Yersin, trained by Pasteur at the pre eminent institution in Paris, leaves the security of a career at the palace, sails for French Indochina, winds up identifying the causative organism of the disease which laid waste to Europe for centuries--the plague. And, just to add to the excitement, he raises an anti serum to this disease, launching the first successful treatment, before antibiotics.

For every great success, there may be a thousand failures, who also took their own path but it led to failure.

The question the Phantom would like to see answered: What happens to the failures? Do they wind up homeless, or do they find another path, find at least some success?

Who has these answers?