Zucchinis I Grew In My Backyard

Next weekend (Sunday, to be precise), the honorable gentleman Terence Lee will be running in the 2008 New York City Marathon. The marathon is Terence’s third (he’s previously run in Munich and Philadelphia), and he’s striving to achieve an incredible time of 3:10, which would put him in the 97th percentile of all runners. Yeah, pretty decent.

Anyway, a sizable Amherst contingent is heading down to New York to watch the race. We’ll be there Saturday night at the least (potentially Friday too), and then all day Sunday to watch the marathon. After the race we will descend en masse upon Jake’s Dilemma, a terrific bar on Amsterdam. All in all, it promises to be a spectacular weekend. A few New Yorkers, including myself (technically I’m a Westchester resident, but near enough) will be hosting revelers and offering rides to and from the city. If you’re a friend of Terence’s, or just interested in supporting a fellow Jeff, send me an email at bgoldfarb09@amherst.edu.

After the (quite modest) success of the Ballad of Sarah Palin, I thought I’d write a song to commemorate this momentous occasion. Given my vocal ineptitude, and the magnitude of the situation, I delegated singing responsibilities to Monica L and Olivia K, both of whom sound lovely. Lyrics, instrumentation, and production by yours truly.

The Terence Lee Marathon Song

Hope to see you in New York on Nov. 2nd!

After watching the VP debate Thursday night, I found myself completely preoccupied with Sarah Palin. I couldn’t help dwelling on her terrifying policies, her utter inanity, and, most of all, the bizarre appeal she holds for millions - yikes, make that tens of millions - of Americans. Oh, and she loves hockey. Seriously, Sarah, WTF?

Anyway, I decided to confront my feelings, and perhaps come closer to unraveling this riddle, via the miracle of Garageband. I’d never done much by way of songwriting, but I did go through an obsessive limerick-writing phase (don’t ask), so I’m an experienced rhymer. As for the singing…. eh… judge for yourselves. Hopefully it’s tolerable. Well, here it is, and enjoy!

The Ballad of Sarah Palin

Feedback, of course, always appreciated (unless you’re just writing to tell me how far off-key I am; trust me, I already know).

One of the mistakes I made in my last post was conflating “enjoyable” work with “meaningful” work. I railed against jobs in the financial sector first for their lack of social benefit, and second for being just plain ol’ no fun. I advocated pursuing work that has value to society, but I also spoke to the importance of loving what you do.

Unfortunately, these attributes aren’t necessarily packaged together. There are plenty of shitty, paper-pushing jobs out there which contribute mightily to humanity. I wouldn’t want to be the secretary recording minutes at the Gates Foundation’s board meetings; but I wouldn’t short-change his importance, either. So, too, are there kick-ass jobs which confer no social benefit. For instance, you could work as a snowboarding instructor in Aspen and adore getting out of bed every morning; but your vacuous responsibility would be teaching rich teenagers how to have some frivolous fun. So: how to navigate these waters? How to negotiate the balance between “enjoyable” and “meaningful”?

I’ve been asking myself that question a lot lately. This summer I’m going off to an island in North Carolina to research loggerhead sea turtles. Pretty cool, right? I think so; I think it’ll be a blast. The turtles are nocturnal, meaning that we spend our evenings patrolling the beaches for egg-laying females - which also means that we have most of our mornings off to revel in sun, sand and ocean. The next three months of my life will equate to a glorious combination of entertaining research and deliriously relaxing vacation.

But how socially valuable is my Summer O’ Turtles? Well, loggerheads are a threatened species; thus, insofar as you care about biodiversity, my work will be meaningful. If you’ve ever had the privilege and pleasure of snorkeling with a sea turtle, you probably appreciate their existence and don’t want to see them go extinct. I sure don’t; I think the loggerhead is a gorgeous creature with an incredible life cycle, and its very existence brings me pleasure. If my fellow human beings brought about the turtle’s extinction, effectively eradicating hundreds of millions of years of evolution, that would weigh heavily on my conscience. So, okay, I think turtle research is pretty darn important.

Still, I’d be the first to admit that, in the ranks of dire environmental problems, the threat to loggerheads doesn’t rate very highly. The disappearance of sea turtles would be unfortunate, sure - but not nearly as unfortunate as a three-degree rise in global temperature, or the extirpation of rainforests, or the world’s population reaching nine billion, or the escape of swarms of genetically-engineered velociraptors after a candy-bar eating computer technician deactivated Jurassic Park’s electrical fences. That last one still keeps me up at night. The point is, turtle extinction would be bad. But the world has other problems, and many of these problems are much, much worse.

So: as an environmentalist who wants to employ his passion for maximal social good, wouldn’t I - and the world - be better off if I did something else? If I really care about the earth (and I do, I swear!), shouldn’t I spend my summer, say, lobbying for a hiked-up gas tax? Or dispensing birth control? Or studying for the LSATs so I can someday prosecute evil, groundwater-polluting corporations? Yeah, maybe I should.

But would I enjoy doing those things? Would I enjoy going to law school? Would I enjoy fundraising? (Hint: the answer is no. I’ve tried doing this, and it sucks.) Meaningful though it may be, I just don’t think that a desk job could ever satisfy me - at least, not to the extent that cruising around the beach in search of turtles will. So when the Turtle People offered me an internship, I jumped at it without a second thought. But it’s only a summer, after all. I’d think much longer and much harder about signing my life away to loggerheads, considering that I could serve as a more useful environmental advocate in a different role.

All of this is to say that I still haven’t negotiated a balance between meaning and fun. If anybody else has been having similar career crises, post ‘em in the comments. We can start a foundation teaching snowboarding to underprivileged inner city youth. Somebody get on that.

As my class (’09) crawls ever closer toward graduation, it seems to me that our nascent career goals have become more pragmatic. And by pragmatic, I mean that we care more about money. Sure, I know people who will spend their summer leading bike trips, or sequestered in writers’ colonies, or performing works of altruism in third-world countries. By and large we’re a socially aware campus - compared to most, at any rate.

But with crunchtime approaching, our priorities have begun to perceptibly shift. The summer before senior year is the time (or so says conventional wisdom) for securing an elite job/internship, the resume-builder that will elevate an applicant above armies of high-achieving clones from Brown and Dartmouth and Williams. The job hunt in earnest nears, and we’ve no choice but to realistically consider what prospective careers we should target in, like, the Real World. The answer, for a surprising plurality, lies in the financial sector: i-banking, consulting, and the suite of other jobs that involve zapping electronic money from Point A to Point B. And that, I think, is a shame. A damn shame, in fact.

Okay, I’m about to reveal my prejudice and ignorance. At the risk of sounding like the smelly old man who sits in front of your town’s VFW building, sipping from a hip flask and pestering passersby with ad hominem attacks against hip-hop and the internet, I’ll say this: I don’t really know how i-banking works, but I don’t like it. I can’t escape the sense that the point of the endeavor is, A) to help the rich get richer, and B) to get rich yourself.

And I feel like this latter lure is insidious, that it’s corrupting otherwise charitable and generous people. Look, I’m sure there are students at this school who love the financial world, who relish plopping down in front of a computer and doing money-related things, things which I understand so poorly that I can’t even begin to satirize them. But, come on, there can’t be too many kids like that; we’re a liberal arts college, and not, say, UPenn. It seems like a lot of students arrive at Amherst with diverse academic pursuits and a developing social conscience, but when push comes to shove and they have to make real decisions about their future, the desire for financial success trumps the desire to do interesting and meaningful things.

Look, I’m a sellout too. I don’t want to be poor. I consider myself an environmentalist, which means that if I practiced what I preached, I’d start a subsistence farm and live off the zucchinis I grew in my back yard. But I’m too complacent, I suppose, to live outside the system, which means that I’ll need money like all you saps. That said, I genuinely don’t want to be rich. I’m not revolted by wealth on principle, but its accumulation is very low on my list of priorities - say, 387th.  Compelling psychological studies (which I would cite if I had any journalistic integrity) indicate that money contributes nothing to happiness. (This is true, notably, for families above the poverty line; the dirt-poor are understandably miserable, though that’s a whole ‘nother issue.) Anyway, if you think that makes me sound holier-than-thou, well, I’ve been called worse.

Nonchalance towards wealth puts me in the minority, however, both among my financially-minded peers and in the US of A. I’m very, very skeptical that any i-banker derives emotional or spiritual sustenance from padding some cigar-chomping CEO’s bankroll with another million. I’m confident claiming that investment bankers enter their field only - or at least predominantly - to make money. (And also because a network of Amherst alumni crawl the guilded halls of Merrill Lynch.)

To my mind, the i-banking example represents one of America’s great unchallenged and destructive tenets: the disconnect between ‘work’ and ‘leisure.’ Americans in all sorts of careers loathe their jobs, yet they suffer through 9-to-5’s in order to accumulate wealth. And when they’ve accumulated enough, they get to… spend it! They can take vacations for ten whole days at a time, and eat sushi at Nobu, and buy sailboats! They can purchase modern art and go snowboarding! They can rent suites at the Marriott! The ethic goes like this: if you work diligently and without complaint, someday, someday, you can play.

So here’s my batshit insane idea: what if our work and our play were the same thing? What if we chose careers based solely on what we felt passionate about, what we most enjoyed? If work was a delight, would we need to escape to spas and ski slopes? Would we need to spend money on leisure as profligately, or even at all? Would anybody choose to be an i-banker?

But how feasible is such a dramatic realignment of priorities in this country? Maybe America didn’t invent the work/play dichotomy, but we’ve sure as hell perfected it. That’s because our leisure time has become inseparable from our unparalleled consumerism, from our use of fossil fuels and plastics and imported Brazilian ribeyes. We can’t relax without spending money, so, out of necessity, we work like dogs to earn more. Industries would collapse en masse if Americans stopped spending on pleasure. Legions of suddenly unemployed JetBlue pilots and golf instructors and Best Buy salesmen would revolt.

Yet I say that a paradigm reversal isn’t impossible. I’m not the world’s most experienced traveler, so I can’t speak specifically to the state of affairs in too many other countries. But after spending last semester in Australia and New Zealand, I can tell you that those cultures adhere to a different dynamic than Americans, and to a far preferable one. Everywhere I went, I met people who spend their lives pursuing work that’s low-paying, seasonal, travel-heavy, and flat-out fun. By and large, Kiwis and Aussies care much more about their emotional well-being than their paychecks. Their work doubles as vacation; thus they don’t have the same imperative to earn and spend. An example: at a hostel on the South Island, I bunked with a Kiwi who works half the year in NZ as a naturalist on a whale-watching boat, and the other half as a park ranger in Utah. Maybe JP Morgan executives can afford to wipe their ass with hundred-dollar bills, but I came away convinced that there’s nobody on the face of the fucking planet who loves life more than that dude.

Anyway, I’ll resist the urge to moralize more than I already have during this post. Look, if you really, truly, sincerely love investment banking or consulting or stock-broking or whatever, then more power to you. Go to it. And if you’re pursuing it solely because you want to line your pockets, well, that’s your perogative; I can’t stop you. But, again, wealth and happiness aren’t correlated. Earning and spending will not make you happy. Seriously. And at least in my limited experience, anecdotal evidence supports that claim.

Ultimately I think it’s a shame that our priorities are skewed, and that many of my bright and motivated colleagues are going to choose professions that they don’t love, embodied by the financial sector. And I hope - no, I believe - that the work/leisure dichotomy is reversible; and what’s more, should be reversed. Refute me.

There once was a writer named Ben,

Who with insomnia was suff’ring again.

Plagued by ennui,

And with nothing to do, he

Decided to take up the pen.

More to come…