Investing in our futures: A cost-benefit analysis

My mom recently went to see the new documentary film, "Race to Nowhere." She has been running around recommending it to everyone, in part because she is a teacher at a middle school, but mostly because, in her own words: "I watched it and just kept thinking to myself, 'This is about my children. I can't believe it.'"

If you haven't seen it (and I haven't yet) - it's about kids at high schools. They talk about how rough school is - a 13-year-old girl commits suicide after failing a math test (which is why the movie was made), kids are taking Adderrall to be able to stay up late and do excessive amounts of homework and most of them spend their lives racing around from place to place to place. All because they're freaking out about getting into college.

These kids are a bit younger than most of us, but when my mom told me about the movie I couldn't help but agree with her reaction: It is about her children. It's about this school. It's about privileged schools across the country, as far as I've seen.

"Race to Nowhere" was titled using a phrase a girl said in an interview. She said she felt as though she kept going and going and going, but she's in high school; she thought in college it would be the same or worse.

If her hard high school work pays off, she's right.

I don't need to tell you all about how hard we work. You know how it is. Races to library computers can actually result in injury or death, there are more Adderrall pills ingested in a single night on campus than there are Skittles in the rainbow and the bars across upper-level library windows are definitely not there for decoration.

Now, as a senior, I wonder if I shouldn't be thinking the same thing - we just keep going and going and going and not only do we not know why, but we don't ask questions. We just push and push ourselves further.

We feel as though we are going through necessary steps to a long, long process. None of the steps - (i.e. hard work in high school, SATs, hard work in college, being president of this and treasurer of that, LSATs, etc.) - are that much fun! The closest we ever come to enjoying education is oftentimes reduced to being a good grade. We aren't here for us, we're here to get to step three.

And step three isn't awesome, either! This is the part where you get an entry-level job or apply to graduate school, hoping you end up with a "good job." News for those who haven't experienced entry-level work - it is not fun. It is awful. Think about every homework assignment that you have ever considered irrelevant busywork and picture yourself doing those very assignments over and over for an eight-hour day, and then doing the same thing the following day. That's entry-level work.

It's not something that requires a college degree. I can't speak for grad school, I don't know much about it - but it does have the word "school" in it. That has some connotations. So why do we perpetually march along the same course like an army of wind-up dolls?

I suppose it's the idea of investing in the future. That's tricky because it truly is a good idea - in theory. The problem is that our idea of what "investing" means is so warped that, many times, we end up doing the exact opposite of investment in our future lives.

On the contrary, we set ourselves up for dissatisfaction. We work our tushies off in high school, in college, in grad school, in our first jobs and, eventually (if we're one of the "lucky" ones), in our top-notch careers. We never know why.

Money is one way we try to rationalize our actions, but rarely does it account for what we lose as we race to get it.

Plus, my dad (who grew up on a dairy farm in Ireland, climbed to the top of a law firm in New York within one year of getting to the United States and subsequently resigned to be a stay-at-home dad to my half-sister) says that it is always a difficult thing to appreciate money; he says that standards of living always parallel income, so no amount of money is ever "enough" for happiness to preside.

I don't advocate giving up on a college education and running off with the circus. College educations are valuable, if what you take from them is truly an education. We should enjoy reading and analyzing texts, or manipulating numbers, or learning a language - whatever it is that we chose to study. We should be happy with our pursuit of knowledge and realize how lucky we are to be privileged enough to learn.

We aren't, though, and that's a sure sign that we are setting ourselves up to continue the pattern we have started. It's as though we are actually frightened that if we do not get going on our careers right away, we won't have one at all - or worse, we will all be waiting tables (not actually bad money, but a lot of energy and no job stability)!

Sometimes I think we just don't know our other options. We spend the first 30 years of our lives worrying and pushing ourselves, testing our limits with the vigor of complete masochists. And maybe that's exactly what we are.

We need to step back and ask ourselves why we do the things that we do, then think about the implications of not having a persuasive answer. If we don't have an answer, then we should stop doing them. Or else we could be doing the same thing forever. It's definitely a good idea to invest in the future, but not when it comes at the expense of your present.