Should You Put Your Kids on the Elite Education Path? | #215
February 18th, 2023: Greetings from Austin. I’m winding down some of my work this week and starting to shift into preparing for baby mode. Two or so weeks to go…I’m quite excited.
+I’m hosting a live Q&A accessible to paid subscribers in Find The Others on Tuesday. You can join and learn more here.
This post is sponsored by Ali Abdaal’s Part-Time Youtuber Academy
I took the first version of Ali Abdaal’s Part-Time Youtuber Academy while living in Mexico in 2020. It was a great way to meet people in the YouTube world who were obsessed with video. I genuinely love diving into new ways of creating and seeing what sorts of unexpected things I can learn. I documented my in-course progress:
Ali’s team was awesome and I got a ton of useful feedback that I probably would have wasted a few years learning. They are hosting their final live cohort and they are trying to help more people “grow a YouTube channel from 0 to 100,000+ subscribers and make it a sustainable, income-generating machine.”
#1 How I’m (Not) Thinking About College For My Daughter
Many people have asked me how I’m thinking about this new chapter of my life and how it will impact my approach to work and life.
The truth is I haven’t thought too much about it and the only true answer is: I don’t know.
I’ve been quietly impressed, however, at the power of the scripts that seem to run people’s lives around kids. For years people have been taunting me online with comments like “this is great, but it won’t work with kids.”
These parent scripts seem to have a much stronger hold over people than work scripts. And compared to work where people have a bit of shame talking openly about it, parenting advice is offered aggressively and proactively by people with kids AND without kids.
One person asked me whether we had started looking at houses. I sensed a strong assumption in her question, that having a kid meant I had to own a home. I told her that we loved renting and planned to stay in our two-bedroom apartment. She made a confused face. I tried to cut the tension by joking, “it’s legal to raise kids in rentals.” She confessed, “I had never thought about that.”
Education (or really, school) seems to be another powerful script. I have been surprised at how many people have asked about our plans for school and how we are thinking about college. My typical response: “We’re going to focus on feeding her first but also no, we have not thought about it.”
In the US we are obsessed with going to college and for many parents, it seems that a popular fixed point to adopt as a goal is being able to pay for your child to go to a good university.
Ben Hunt has a great way of capturing this as part of the “Yay, College!” meme.
What makes our educational caste system so stable and ubiquitous?
Common knowledge.
Even if, like me, you do not personally believe in the social mobility variant of the “Yay, College!” narrative, you believe that everyone else believes it. Common knowledge is what everyone knows that everyone knows – not what you personally know or believe! – and everyone knows that everyone knows that going to a ‘selective’ or ‘highly selective’ college or university is the ticket to a better life for ourselves and our children, a ticket that’s available to anyone who’s smart enough and works hard enough to grab it.
This common knowledge of “Yay, College!” is why we put such enormous pressure on our children to get into a ‘good’ college, and it’s why so many of our children are damaged by that pursuit. It’s why we borrow such incredible sums for ourselves and our children, sums that our government is only too happy to lend to us.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting your children to go to a good college and I’m grateful that my parents supported me in focusing on school while younger.
It’s just that everyone knows that none of it is about learning or becoming excellent at things or trying to pursue the philosophical “good life.” It’s really about money and status. It took me more than ten years after graduating college to realize that I had become disconnected from my actual enjoyment of learning and that might be something worth paying attention to.
I’ve shared this survey of college freshmen over time a few times and it still has a strong effect on me when I look at it:
What happened in the 1970s is that we decided everyone should go to college and by doing this it became part of the default path.
College became detached from a liberal arts tradition that embraced the philosophical good life and became an instrumental step in a life built around work. Or as Bates President Clayton Spencer said to his students in 2013:
Work is fundamental to who you are and who you will become. And I hope you realize by now that you have been working all of your life.
This is fifty straight years where the majority of college students are prioritizing work as one of the central aims of life. But by work, most people mean formal work in the form of full-time employment. A job. A career with a good paycheck.
As this ethic has washed through society, the purpose of parenting appears to have changed. In a survey asking parents what they prioritize for their children, almost everyone wants their kids to be “financially independent” and have a “job or career they enjoy.”
But I sense this is starting to shift. Many boomers are finding themselves retired with that financial independence they were aiming at BUT lacking many grandchildren to play with as their children are career focused and convinced that kids are a financial problem to be solved. While most people won’t see the connection to our obsession with career success and money, some people are starting to reflect.
This is all to say that I think prioritizing financial independence and a good career for my child above all other things is silly. It’s a narrow conception of the possibilities of life.
Not to mention the increasingly hard-to-ignore data on rising sadness and hopelessness among high schoolers, especially women:
To me, it seems a better strategy than focusing on achievement is to invert: how to avoid some of the traps of raising children in an achievement-obsessed culture?
The biggest benefit of being on my current path is learning to appreciate not knowing and living in the present. On my previous path, I was bought into an illusion that life is a series of well-orchestrated plans, moves, and steps. The illusion is that we can pick goals and aim at them. Life doesn’t work like that.
Instead, I’ve learned how to aim at empty space - the unknown unknowns and be okay with it. Too many of us are convinced that this is a risky way to live life and I suspect that if we believe this, we will likely pass this vibe on to our children.
So how am I thinking about school and education for my children? I don’t know. We likely will not organize our entire life around the goal of getting our children into a top school 18 years from now. That does not mean I have a good replacement plan. The truth is, no one really knows what they are doing. It’s just that we think we are supposed to know so we invent stories or start planning.
I think a wiser strategy is just to show my daughter this post in ten years and ask her what she thinks.
#2 How To Take A Sabbatical
This video from
on living in Bali with his family (including two kids) is a total vibe. Check it out.#3 Rich Upper Normies Struggling
Every year or so there is an article highlighting rich people (usually in New York) claiming that they are struggling. This graphic is the all-time GOAT of this genre:
There was another article posted a few weeks ago with a tremendous amount of bait for easy dunking on social media. Here is one quote:
Since leaving New York, Beth has found herself in tears at least once a week. She makes $300,000 a year — more than she’s ever earned in her life — but she’s running out of minutes in the day to squeeze out more dollars. “How do I make the $700,000 that I’m going to need to send her to private school or do the renovation in the attic so I can turn it into the master suite so I can have a tub and so I can have one thing I enjoy in my life?” she says. Her takeaway from the show: “Both avenues are shit. You can stay in New York and climb, climb, climb and never get where you need to go and give yourself a nervous breakdown, or you can move to the suburbs and be like, Who the fuck are these pod people? Neither seems great. Is the secret to it all that we have to just choose a lane and embrace it?”
and another:
At their school, “unless you’re a parent who’s a banker with a capital B or a lawyer with a capital L, it’s like you don’t exist,” she says. The go-to bat mitzvah gift of the moment is a Cartier bracelet, for which moms are expected to pitch in for a group present. “When I heard, I almost dropped dead,” she says, admitting that now in the middle of a divorce, the extra expenses are out of her budget. “There’s pressure to give, though, and it’s huge, and then there’s this whole thought process of We signed them up for this, so we have to go along with it. They didn’t choose this life, we chose it. I was naïve when I put them on this treadmill, and now we can’t get off of it. Part of me is now like, Am I doing a disservice keeping my kids here?”
These people fascinate me and while it’s like a layup to dunk on them I find that boring. After talking to so many people about work, I think most people’s anxieties about work, status, and money are legitimate.
In my book, I suggested that most of us are living out a story of what we think our life is supposed to be. Even if we find ourselves in extreme levels of anxiety or dissatisfaction, we will explain away most of the evidence that our path is not working. This is because the process of developing a new story or embracing uncertainty in order to find one is damn hard. And I sense that it is much, much harder for people with a lot of money. Because to walk away from their path means giving up the built-in praise and respect that comes with such success in today’s culture.
#4 The Curse of the Car
I went down a YouTube rabbit hole on the Not Just Bikes channel where the creator details America’s exceptional obsession with cars and how a massive post-WWII road-building frenzy set up most of our cities to be far less walkable than the rest of the world.
A couple of videos that I thought were pretty interesting:
The post-WW-II GM propaganda to build more roads
The kinds of homes that can’t legally be built in the US (often called the “missing middle")
#5 Fromm On Modern Work
Here is Erich Fromm in 1958
“Because in our enthusiasm to dominate nature and produce more material goods, we have transformed means into ends…Production and consumptions have ceased to become means and have become ends and we have become production and consumption crazy.”
“I think his work is to a large extent meaningless because he is not related to it, he is increasingly part of a big social machinery governed by a big bureaucracy and I think American man unconsciously hates his work very often because he feels trapped by it imprisoned by it because he feels that he’s spending most of his energy for something that has no meaning in itself”
#7 Shoutouts
Pathless Path reader Tom has created a free pdf called The Work/Life Balance Blueprint. Using a simple, 4-step method, Tom shares ideas and insights which could help anyone who wants a more balanced relationship with work. Grab your free copy here.
Thanks For Reading!
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I think you raise an interesting point about not having a set replacement plan for the yay college vibe.
Made me think about the way my parents raised me and the way I’d like to raise kids one day, and notice that even when I see all the issues with the College/ Financial Stability optimization, I still prioritize that for its appearance of certainty,
Congratulations on the upcoming baby phase. Enjoy these last few weeks of quiet. Because as awesome as your world is today, its going to tilt on its axis once you become a parent. And I'll DM Angie because I have so much to share on the college, the sabbatical, etc etc. Great edition Paul.