This week I cleared another birthday. With each solar circumnavigation, standing up takes longer, bedtime inches earlier, and loud music inclines me more to call the cops than join the party.
But age also encrusts attitudes and hardens habits, trapping us in deepening ruts of weary routine. We carve these grooves thru the course of our lives, often in orchestrated trails we’re supposed to take.
Over time, we expect everyone else to follow them too. Without thinking, most of us do.
For several generations, the recommended road has been heavily choreographed: Finish high school, go to college, find a job, get married, buy (i.e., mortgage) a home, have kids, raise them to follow the prescribed path, and retire to Florida after forty years racing rats.
The Long Emergency: Su...
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But in recent decades, the conventional career track can seem like quicksand, leaving many modern graduates feeling stuck in the mud.
That isn’t their fault.
Unfair Criticism
Like any generation, the latest crop has its foibles and flaws. But criticism they receive is often unfair.
They were born after the wave of post-war prosperity began to break. Today’s college-age students weren’t alive on 9/11. No high schooler remembers the Great Recession.
Diluted dollars, incessant spending, relentless regulation, and collapsing quality have pulverized purchasing power of most Americans. Those who own the least are hit hardest. That includes most young adults.
They don’t bear responsibility for this. Yet they bear the brunt of the burden. But the victims are finally getting wise to the racket.
As they wander into the world, many of them sense they’ve been led astray. Those who stripped the mine gave them the shaft… and now tell them to stop whining as their ladder to liberty is lifted away.
Not whining is good advice as far as it goes. But more high school graduates are following it while going their own way.
The Guinea Pig
They’re beginning to realize college isn’t for everyone, or even for most.
In certain situations, higher education makes sense. I went that route. So did our sons. One graduated and the other’s almost halfway there.
Yet many students are misallocating time and resources, accumulating debt to waste four years. Last Fall, I learned of a remarkable young man who shunned university for an unconventional route.
It wasn’t merely the road less travelled by. It was one that didn’t exist.
How could it? The path is personal. Anyone taking it must clear it himself. That’s the point. The main obstacle is having the guts to grab a machete.
Maxim Smith did.
His father is Matt Smith, a serial entrepreneur and brilliant thinker with whom I briefly contributed some essays for Doug Casey last winter.
Casey is renowned internationally as (among countless other accomplishments) a philosopher, author, and speculator. For years, he’s contemplated “a radical alternative to college”.
He envisioned compiling his ideas into a book (which he, Matt, and Maxim are finalizing now). Other priorities intervened, and the project languished…until Maxim graduated high school.
Not being interested in college, Maxim sought other options… and decided to try Casey’s approach. Like Donald Trump’s healthcare proposal, it was more a “concept” than a “plan.”
But Maxim decided to give it a shot, and make it his own. He’d be the guinea pig for what Casey calls The Preparation.
The Count of Monte Cristo
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When Matt told me what his son was doing, I was intrigued. With his permission, I called Maxim (as it happens, one year ago today), and was instantly impressed. This eighteen year-old was mature, intentional, curious, and disciplined.
We spoke more than an hour as I delved into what he was doing. He admitted he wasn’t quite sure. But the gist was he’d learn what he could to be ready for anything. He told me his model was the Count of Monte Cristo.
After years wrongly imprisoned in the Château d’If, Edmund Dantès met a learned priest who accidentally tunneled into his cell. The Abbé helped Dantès use his prison time wisely, instilling knowledge and skills to make his protégé “confident, competent, and dangerous.”
This trilogy of attributes comes not from Alexandre Dumas, but from Matt Smith.
The notions of confidence and competence seem self-evident. But “dangerous” might take some people aback. It shouldn’t.
Matt describes it not only as the ability to defend oneself, but to think for oneself…to critically assess and question any information received – particularly what we’re told to believe, and especially what we already do.
