The Best Decisions You’ve Never Made

This week was orientation for Duke’s incoming students. As a result, campus has been full of freshmen doing… well… the things freshmen do, including lots of welcome events and programs.

I’ve been to a handful of the activities, which is always a fun opportunity to hear what the newest crop of students are complaining about. Lots of stuff changes from year to year, but some topics are consistent. And one of the most consistent complaints I encounter is freshmen wondering why they have to take so many required classes.

Why do I have to take a writing class when I’m here for engineering?

What does an art course have to do with being pre-med?

I’m a musician… when am I ever going to need to know math?

By the way, this isn’t a Duke-specific gripe. Most schools have some base level of curricular requirements, and liberal arts colleges are basically built around making students take classes they wouldn’t have picked.

Why? Because, as I reminded every student I heard complaining about curriculum requirements, those classes might be the most important ones they ever take.

Yes, I realize how patronizing it sounds, and yes, I remember being 18, hearing adults say things like that, and finding them insufferable. But I repeat the message anyway since it happens to be the story of my life.

The 18-year-old version of me went to college expecting to come out as a doctor. I was pre-med, taking freshman organic chemistry, and already looking for an internship in the hospital. However, thanks to a curriculum requirement I definitely resented at the time, I got stuck in an English class I didn’t care about.

A decade later, I left college with a PhD in English, which I guess means the class wasn’t as bad as I’d originally thought. It also technically means I did come out as a doctor, but not the kind my mom could brag about to her friends at dinner parties. (Sorry, Mom!)

Over the years, I’ve told that story to lots of freshmen. I usually frame it as a cheerful little lesson about keeping an open mind. But, when I told it this year, I found myself thinking about it from a slightly different angle. I’m starting to wonder if the important part of the story isn’t about the value of keeping an open mind. After all, I didn’t have an open mind when I got forced into that English class. In fact, I remember being annoyed for at least half the semester.

Instead, the important part of the story is that I never would have chosen the English class on my own. The only reason I wound up taking the class was because the choice got taken away from me. As a result, my entire career — everything I do, the way I think, and the person I became — exists because a system I resented overrode my preferences and forced me to do something I’d have certainly avoided if I’d had any choice.

While that outcome leads to all sorts of cliches about the value of leaving your comfort zone and being willing to try new things, I wonder if the more important lesson is a lesson about the value of having forcing mechanisms in our lives.

For all the grumbling that goes on around college campuses from students being “forced” to take required classes, that forcing mechanism is enormously important. The required classes (and distribution requirements and prerequisites and core curriculums) are all designed to override an eighteen-year-old’s instinct to only do what already appeals to them. And, as a whole, the system works beautifully. It helps huge numbers of people find their callings, their fields, and their life’s directions among things they’d almost certainly not have otherwise discovered.

In fact, I’d go so far as to guess that lots of you reading this are, in ways you perhaps don’t even recognize, the byproduct of an educational system that made decisions for you. But once we finished school, most of our “forced discovery” scaffolding vanished.

Is that a problem we should be more worried about?

From what I can tell, adult life has almost no equivalent to “required classes.” Nobody makes you take a course in something random at thirty-four, and nobody hands you a schedule with some unfamiliar thing wedged into the middle of it that you have to attend for four months.

Instead, adulthood is basically the exact opposite. When you’re an adult, you finally get to arrange your life entirely around what you already know you like. You pick the job in the field you already chose, you pursue the hobbies you’re already good at, you hang out with the people who already share your interests, and you eat at the restaurants you already know you enjoy.

In other words, the vast majority of choices adults make point them toward doing familiar and comfortable things. But doesn’t school teach us the importance of not allowing that? And what does it mean that adulthood is, in a sense, the systematic elimination of exactly the mechanism that leads to so much chance discovery?

I honestly don’t know.

As I sit here trying to write the part of this essay where I’d usually share some critical lesson or definitive proclamation, I’m realizing I don’t have one. Instead, I find myself questioning a lot of the choices in my life and wondering what other things I might have discovered a passion for if only someone had made me try them

Instead of an exercise this week, I feel like the best thing I can do is offer a few questions worth wondering about. None of these have right answers. Just ask them and see where the answers take you…

• How many of my favorite preferences and experiences in life are a result of things that were forced on me?

• When was the last time something forced me into an experience I wouldn’t have chosen on my own? How long ago was that?

• How much of my current life is arranged around things I already know and am familiar with?

• Do I have any forcing mechanisms in my life that are causing me to try things I otherwise wouldn’t have done?

• What might be the impacts — good and bad — of living a life where I choose almost everything?

Notice how none of these questions require you to take any sort of action. That’s actually part of the point. I’m not sure if any of this is worth “fixing,” but it seems like something worth thinking about.