The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories

by Marina Keegan

  “The danger in doing a prefabricated thing after graduation,” he continued, “is that there’s no unique story to tell about it. If there was ever a moment to be entrepreneurial and daring—whether in terms of business or social change—and really test yourself, this is it.

  “If you’re like most people, you’ll do one thing for two to three years, then something else for two to three years, and then—somewhere in that five- to seven-year distance from Yale—you’ll see a need to fully commit to something that’s a longer-term project: graduate school, for example, or a job you need to stick with for some real time. The question is: where do you need to be with yourself such that when the time comes to ‘cast your whole vote,’ you’re reasonably confident you’re not being either fear-based or ego-driven in your choice . . . that the journey you’re on is really yours, and not someone else’s? If you think of your first few jobs after Yale in this way—holistically and in terms of your growth as a person rather than as ladder rungs to a specific material outcome—you’re less likely to wake up at age forty-five married to a stranger.”

  Yikes!

  Professor Charles Hill also believes it’s an unproductive use of Yalies’ time—but for slightly different reasons. He sees the job world as split into two categories: primary functions and secondary functions, productive and unproductive. Unlike straight-up corporations, he doesn’t see these banks or consulting agencies as contributing to the world in a primary, meaningful way.

  “People go into it without knowing why,” he said. “They consider you a crop. They harvest you, put you in their grinder, pay you well, and off-load you.” He sees consulting services as something companies invest in to protect against potential lawsuits—providing somewhere for CEOs to point the finger in the event of legal trouble. When the economy goes down, corporations cut back on the use of consultants. Hill argues that if their services were truly needed, the exact opposite would occur (i.e., the corporate use of consultants would increase).

  His alternative? Professor Hill wishes more Yalies would go into the productive economy, i.e., work for the corporations themselves.

  “Students have these ideologies dropped down on them from the sixties and seventies about corporations being evil,” he said. “For some reason people will work for consultants and banks but not for PepsiCo or General Motors.” As for the nonprofit world, Hill sees it as a waste of our talents. “It’s a question of grand strategy,” he said, insisting that our energy is better spent elsewhere.

  Yikes!

  As far as other important people go, university president Richard Levin believes “there are many ways to contribute to the well-being of society, and there are many forms of public service.” He rejects the notion that “people who choose a business career aren’t interested in being public-spirited,” asserting that “what’s outstanding about Yale graduates is that whatever career they choose, they end up being active participants in the civic life of the communities in which they live.”

  Harold Bloom disagrees.

  “Alas,” he groaned, “this is the death of the mind. That is not my vision of Yale University.”

  * * *

  Inevitably, some of the students I spoke with aren’t interested in the industry at all. “I can never say for an individual person because I don’t know their financial circumstances,” Alexandra Brodsky ’12 said, “but twenty-five percent is a lot of talent that could do a hell of a lot for the world elsewhere. I think that we have to be aware of that when we make these choices.” Brodsky, the co-coordinator of Dwight Hall,* spends a lot of her time at Yale surrounded by nonprofit management. For her, the argument that working in the private sector is the best way to prepare oneself for this line of work is faulty.

  “I think the best way to get the skills to work for a nonprofit is to work for a nonprofit,” she said. “The answer people give about skills acquisition is very convenient.”

  Sam Schoenburg ’12, a political activist and campaigner, is on the same page. “I’ve always been interested in government work or advocacy and I don’t feel that [consulting or finance] would satisfy me in the same way—even if it was only for a couple of years,” he said.

  “There seems to be a great disconnect between the lofty speeches we hear at commencement from Yale administrators about devoting ourselves to public service and the career advice we’re presented with during the rest of the year.”

  Still, some people I talked to were interested in the industry for its own sake—fascinated and excited by the work itself. Three such students requested to remain anonymous, but one, Sam Bekenstein ’12, was willing to comment on his genuine interest in consulting as a career choice in itself, not as a means to another end.

  “In my everyday decision making, I want to be doing something that has an impact,” he said, “and when I think about how best to be in that position, I usually think of some kind of strategic management.”

  Joe Breen ’12 is caught somewhere in the middle. He’s interested in eventually going into affordable housing development, running a nonprofit that improves services for a community or provides services that do not yet exist. But he’s applying for a series of jobs in the real estate private sector and isn’t sure how he feels about it morally.

  “It’s hard to say which types of things are improving communities and which are exploiting communities,” he said. “But ultimately, I want to work for an organization that I’m positive is not exploiting communities for profit.”

  Joe isn’t sure where commercial real estate falls on that spectrum, and it frustrates him.

  “I would love for there to be a great two-year program that helps you gain all of these skills and gets you to start helping people right away, but I haven’t found that yet,” he said. “It’s pretty hard to be proactive in finding your own alternative, meaningful experience when you’re running an organization and taking classes. These commercial systems are already in place. They have deadlines. They present themselves to you.”

  At times, Breen admits, he worries we’re sending our “best and brightest” into jobs that “abuse communities for profit.” (He also worries that every quote he gave for this article has the word community in it.)

  The Office of Yale Undergraduate Career Services is well aware of these complaints. But Associate Dean and UCS Director Allyson Moore contends that they’re seeking to answer them.

  “We recognize that financial services and management consulting firms have a wealth of resources at their disposal and that their on-campus recruiting efforts are thus highly visible,” she said via e-mail. “That means there is a responsibility for UCS to help those industries with fewer resources, such as arts, nonprofit, and public sectors, to receive equal visibility.” This year, they made sure that one third of the organizations at the career fair were from these categories.

  “We were quite pleased with that,” she said, “and will continue these efforts within the coming months.” One such initiative is an online self-assessment service designed to identify students’ passions so they can “hone in on motivations” to better address their needs.

  * * *

  Honestly, I think UCS is an easy scapegoat. The real reason so many of us pursue careers in consulting and finance is far more complicated than that. Of course, the word scapegoat is problematic to begin with. Are consulting firms inherently evil? Probably not. Are banks inherently evil? Probably not. Frankly, I don’t know enough about everything to make a statement like that one way or another. So is there anything intrinsically wrong with the fact that 25 percent of employed Yale graduates end up in this industry?

  Yeah. I think so.

  Of course this is my own opinion, but to me there’s something sad about so many of us entering a line of work in which we’re not (for the most part) producing something, or helping someone, or engaging in something that we’re explicitly passionate about. Even if it’s just for two or
three years. That’s a lot of years! And these aren’t just years. This is twenty-three and twenty-four and twenty-five. If it were a smaller percentage of people, perhaps it wouldn’t bother me so much. But it’s not.

  What it boils down to is that we could be doing other things. Sure, working at Bain or McKinsey or J.P. Morgan might be one way to gain skills to help us get hired elsewhere, but it’s obviously not the only option. There’s a lot of cool shit we could all be doing—and I don’t need to enumerate the clichés.

  Obviously, some people need to make money. They have school loans to pay off and families to support. For those of us with an actual need to make money quickly, these industries might make a lot of sense. In fact, I think that working hard to earn a decent amount of money can be quite noble. I’m still struggling with the fact that due to my own (selfish) desire to be a writer, my children probably won’t have the same opportunities I had growing up. For most students, however, I genuinely don’t think it’s about the money. It’s a factor, sure. But it just feels like a factor.

  What bothers me is this idea of validation, of rationalization. The notion that some of us (regardless of what we tell ourselves) are doing this because we’re not sure what else to do and it’s easy to apply to and it will pay us decently and it will make us feel like we’re still successful. I just haven’t met that many people who sound genuinely excited about these jobs. That’s super depressing! I don’t understand why no one is talking about it.

  Oftentimes at Yale, I’ll be sitting around studying or drinking or hanging out when I’ll hear one of my friends talk about a project they’re doing for a class or a rally they’re organizing or a play they’re putting on. And I’ll just think, really, honestly, how remarkably privileged we are to hang around with such a talented group of people around here. I am constantly reminded of the immense passion and creativity of those with whom I get to spend time every day.

  Maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe it really is a fantastic way to gain valuable, real-world skills. And maybe everyone will quit these jobs in a few years and do something else.

  But it worries me.

  I want to watch Shloe’s movies and I want to see Mark’s musicals and I want to volunteer with Joe’s nonprofit and eat at Annie’s restaurant and send my kids to schools Jeff has reformed and I’m just scared about this industry that’s taking all my friends and telling them this is the best way for them to be spending their time. Any of their time. Maybe I’m ignorant and idealistic but I just feel like that can’t possibly be true. I feel like we know that. I feel like we can do something really cool to this world. And I fear—at twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five—we might forget.

  * * *

  * Yale’s undergraduate public service organization.

  The Art of Observation

  The old couple in lower berths C and D stared at us for at least twenty of the thirty-two hours between the City of the Dead and India’s south coast. We read books, rolled dice, and looked out at rice fields and rivers. The woman was plump and wrapped in a saffron sari, the man thin and clothed in a starched white shirt. We traveled with them in a curtained compartment as the train wove past scruffy monkeys and starving cows, but they gazed instead at our pale peculiarities. The way I braided my hair. The way he bit at a nail. The way we smiled and laughed across our top bunks. We didn’t mind, really. Not when they watched us eat oily lentils with forks and not when they spoke in hushed Hindi as we took off our shoes. So we looked out and not down as Calcutta wound to Chennai and the monsoon heat broke: five weeks in and we were used to being watched.

  When Luke and I landed in India, we discovered our celebrity before our passports were stamped. Our backpacks rolled through baggage claim and a middle-aged man held out his cell phone and clicked. At first, the attention was surprising. I’d been warned by blogs and travel guides, but I didn’t expect such explicit persistence. “One photo, one photo,” they’d coo from streets and stands: “One photo, please, miss, one photo.” On our first day in Delhi, the circles in the Jama Masjid mosque forced us off its hot marble and our trip to the spice bazaar yielded three or four photos. Thrust into a city where chaos prevails, we were dizzied into frame after frame with beaming locals. We’d agree to one shot and be trapped in five others, avoid followers at lunch only to get them at dinner. By the time we’d traveled west into the desert, Luke was getting fed up. He’d refuse cameras and yell off those who stared, exhausted and appalled by the endless annoyance.

  I liked it.

  When a rickshaw driver turned around or a schoolboy held out his phone, I flattered myself beyond the obvious parameters. I knew, of course, that my white skin and light features were responsible for the attention, but some part of me still took pleasure from being stared at on trains and photographed in city gardens. I didn’t quite mind posing for all the pictures and felt, rather disgustingly, like some kind of movie star, forced to pause for snapshots outside shops and on the streets.

  The sentiment sickened me. Each time I felt a twang of pleasure from the stares or picture requests, my ego was kicked down by my very revulsion that it had been boosted in the first place. I pondered my own narcissism as I smiled again and again next to Taj Mahal tourists from Hyderabad and Mumbai. “One photo please,” they’d ask, and I wouldn’t know how to say no. Luke would walk ahead and I’d inevitably stay behind. If it made them happy, after all, why not play along?

  I confessed such sentiments to two Irish girls on the rooftop restaurant of a cheap hostel in Jaipur. We complained about the stares on trains and in rickshaws, comparing stories of extremes as the sun set and kites flew up from the pink city’s nearby roofs. After a few glasses of Indian wine, I offered that maybe, sometimes, it really wasn’t so bad. Yes, they responded, nodding and thinking. They agreed with the emotion, they saw what I meant. I laughed at our deprecation as the light faded, but searched their eyes in earnest nonetheless.

  Yet as the weeks wore on, it became harder to see fascination as flattery. In the Buddhist town of Dharamsala, Tibetan monks pulled cheap cell phones from within their thick maroon robes and asked grinningly for pictures against the Himalayan skyline. In a rural village near Jaisalmer, a man had me pose with each of his skinny children. In the City of the Dead, no cameras were allowed. The dying come to die in the holy Ganges River, burning on its banks and escaping reincarnation in its waters. Walking through the chaos of bells, human ashes, stray dogs, and bones, I felt a kind of double relief. Not a single Indian requested a photograph, and not one time did I snap my own lens. One night during the monsoon, we wandered down the shore to watch the cremations, standing beside bald men as they threw powders into fires that raged despite the rain. Not a single person was looking at us.

  The next morning we boarded a thirty-two-hour train. In the afternoon, Luke climbed down off his berth, past the thin aged man and his saffron wife, wandering out between the cars to see the jungle fade to palms. I opened my journal to begin writing and caught the corners of my eyes watching the woman watch me. My prose was jumbled and distracted and I was reminded for an instant of a performance-art piece at the Public Theater. An actress worked on a typewriter in a corner of the lobby—claiming art through the action of everyday observation. I’d left the theater with an almost angry indignation. There was nothing to be fascinated by, nothing to esteem, nothing to romanticize in this everyday examination of our immutable solipsism.

  That night, when the train was dark, the woman’s eyes smiled up at me before she faded off to sleep. I heard the rain break and the men vending dosa and chai slowly fade from the aisles. Far from my months stumbling through markets and holy land, I wonder how many photographs of my pale limbs line the walls of strange Indian homes. Embarrassed, I fumbled off my flash from within the stained train sheets, capturing the woman to bring home to a tiny box on my shelf.

  Song for the Special

  Every generation thinks it’s spe
cial—my grandparents because they remember World War II, my parents because of discos and the moon. We have the Internet. Millions and billions of doors we can open and shut, posting ourselves into profiles and digital scrapbooks. Suddenly and totally, we’re threaded together in a network so terrifyingly colossal that we can finally see our terrifyingly tiny place in it. But we’re all individuals. It’s beaten into us in MLK Day assemblies (one person can make a difference!) and fourth-grade poster projects (what do you want to be when you grow up?). We can be anything! Our parents are divorced but we’re in love! Vaguely, quietly, we know we’ll be famous. For being president, for starring in a movie, for writing a feature at eighteen in the New York Times.

  I’m so jealous. Unthinkable jealousies, jealousies of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel I’m reading and the Oscar-winning movie I just saw. Why didn’t I think to rewrite Mrs. Dalloway? I should have thought to chronicle a schizophrenic ballerina. It’s inexcusable. Everyone else is so successful, and I hate them. There’s a German word I learned about in psychology class called schadenfreude, which means a pleasure derived from the misfortune of others. The word flips into my head like a shaming pop-up when a girl doesn’t get the internship either or a boy’s show is bad. I was lying in bed the other night wondering whether the Germans created a word for its opposite when I realized that the displeasure derived from the fortune of others is easier to spell. I should have thought to coin its green eyes.

  I blame the Internet. Its inconsiderate inclusion of everything. Success is transparent and accessible, hanging down where it can tease but not touch us. We talk into these scratchy microphones and take extra photographs but I still feel like there are just SO MANY PEOPLE. Every day, 1,035.6 books are published; sixty-six million people update their status each morning. At night, aimlessly scrolling, I remind myself of elementary school murals. One person can make a difference! But the people asking me what I want to be when I grow up don’t want me to make a poster anymore. They want me to fill out forms and hand them rectangular cards that say HELLO THIS IS WHAT I DO.