Sans raison d’etre

I just spent an evening with an old friend who has a 17 year old sitting his final year at high school. The kid came along.

The 17 year old is privileged in every way imaginable.

Boarding at one of Sydney’s most expensive high schools with access to just about every activity known to mankind, from art history travel to France, charity work in the Solomon Islands, scuba diving on the barrier reef, building aboriginal housing in the NT, charity balls with sister schools, trips to international rugby matches in NZ, a zillion courses at school from drama, professional public speaking, and a tonne of other courses in addition to the demanded curriculum.

Academically, the school promotes great results through exploitation of the bizarrely complex scoring system that was actually dreamt up by one of the kid’s fathers – a well-meaning but deluded mathematician.

On the sports front they get to play everything under the sun, and rugby union; which is their main interest in life and will probably remain so until they die. In truth its just something to talk about with their mates in the absence of talking about anything meaningful.

The kid is lovely. Balanced in character. Caring because he been trained to be so. Careful in his pronouncements. Apparently wise beyond his years. Confident. And the list goes on. Any failings in his life and career are on his shoulders alone, given this head start.

I wonder whether this accelerated development is a good thing or not? We know that the slowly maturing wine eventually outperforms the yearlies. But on the flip-side, such great development while the mind is still pliable may be the opportunity to take advantage of.

The other thought that comes to mind is whether ennui is the curse of these privileged kids? Possibly the ‘new’ in life is all used up in the first 20-30 years and after that life becomes dull and repetitive. Can we actually teach people to remain motivated in the absence of substantive change or novelty? I suspect this varies from person to person.

I have noticed that the kids from these schools, in former eras, tend to keep close to their high school mates and have very few close friends that didn’t also attend their schools. It’s as if the experience was so intense that anyone that didn’t experience it can’t possibly understand them. Somehow this feels like a failure to communicate, emotionally. But maybe in the modern era they are onto this as well.

One thing that I am sure of on life is that there is trade-off between genius and contentment. These balanced and high-performing individuals will be smoothly-operating higher-end parts of the societal machine but they will lack the irrational and unbalanced motivating forces that drives lasting achievement. But so what? You have to be irrational and unbalanced to care about such things anyway.