My current favorite example of too much stress in the system comes from a young woman of obvious ability and promise--she speaks four languages, did well in school, has a fine relationship with her parents--who tells me she won her first job out of college after eight interviews. Her future boss, that is, needed 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8 times to vet an obviously competent person to do work which, however valuable and demanding, did not require space travel or knowing how to drill teeth.
You have to wonder how much time, energy, and money would have been saved by this organization if their H.R. department was run by the average grandparent. If they punched it up on their control board such that this 23-year old was told: “Go on round to Nanna’s for a cup of tea. She’ll tell you if you make sense for the gig.”
But with the dials of “efficiency” and “best practices” and “we hire rock stars” all turned up to eleven no one ever stopped to wonder how to vet an obviously competent person for a job that was not life or death in a scant seven interviews.
You see those dials turned up to eleven too on the average campus and in the average classroom too, where what matters is living up to an imposed standard and following a minute-to-minute syllabus and getting everyone stamped with a stamp that makes them ready for purchase by a college or some employer.
Curiosity? Adventures of the mind? Failure? Experiments in the soul? These have been wrung out of most education.
Sure there are reasons to take tests and compete, to ask for a C.V. or interview someone you might hire more than once. All of us want our dentists to go to school and measure up to a minimal standard before we open wide. Still, no one will say--will they?--that eight interviews to hire a twenty-three-year-old represents the most sensible way we might do things. Is there really someone out there who thinks nine interviews would make more sense? Or who thinks education needs to be more controlling?
Is there no link between the level of stress we manage to put on one another in our work and at our schools and a world that got sick in March of 2020? (Or did you think we were well in February of that month?)
Is it silly to say that the heat we feel internally has nothing to do with the warming of the planet?
Love this. I’ve often thought that there’s a relationship between the anorexia and obesity of the overdeveloped world and the starvation of the developing world… a bit like your observation about the heat we make by overwork or burning fossil fuels. Gave me a lot to think about. Thank you!