College and the age-old challenge of becoming someone new
July 19, 2018 | Raleigh News & Observer
We’re more than the sum of things that happened to us or the qualities we were born with.
We can decide how we want to navigate the world.
When Carolina announced the 2018 summer reading for new students, I was skeptical.
Mitch Prinstein’s “Popular: Finding Happiness and Success in a World That Cares Too Much About the Wrong Kind of Relationships” looks like the kind of book that gets assigned on a corporate retreat — pop-science life advice delivered in snackable prose. “We have the choice to harness our natural instincts to be liked in genuine, beneficial, gratifying ways,” chirps the promotional copy on the paperback.
Popular argues that our high school anxieties never really disappear. They just sink into the background and afflict us in new ways as we get older. “There’s something about our popularity in youth that seems to to remain a part of who we are, as if it’s become deeply embedded in our souls,” Prinstein writes.
That sounded like total nonsense to me. Or it did, until I ran into a long-ago ex-girlfriend at the airport and flashed back to the insecure, awkward twit that I was at 17. Glory days, those were not. I felt a whole decade of confident adulthood momentarily evaporate right there at the boarding gate.
Fortunately, Prinstein says, we’re not fated to relive our adolescent agonies forever. His guidance on how to be more likeable — how to earn genuine appreciation, not just superficial status — is straightforward and useful. Listen attentively when others talk. Assume the best in people. Work hard to recognize your own destructive tendencies, and compensate for them.
That all sounds pretty bland for a college read. Yet the overall message of Popular cuts against the grain of self-actualizing, self-promotional affirmation that seems to dominate contemporary culture. In the era of “You-do-you!” egoism, being told to recognize and fix your personality flaws is radical stuff. Sometimes you really shouldn’t do you.
“Psychological research overwhelmingly supports the idea that if we want to change how we feel and act, we first have to change how we think,” Prinstein writes.
College is a great place to get started on that project. It bothers me that conservatives talk about college students like empty vessels, vulnerable to liberal brainwashing, while liberals talk about students like delicate artifacts, likely to crumble at the first exposure to heat and light.
Prinstein’s view is more pragmatic and hopeful, and much closer to the real experience of student life. People are a jumble of past traumas and triumphs, a mess of good intentions and self-delusions. Getting a handle on all of that — not just figuring out who we are, but making earnest decisions about who we want to be — is the whole point of an education.
The most successful students I’ve known understood that power of self-shaping. To use the trendy term in education circles, thriving students possess a “growth mindset,” the belief that habits and capacities are not fixed but fluid, subject to our own choices and efforts. We’re more than the sum of things that happened to us or the qualities we were born with. We can decide how we want to navigate the world.
By the time graduation rolls around, the Class of 2022 will have read more affecting books than “Popular” and contemplated deeper subjects than likability and status. But in the meantime, spending a few weeks this summer contemplating their high school baggage, deciding which pieces to carry with them and which to discard, isn’t a bad start. They’ll go into these fulsome years knowing that adult life is actively formed, not merely fated.
And from now on, I’ll head to the airport with “Popular” tucked into my carry-on. Just in case.
Originally published on the op-ed page of the News & Observer.
https://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article215086025.html