One of the benefits of spending ten hours a week in a car with a fundamentalist Christian is the opportunity to reflect seriously on the important things in life, like whether saving gas is really worth spending ten hours a week in a car with a fundamentalist Christian.
No, seriously, I really enjoyed many of the conversations we had in the carpool, especially when we were able to push beyond the surface disagreements to the underlying and sometimes unexamined beliefs that we hold strongly. In one memorable conversation, we ended up arguing about what was the measure of a good life. What, essentially, was the purpose of human existence? What is our destiny, as sentient and moral actors?
My carpool-mates agreed that this was an easy question: the goal of a good human life is to come to know and love Jesus Christ. Simple. It shouldn’t be shocking to you, dear readers, that I don't think it's quite that easy. Indeed, I argued that the essential goal of human life is to leave the world better than we found it – our duty as moral actors is to improve the world.
Comity was not reached, but it was a stimulating conversation. On reflection, though, it left me dissatisfied. Thinking it over later, I realized that if this is what I believe (and it is), then I’m not doing a very good job living up to it. I’ve spent ten years in a field that I’m pretty good at, and that has provided me with a very comfortable living, but was it helping to make the world a better place?
“Sure,” I could argue, “I work for a company that makes software that helps
accelerate the pace of discovery, innovation, development, and learning in engineering and science. This is a good thing.” And it is. Our products are used to design better and more efficient cars, communication systems, medical systems, and so on, but the truth is that my contribution is really too abstract and remote for me to take real pride in the positive outcomes. I write software that helps people write software that other people can use to do good things – that’s just too nuanced for me to take much comfort in.
As it happened, I’d been pretty down on my job anyway. It was becoming clear that my dissatisfaction was over more than my particular job at this particular company. The whole enterprise of writing software just wasn’t getting me out of bed in the morning. Maybe a decade of programming was all I could take.
What could I do instead? What flavor of do-gooder would I become? Medicine was right out, both because there's no way I'm going to go through medical school and because I pretty much faint at the sight of a needle. I wasn't going to go build houses in impoverished countries because, well, I don't really like the out-of-doors. I decided that I need to get into public service, in some capacity that involves mostly talking, writing, and thinking. And, if at all possible, sitting.
To that end, I'm excited and terrified to say that this fall I'm quitting my job to start working towards a Masters in Public Policy at the Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions at Brown University. Excited, because I'm going to be a grad student! At Brown! Terrified, because I'm quitting my job. Rachel (who functions as the CFO in our relationship) assures me that we'll still be able to live in our house and buy food, but we will have to institute a series of strict austerity measures. For instance, we might have to stop shopping at Whole Foods. And I probably won't be able to buy an iPhone. Talk about sacrifice.
I feel really good about this decision, and I feel especially good having the decision behind me since I'm sure my family and friends were getting tired of hearing me whine, "Should I go to grad school?" Of course, I still have to decide just what area of public policy I want to focus on, and what I want to do when I eventually get out of school, but I have some time to figure those things out. My dream job is to be Sam Seaborn from the West Wing, but I think I may need to find a slightly less ridiculous way to phrase that ambition.
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