American culture is composed of a set of stories that we tell ourselves and each other. They help establish a common language, a common way of thinking about what it means to be American, and set our expectations for what life should be like. Many of these stories are within the cannon of “conventional wisdom.” But what if some of our most important stories aren’t true and rather than being helpful, actually steal enjoyment from life, or even do damage? What happens when the conventional is unwise? The recurring American Myths series will explore this question.
As a parent of a college student and a high school student, and as someone who has worked with young adults (18-24) my entire professional life, I’m keenly interested in how our American Myths shape the expectations of our youth, and the impact on their success, happiness, and fulfillment. Perhaps the most damaging American Myth is the belief that “you can have it all.”
You Can Have It All was not something my parents ever said to me. They said “you can be whatever you set your mind to.” The two statements are both aspirational, both meant to convey belief in possibility and opportunity, but have completely different implications. My parents’ statement put the responsibility on me – I had to set my mind to it. Implied within was that I then had to do the work. It was a commitment that was necessary to obtain a result. And the result was not an accumulation of “haves,” it was to be who I wanted to be. Holistically. As a person. Contrast with you can have it all – no need to set your mind to it, no need to put in the work, the only personal responsibility is to “have.”
Through our focus on equal opportunity over the last few decades, we have looked to easily measurable outcomes for evidence about our progress toward opportunity. When we conflated output metrics (results, mostly in economic terms) with input metrics (opportunity and choices), we conflated equality with opportunity. Success as a person was defined by output metrics centered around pay and benefits. And by doing so, we have greatly cheapened the human experience. Ironically, we lost sight of the inherent value of each person’s humanity; we lost sight of the value that rightly spurred the equal opportunity movement in the first place.
Along the way, we migrated from “you can be whatever you set your mind to” to “you can have it all.” Equal opportunity came to mean that in every area of life, everyone is entitled to arrive at similar outcomes. Where there is inequality in outcomes, there is work to be done on opportunity. And success, both personal and societal, was defined in the same terms.
Powerful people have a successful career. And a great family. And a fulfilling home life. And great vacations. And College educations. Big house. Nice car. The list goes on. But we never talk about the trade-offs that go into reaching those goals. A generation of young people have been raised to believe that if they don’t achieve all of these outcomes simultaneously, that they have failed somehow. Or worse, that someone else has failed them. That their employer has failed to compensate them properly. That government has failed to provide free services. That colleges have failed to award them the right grades. Even worse, we have lost the value of hard work compounded over long periods of time. Many young people expect the success of their parents in their 20s, but don’t realize that it took their parents 30 years of choices and consequences to get there.
We have increased our rights to make personal choices, but have outsourced the risk and consequences to bureaucracies. We have lost the concept of personal ownership. We no longer talk about opportunity cost.
We have created a society of great abundance, where people still feel as though they are not successful, because we have set an impossible goal. The everything trap.
Yet, we celebrate those who embrace those very concepts. We celebrate the entrepreneurs who take personal ownership, who put skin in the game, who take risk, fail, and try again, blaming no one but themselves. At the same time, we resent and distrust those public figures who enjoy success, fame, fortune, power, but who don’t assume the risk inherent in their decisions and actions. Instinctively, we understand what properly aligned risk and reward look like. What properly balanced rights and responsibilities look like. What properly aligned choices and consequences look like.
I work hard to teach my children that they are solely responsible for the choices they make, and for the consequences of those choices. I teach that for every choice, there are many opportunity costs. And they must own those as well. I teach them that they can be anything they want to be, but that they can’t be everything they want to be or that society seems to expect. That being who you want to be through your own efforts celebrates humanity, while expecting to have what you believe you are entitled to through the efforts of other cheapens it.