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Sometimes, the more things stay the same, the more things
stay the same. A frustrated and angry young doctor with $250,000
in tuition debt cried, "I wasn't considering my long-term
happiness when I was 18 years old, nor did anyone bring it to
my attention." Just out of med school at a top Ivy League
university, this orthopedic surgeon is looking for a new career
path, one that fits. Things haven't changed since I graduated
high school a quarter-century ago. So, why aren't we yet providing high
school juniors and seniors with better career choice mentoring?
To answer this question well, let's explore human nature in the
face of change and the history of our mind.
Usually, changes that we may be ready for don't happen until
we have enough proof that the change is necessary and doable.
When it comes to considering a major change in our lives, or
in society at large, we all know how easy it is to fall back
on the same old way of doing things. We humans love our routines.
In the morning we brush our teeth, drink our coffee, grab the
newspaper, and sit in traffic jams to go to jobs we don't particularly
care for. Human life needs rhythms, which are important for reducing
the stress of living in an unpredictable world. If we had to
change things up everyday, and completely reinvent what we do
and where we go, life would feel chaotic. Even if we don't like
our routine, we'll usually opt not to upset it. Unknowns can
create enough anxiety and fear to keep us locked into the usual
way of doing things. This default behavior gets short-circuited
if "keeping things the same" becomes an actual threat
itself. For example, when the Washington DC sniper was on the
loose, the whole metropolitan area experienced higher levels
of stress. People were hesitant to do regular daily activities
like shopping and going to work or school. Hundreds, if not thousands
of the schools within a 90-mile radius went into lock down mode;
no one was allowed outside for lunch. Even Friday night football
games were cancelled. The threat to any one of us in the DC area
was very small, but most of us reacted as if our chance of being
the next victim was likely. Daily life changed. The take out
and home delivery food businesses boomed, and retail stores weren't
getting many customers. An anomaly in our environment caused
us to react. We adapted to the situation, changing our "same
old" way of life. For a short period of time, keeping things
the same was no longer comfortable.
It's difficult to fully grasp the "keep-things-the-same"
side of our nature until we look at the history of becoming human.
Why do we do this? A key feature of the human brain is to notice
sudden changes in our environment, as they occur. We pay little
attention to things we see regularly. Mother Nature "designed"
our brains for a world long ago, where survival was a daily activity.
Spotting sudden changes gave us a survival edge. Evolutionary
biologist Paul Ehrlich concludes in his book "Human Natures,"
that we are "sight" animals, superb at handling crisis
situations that we can "see," like an attack from a
tiger in the bushes. As long as we can literally see the threat,
we are quite tactful at solving the problem. Throughout most
of our evolution, with about 250,000 generations of daily practice,
we lived as hunter-gatherers. Our daily lives were full of safari-like
dangers. Since our brains were evolving during this period, it
makes sense that they were genetically "fitted" with
hardware to deal extremely well with sudden anomalies in our
environment. We would get overloaded if we were conscious of
all incoming information; hence our brains were designed to go
on automatic pilot most of the time, allowing us to focus our
conscious awareness on the most critical changes in our surroundings.
On the flip side, we have developed very little innate sensitivity
to changes that happen slowly, over long periods of time. Out
of sight, out of mind. What we could not see didn't matter, especially
in the small world our brain was adapted for long ago. In sum,
the human brain (and our five sensory input system) is designed
to pay attention to any change that stands out against a backdrop
of constancy. For example, notice how your sense of smell will
tire with continuous exposure to odors in your home, where a
visitor will pick up the scent instantly.
The DC sniper, a modern world version of a sabre tooth tiger,
prompted our survival-brain-gear into action. Early in the sniper
investigation, bystanders noticed a white van speeding away from
the scene. Law enforcement had to go on any lead, so the white
van was identified as an anomaly, the new "change in our
environment." One afternoon during the sniper's siege, I
counted 10 white vans within a 1-mile strip of highway, in less
than three minutes. White delivery vans are everywhere, speeding
along, all day long. They have become part of our backdrop of
constancy. Just like your sense of smell tires easily, we didn't
notice white vans as one of the most common vehicles on the road.
Without being aware of their frequency, bystanders say they spotted
a white van at just about every crime scene. Operating as humans
always have--sighting anomalies-- so we thought. In the meantime,
the sniper was passing through police roadblocks, including eleven
license plate checks, in a burgundy Caprice.
Mother Nature's solution, in promoting our survivability in
a dangerous environment, was to give us the gift of crisis problem
solving. This wonderful ability to quickly respond to life's
sudden uncertainties served us well in our ancestral environment,
and no doubt played a key role in moving us from living hand-to-mouth
as hunters and gatherers for 6.5 million years, to living in
complex modern societies. The advent of the agricultural revolution
some 10,000 years ago accelerated our accumulation of cultural
and technological know-how, but our brain biology stayed the
same. Environmental pressures changed for the better, but we
still largely lived off the land in harsh survival conditions,
literally all the way up until the mid 1800s. In geological
time, it was just a few days ago that we were still living like
our distant relative, Cro-Magnon man. This means that up until
that last century or so (for millions of years), we largely only
needed to rely on our five-sensory-perception brain to understand
and survive in our small tribal world. Our brain has not had
near enough time to adapt to living in large tribes, e.g., modern
cities and nations, and brain scientists don't believe our mental
wiring will change anytime soon. As Robert Ornstein (Stanford
brain psychologist) would say, we're stuck with the same old
brain (SOB!). The industrial revolution, spawned practically
yesterday (300 years ago), catapulted us into an environment
very foreign to the one our brain was biologically "wired"
for. Although we have the ability to build great cities and societies
to cushion us from many of the hazards of living on planet earth,
we are still learning how to manage large social and physical
systems that rely on observations beyond our immediate sensory
input. Unfortunately, we can't rest on our gray matter. We need
a new mind set for this new world.
As soon as we started living in more complex environments,
e.g., cities, states, nations, and the now the global economy,
our problems got much more complex. Many of the looming problems
challenging us in the 21st century are not visible to the naked
eye. Global warming, for example, is a problem that is still
not taken very seriously. Is it a real problem? Without scientific
measurements over longer periods of time, would any of us have
enough evidence to know that it may be sneaking up on us? If
we continue to weigh our problems as we always have, like that
frog in a pot, the water will start to boil before we can leap
out. Remember, our brains are designed to respond visible threats,
vague evidence is usually not enough to convince us to act. Evolutionary
biologists believe that our innate talent (survival mind) to
deal with immediate danger, as sight animals, is inadequate to
competently solve our modern world dilemmas using only our current
"wait and see" approach. We are no longer living in
small tribal communities where we can keep an eye on the immediate
dangers lurking in the bushes. By the time we would have enough
sensate data to "see" the problem, it usually is already
causing havoc.
Back to our opening question, why aren't we guiding teens
to make more sophisticated choices in setting their life course?
The career world "environment" has changed, but our
mainstream career choice process is a hangover from a time when
choices were few. When comes to choosing our career path, "keeping
things the same" is an understatement. To illustrate, let's
imagine a 17-year-old Cro-Magnon teen hitching a ride on a time
machine 40,000 years ago and landing in one of our high schools
in the year 2002. He would have no clue about how modern society
works, rather, his main concern would be to find a mate, reproduce,
raise a family, hunt (get a job), and stay alive. Ironically,
he would easily blend in with today's teens. Approaching his
senior year, he wouldn't be thinking about his long-term fulfillment.
First on his mind is gaining social status in his tribe, the
more status, the more wealth, comfort, security, and of course,
access to the best mating partners. Sound familiar? Given the
few careers choices he would have had in prehistory--hunter,
toolmaker, craftsman, killer of enemies--you'd think he would
be quite picky with all the thousands of choices available in
the modern world. Well, maybe that's wishful thinking. Practically
speaking, we realize that he would look to his teenage peers,
and parents, to see how "modern-age" people are choosing
their careers. As it turns out, he wouldn't learn much of anything
new about how to make life choices. Our status and survival "minds"
are setting the course for our lives without us knowing it (see
"The Bachelor" TV program for a modern glimpse). At
the moment, it appears that Mother Nature did not architect a
"long-term fulfillment" circuit into our brain. Our
SOB (status seeking and survival minds) don't care about our
long-term happiness, we have to convince these parts of ourselves
that there is a lot more to life than finding a sexy mate.
So, what do our teens have to say about all this? I recently
asked a group of 35 juniors and seniors at a local public high
school if they were planning to go to college. Most are, but
only two felt relatively certain about their field of study.
Needless to say, most were taking a confident stab in the dark;
and listed "comfort and prestige" as the main appeal
for their career considerations. Their Cro-Magnon mind is doing
the choosing. None of the teens had even heard of such a thing
as having "natural talent," and thought it idealistic
to pursue something enjoyable for a living. Surprisingly, most
had a healthy skepticism about following a path solely for status
reasons, but not enough mentoring or personal conviction to know
how to pursue a path that would bring long-term satisfaction.
Simply put, they were "not choosing," as can be expected
without good tools; Cro-Magnon mind doing most of the thinking.
Our career and daily lifestyle environment has completely
changed, but our brain hasn't learned to make sense of this new
world yet. Remember, our same old brain doesn't easily see changes
that happen over long periods of time. The complexity of living
and working in our world has slowly and steadily crept up on
us over the last 150 years. Like the white delivery vans, we
haven't been paying attention to critical changes in our way
of life. We live much longer and healthier, well past our Cro-Magnon
ancestors who died before age forty. In prehistory it made sense
to let our status and survival minds make most of our choices.
Without social status and survival savvy, our chances of reproduction
were limited. Today, we can own our first home, BMW, and raise a
family before age thirty, and many of us will likely have 50
more years to enjoy. Was your career direction designed to keep
you happy beyond age 30? Career choices that satisfy our early
adulthood desires usually do not serve our long-term need to
do something personally meaningful, our brains were not designed
to worry about the far off future. If you stumbled into your
career as if it were largely a means to comfort and status, you
can bet that S.O.B. was at the bottom of it!
So, how do we human beings go about convincing our SOB to
think about long-term happiness? Stay tuned . . .
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