Someone wrote me today asking for some advice about what to study in school, what to do in life, etc. This is a rare occurrence, but it isn’t so rare that I haven’t thought about it. I know I looked around for guidance a lot when I was younger (hell, I would happily accept some now too!). People usually ask things like — I have an opportunity to study, what should I study? I have an opportunity to travel, what should I do with it? How can I learn more about how to change the world? Of course, the answers to all of these questions depends a great deal on the talents, interests, skills, and circumstances of the person asking. But even that answer alone is a bit of guidance that would have been useful for me when I was wondering what to do…
In terms of reading, I found Peter Kropotkin’s ‘Appeal to the Young’ to be a very nice essay. More recently, George Monbiot wrote a nice piece, aimed also at privileged youth who have opportunities most can’t dream of (as Kropotkin’s is aimed) and as such are in a position to ask for advice. My own little pep talk for young people (actually young social democrats who I was trying to radicalize) is here. For people heading into professional schools or work, I can’t recommend Jeff Schmidt’s Disciplined Minds enough. If you want to know how your professional training will warp your mind and turn you into a privileged caste without empathy for working people or the public good, read this book. Better, Schmidt provides advice and ideas on how to resist the indoctrination.
That might have turned out to be more of a reading list than an advice column. Reading advice columns (I won’t tell you which ones) is a guilty pleasure of mine, I have to admit. A genuine radical advice column would actually be fun… though I suppose if radicals have a problem it’s that they are keener to give advice than to ask it… that would seem to be a blog post for another day, though.
For today, I’ll quote you George Monbiot’s last line from the essay linked above: “You know you have only one life. You know it is a precious, extraordinary, unrepeatable thing: the product of billions of years of serendipity and evolution. So why waste it by handing it over to the living dead?”
