I'm actually studying Gertrude Stein, not Dostoyevsky

David Brooks, insightful as always, beat me to the punch* in tackling how Bob Woodward's description of his chance White House encounter with Mark Felt perfectly encapsulates the anxiety-ridden aimlessness of big-city young-adulthood. Smartly, he doesn't turn Woodward's experience into an opportunity to dole out the sort of Sage Elderly Wisdom (TM) that floods at recent grads(Network! Be aggressive! Join the Navy!). Instead, he simply reminds us that even the greats were once young and uncertain, weighing the advantages of graduate school over an entry-level job processing flag requests and giving Capitol tours (a job I'd gladly accept, thanks).

As someone who may or may not resemble the young person so accurately described in David Brooks' new essay, I'll simply highlight a couple of sections and leave you to read the whole thing:

"Places like Washington and New York attract large numbers of ambitious young people who have spent their short lives engaged in highly structured striving: getting good grades, getting into college. Suddenly they are spit out into the vast, anarchic world of adulthood, surrounded by a teeming horde of scrambling peers, and a chaos of possibilities and pitfalls. They discover that though they are really good at manipulating the world of classrooms, they have no clue about how actual careers develop, how people move from post to post."

"They often feel stunted and restless (I haven't moved up in six months!), so they adopt a conversational mode - ironic, self-deprecatory, postpubescent fatalism - that masks their anxiety about falling behind."

"In college they were discussing Dostoyevsky; now they are trapped in copy-machine serfdom. They spend their days amid people with settled careers, but they teeter on the cliff's edge."

__________________________________________
*This is not to suggest that we are in any sort of competition, or that my getting to the subject first would have at all influenced Brooks' topic choice. A slow day for the Times is something like 1.3 million readers. A good day for this blog is any that hovers around 8.