Another malady of my generation is the inability to do or endeavor toward a goal without some extrinsic and passingly authoritative validating mechanism. Millennials have no understanding of Emerson’s “What we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so.” This was a contrived result, borne of a kind of decentralized and self-forming imperative, for it would have been particularly destabilizing for millennials to go out in the world with the intent to do, achieve, or come to a deep realization without education, most likely because millennial corporate, governmental, and cultural institutions were, by design, too rarefied and stingy with their allocations. We would have found that there was not enough meat on the bone and instead, willingly, perhaps, or subconsciously, decided to take “safe” paths in life that our parents, in actual fact or in the abstract, would not find abrasive or shameful. It also meant that those figures would not have to explain the state of society.

In considering Emerson’s balance of nature, I find myself thinking that preoccupation is this age’s most relevant illustration of the hazard Emerson describes. Preoccupation ruins the mind. What are algorithms but the discovery of an individual’s several largest preoccupations braided into one rope? It is the rope by which we hang ourselves. In a society that specializes economically and which destroyed the spiritual imperative in the process of doing so, there is a great middle class of people without a self-evident and multivariate purpose who, unaware of the opportunity to perceive renewal and interest in every matter, fall prey to a preoccupation with a narrow set of concerns. Who would wish to be preoccupied?