Finding meaning beyond the 'burbs

We come from the suburbs. Our parents -- doctors, lawyers, engineers -- are well off, but not filthy rich. We major in psychology, history or international relations. In terms of how much time and money has been invested in our personal development, we stand at the apex of human progress.

And we have no idea what to do with ourselves. Are you one of us?

We are the large number of Penn's undergrads who can't decide what comes next. The American Dream of front lawns, minivans and widescreen televisions doesn't appeal to us. Thanks to our parents, we can't be self-made men or pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. And growing up in modest comfort, we are less interested in money than those who really need it or those who are obsessed with it.

"I was exposed to a lot of different things as a child. ... It's really difficult for me to narrow it down," College senior Sam Rothberg said. Rothberg, a music major and psychology and art history minor, does not know what he's doing after graduation. He hasn't applied to jobs or graduate schools.

Rothberg is one of us. We travel, we dabble, we adopt and discard. We watch Fight Club, American Beauty and Office Space -- movies that lionize the renunciation of the American Dream. After graduation, a few of us will follow the heroes of those movies into drugs, crime and anarchist revolution, but most of us will filter into consulting jobs, graduate schools or move back to suburbs because we can't think of anything else to do.

We are a generation adrift, striving to find something that we find meaningful.

"The dream has mostly to do with becoming self-sufficient and comfortable. That is somehow not very satisfying, so everyone looks for these other dimensions," said American History professor and former University President Sheldon Hackney.

The American Dream permits us the opportunity to benefit from our own hard work, to improve our personal condition. If our personal condition no longer needs improvement, Hackney suggests that we can find meaning by working to benefit others. For the American Dream to remain relevant, we must revise it to measure a person not by what he earns, but by what he gives.

Because we must find ways to contribute to society -- even if it's only to bring purpose into our own lives.

And these issues play out every day at Penn.

Penn is representative of the original American Dream: opportunity, hard work, reward. But in addition to claiming the world's top business school, Penn also holds the No. 1 spot in the US News ‹¨« World Report's ranking of "service-learning."

It's a place to discover the great injustices of our times, whether you're reading about genocide in Rwanda from a textbook or witnessing Philadelphia's racial tensions first-hand.

Of course, Hackney acknowledged that there are avenues other than community service and political activism through which the sons and daughters of the suburbs can find purpose.

"If you're trying to find meanings in life that go beyond what you get in the daily newspaper, that's terrific," Hackney said. "But if it's only for you, it's no different than trying to earn another $50,000 a year. You have to do it in some way that's shared."

In other words, what we do is less important than how we do it and why. Places like Huntsman Hall and Civic House are not mutually exclusive. And the call to contribute to society is not just a condemnation of capitalism but an argument for its redemption.

Indeed, the best example of extending the American Dream to help others is the new generation of American philanthropists. Capitalists such as Bill Gates and 1965 Wharton alumnus George Weiss represent the ultimate embodiment of the American Dream -- and now dedicate themselves to giving it away.

The other side is the story of Chris McCandles, as documented by Jon Krakauer in Into the Wild. McCandles, after graduating with honors from Emory University in 1990, renounced society and embarked on a quest of raw, genuine experience. For more than two years, he walked, hitchhiked and canoed through North America in solitude, searching for greater meaning.

He found it shortly before dying from food poisoning in the Alaskan wilderness, when, in the margin of his copy of Doctor Zhivago, he scribbled in capital letters: "Happiness only real when shared."

Daniel Nieh is a senior East Asian Languages and Civilizations major from Portland, Ore. Low End Theory appears on Fridays.

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