Generation Bubble

Impractical Necessity: Selling Millennials on the Humanities

The latter particularly — knowledge work — would seem to throw a spanner in the distinction Nussbaum wishes to draw between pursuing knowledge for a job and pursuing it for more edifying, spiritual reasons. In an era like ours, in which work and play become increasing entangled (and not necessarily for commendable reasons), it’s hard to see how knowledge pursued for a career’s sake isn’t also knowledge pursued for one’s own good. Americans are famously beholden to the idea of self-actualization through work. That’s why they work harder, work longer and take less time off than their counterparts in other advanced nations. This mentality, though it might to some extent be rooted in Americans’ national character, hasn’t exactly been discouraged — and, indeed, had even been helped along — by corporations. So naturally thought about the whole of one’s life will at the same time be thought about one’s career; the two are in many cases indistinguishable, because, according to the master narratives of primetime one-hour dramas, advertising, and corporate in-services, reaching career benchmarks and reaping the fruits thereof, they tell us, are expressive of a life, in a very real yet vulgarized Nietzschean sense.