I wonder sometimes what would happen to me if I stopped everything. If I stopped rowing, if I stopped going to school, what would happen? Everyone's had thoughts like this from time to time, little thoughts that fritter across our brains when we're up too late at night working. A life without work or responsibility may be tempting sometimes, but after any sort of careful scrutiny, it can also be truly terrifying.

We define ourselves by what we do. During introductions on the first day of class, I couldn't stay away from the temptation to declare that I was a neuroscience concentrator who also rowed. Many others followed suite declaring their own concentrations and activities. It's what we value. It's how we size each other up. Life without a job or a calling is life without purpose, a wandering existence. The need for definition has led us to become dependent on our many means of production as armaments against frightful nothingness. In the modern age, this form of existentialism can be summarized quite neatly in any number of numbers, charts, or graphs. We are defined by our grades, our test scores, the names of the schools we went to, the number of papers we've published, our jobs, our credit ratings. Lives squashed into two dimensions.

It is very easy and very tempting to try to reduce the world into a series of statistics. Numbers are absolute; there are no grey areas. One is larger or smaller than another. Value is therefore easily assigned and choices are easily made. Numbers have freed us from the naggings of morality and values. Take the average corporation of today versus what it was 50 or so years ago. When you worked for a company in the 1950s, you worked there for life. You were well taken care of and had an extensive benefits plan. Now, companies fluxuate in size with the tides of the stock market. News of companies downsizing and cutting thousands of jobs is a common headline, and outsourcing labor to other countries is an accepted practice. We can certainly feel that some values are being ignored here, loyalty, dependability, sacrifice, but in every case you can point to a set of numbers or statistics and say, "this is cheaper." It frees the executive from a certain amount of responsibility by providing an irrefutable justification, and yet we cannot escape the feeling that something has just been lost. GM is one of the last companies to operate under 1950s style practices, and has a very generous pension plan. But, as baby boomers begin to retire, GM is under a huge amount of strain to keep their company afloat.

High powered corporate lawyers are paid in 10 minute blocks. Policemen have ticket quotas to fill. Doctors are given ratings based on successes in certain procedures. In academia the motto is "publish or perish." Numbers are also deceiving because they lack context. In every instance, the push for production must inexorably lead to the output of statistics that are misleading or reflect inferior work. Humans are simply not that brilliant to be inspired all the time everyday, and a number can never reflect the reality of a situation. Less than 1 second separated the top 2 men's finishers at New York's ING marathon this year. 1 second cannot sum up the totality of triumph, anguish, and pain those men felt. 6 million cannot reflect the horror of the holocaust. 11 seconds cannot capture the magic of your first time. A nine digit SS number will never elucidate the complexity of a human being.

And yet we would try. By numbers and statistics we would try to cook up a recipe for success. We are introduced to the beginning stages as early as middle school. Get good grades, join a sports team, do community service, score well on your standardized tests, play an instrument. You can run down this checklist and with a little bit of luck get into any college in the country, but there are many problems introduced by this approach. Because this system is so well documented, a ceiling effect is induced. So many kids have this type A profile now that it's impossible to tell them apart, and they are struggling hard to stand out. Like stars trying to outshine the other stars in the sky.

It's also a system that you can very easily hide in. The threat is that you can keep moving along though and not ever love a single thing you're doing. Not that you necessarily hate it, just that there's no passion there. You do it because this is what you think should be done. And in fact, the high level of activity that is required to maintain this profile makes sure that there's not enough time for the type of self-reflection that would help you find your way. It's like swimming in the ocean. When you dive underwater, everything is dark and you can't hear a thing. You swim a long for as long as you can hold your breath, and when you come up for air and you are buffeted by terrifying sound and wind, and you look around and you aren't anywhere close to where you imagined you were heading. Best to dive again to the comfort of the deep and keep swimming.

I worry about my decision making process that led me to choose to the premed tract. I worry sometimes that I too have just been puttering around in the ocean, or that I started pursuing that path simply because it was the hardest course open to me at the time. Entry into Med school has become so competitive that kids accrue a laundry list of activities and health related volunteerism a mile long, to go along with their >3.5 GPAs and >33 MCATS. Now those are some statistics that you will live and die by when applying to Medical school. And if the statistical perfection weren't frightening enough, try reading the personal statements of some of these kids who are applying. They try to reflect that they are totally, fanatically committed. I doubt that many of them are as committed as they say they are; it's rare to find a person so devoted to their fellow man. It seems like the farther back they can cite their inspiration the better. "I was inspired by an episode of MASH at age 8." "When I was a little girl I used to put band-aids on my brother (1)." They speak as if it were a good thing that they entered the conveyor belt so early.

And we have extended the conveyor belt as far back as it can go. In an effort to add accountability to our decaying national public school system, we have turned to our old love of numbers and production in the form of standardized testing. Mandated state sanctioned testing means that a school must now teach to a specific test to get funding, and as a result our schools are becoming mini test taking factories.

Take Fox Point elementary for example, as part of the No Child Left Behind Acts, they are mandated to have 6 hours of testing every month in Math and Reading. As a result, those are the only subjects that they teach; they have no music, art, or science programs, and only the most rudimentary social studies program. The average child in Mrs. Fish's 5^th grade classroom is 3-5 grade levels behind in reading and is still grappling with times tables. It's not that the kids at this school are stupid, it's just that they don't pay attention that often. They are bored and difficult to control. They just don't take to the factory system of learning yet. The rigorous driving of cut and dried self evident concepts makes them turn off to everything else. Performing well on standardized tests doesn't seem to be a thing that holds particular allure to people until they are older. Any teacher will tell you that progress in early years of education is rarely quantifiable, and No Child Left Behind is an attempt to fix a system without actually doing anything about the flaws (2). Some may be comforted by the idea that we've introduced accountability into our public school through statistics. But we're attempting to use statistics to quantify a system that is not readily adapted to quantification.

And what's at the end of all this anyway? What if we manage to complete the success scavenger hunt? Got our 6 figure job to pay for the Lexus that will take our spouse and 2.5 children to the summer home. Are we fulfilled? Maybe, but it seems doubtful. Success, as defined by our 2D representation, doesn't equate to happiness. In fact it might be one of the most sure fire ways to unhappiness. As Joseph Brodsky so aptly put it, "The other trouble with originality and inventiveness is that they literally pay off. Provided that you are capable of either, you will become well-off rather fast. Desirable as that may be, most of you know firsthand that nobody is as bored as the rich, for money buys time, and time is repetitive((3))." No one enjoys being bored. No one enjoys that silence because it's the silence that signifies that we've reached the end of the vaunted statistical status road. And of course the next horrible question must come. "Is this all there is?" No, they're just numbers, devoid of context and metaphysical value. Ways we have of measuring ourselves and making ourselves seem useful to other people. They may be convenient or useful in some situations, but the real meat of life is found elsewhere.

Hui Tzu said to Chuang Tzu, "I have a big tree named ailanthus. Its trunk is too gnarled and bumpy to apply a measuring line to, its branches too bent and twisty to match up to a compass or square. You could stand it by the road and no carpenter would look at it twice…"

Chuang Tzu said, "Now you have this big tree and you're distressed because it's useless. Why don't you plant it in Not-Even-Anything Village, or the field of Broad-and-Boundless, relax and do nothing by its side, or lie down for a free and easy sleep under it? Axes will never shorten its life, nothing can ever harm it. If there's no use for it, how can it come to grief or pain?"(4)

 Danek, Jenniffer and Marita.  Becoming a Physician.  New York:  John Wiley and Sons Inc, 1997.

Kohn, Alfie.  The Case Against Standardized Testing Portsmouth: Heinemann,       2000.

 Brodsky, Joseph. In Praise of Boredom. Harper's Magazine, March 1995 v290 n1738 p11(3)

 Tzu, Chuang.  Basic writings / Chuang Tzu ; translated by Burton Watson.  New York: Columbia University Press, 1996