Lists

 Back when I was a freshman in high school, I didn't care where I landed on any list. I had no notion of relative rank, order, hierarchy, or prestige. To the extent that I imagined a future for myself, it didn't involve what could be described as a career or a formal education. I knew I'd have to pay for food somehow, but I also knew that whatever said day-job might be, it could not touch my true vocation—that of novelist. I figured I'd pay the bills washing dishes and waiting tables, and then retire to my garret somewhere in noble squalor and spend the night penning works of genius. 

In short, the Paul Auster approach.

At some point later in high school, I got sight of my first list. The U.S. News and World Report rankings of the relative prestige and reputation of various national colleges and universities. It began to occur to me that my future life of romantic squalor as a poète maudit would have even more nobility to it if it could be an existence not only of suffering, but of renunciation. Suppose, I thought, that before I chucked it all aside—this whole deadening, soul-killing bourgeois existence—I first went to some prestigious university high up in the rankings, and then renounced it all to go and become an artist.

In short, the Will Self approach. 

I made it into all of one year at the university before I discovered that there was in fact another list beyond the one with which I was hitherto acquainted. The U.S. News and World Report national rankings of law schools. This stunned me at first. I thought that no one was competitive anymore once they got into college. That we all knew you had to work hard to get in, but that once you did, the difficult part of life was substantially over. But, horrifyingly enough, I found that people even within college were still competing with each other, and wanted to go to a fancy law school high up in the rankings. 

Worse still, I discovered that they weren't satisfied with me, didn't already regard me as a worthy renunciate, simply for having made it this far. Instead, if I didn't follow them in trying to find a place on the next list, I would be regarded, not as a renunciate, but as a failure.

I could have followed them. I could have said: okay, fine, this is one more list to try myself against. I will see how high up in it I can rise, but then I will renounce and go and write novels and live in squalor.  

Instead, I did something infinitely more perverse. I went to divinity school. 

Of course, once upon a time the choice of post-graduate education I made would have seemed an eminently sensible one. The ministry was one of the available learned professions, and one could expect to find a job professing it in any town or village. Entering the program in the year 2012, however, as I did, circumstances were rather different. One could still hope to find employment as a minister or with an MDiv in the world, and I did, but it was more in the catch-as-catch-can way that, say, people with MFAs might find themselves working for an ad agency. There were no lists involved. 

But now, having spent several years as a policy professional with an MDiv, I've decided law school is the right next thing to advance my career. I am suddenly confronted with a list again—that very same one I had hated so much in college, and had spent ten years on a massive divinity-induced detour to avoid. The law school list. I tell myself that now, of course, in facing the list, I am no longer a boy. I can hold my own against it. I have a job. I've worked for five-plus years in the real world with no law degree at all, so what terror can the list hold for me, or the prospect of ending up in a lowly position on it? 

But... I lie. I still fear it. Lists are powerful. I find myself longing for a spot high up. Then, of course, I tell myself, afterward, I will stop caring about the lists. There are not lists after that, after all. After that, there are just jobs. And I'd be working in one that was low-paid and for the public interest and aligned with my career in social justice, since that was the right thing to do. Renunciation all over again. 

Then I was talking to a friend. He is going to Yale Law School. He made it to the top of the law school list. So one might think he was done with having to worry about lists. But no. He showed me something that took my breath away. There is, it turns out, another list. The Vault Law 100. The definitive ranking of the nation's top law firms, in numerical order. 

And of course, all real prestige and value in life suddenly seemed to depend exclusively on finding a place on that list. But how was it to be done? "You basically have to end up going to at least one of the top 14 schools to have a chance at landing one of these Big Law jobs," my friend said. "Even if you go to, like, Minnesota [rank #22 on the law school list] or whatever, you don't end up at the Big Law firms in New York or D.C."

"Well yeah," I said, "presumably they end up at law firms in, like, Minneapolis." "Yeah," he said, "but those aren't on this list." And suddenly I could see how the list was the world, and the world was the list. To not be on the list was not only to have failed. It was, in some cosmic sense, not to exist. 

And all at once I had a vision of how one could in fact address the fundamental existential quandaries of life by the means of simply moving from one list to the next. One could spend one's entire existence hopping between lists, trying to get as high up in each one as possible, and measuring one's worth relative to others based on their proximity or distance from you on the list. One could get as high as one could on the college list; then as high as one could on the law school list; then as high as one could on the Vault 100 law firm list. "A hamster wheel, in short," as another friend put it to me, when I confronted him with this image of splendor. 

"But then you're just done, right?" I asked my Yale Law School friend. "Then you've made it." "No," he said, and then explained that you have to spend the first several years of your Big Law Vault 100 job working in utter misery and obscurity to pay off your law school debts. Then, eventually, you can become a partner in the firm. "Ah, so then you've made it," I said. "No," he said, and then explained that in order to make partner, you have to buy into your share of the firm, and in order to do this, you have to take out more large loans, usually from the firm itself, which you then have to spend many years of your life as a partner paying back to the firm.

After which, then, finally, you have reached the end of all your striving, and you can sit back and collect your share of the profits of the firm as a whole, which seem after hearing all this to be derived chiefly from the interest payments made by other aspiring partners inside the firm, leading one to question how much of any of these firms' earnings in a given year if fact derive from performing actual legal services for anyone, per se, and whether they are not in fact, as my other friend put it, just a massive, legally-licensed Ponzi scheme. 

But by that point, you don't care; you are old and your career is done, and you have managed to solve the existential riddle of what is it that I should do; albeit at the cost of having spent all one's life clambering up to the summit of something that may not in fact be there. 

At some point in college, plainly, I got off this track, and now it's probably too late for me to get back on it. Maybe I had the chance to do so at one point. I had made it onto one list. I could have leapt onto the next, along with all my classmates. But I balked. I leapt sideways, into the untested waters of divinity, and a life facing the job market with only a nebulous liberal arts education under my belt, and no definite and inarguable professional license or credential. (There's no government body that accredits a "policy strategist"!) Despite three years in divinity school, after all, I hadn't even bothered at the end of it to become a "reverend." Instead, I was among the great indistinguishable mass of the untitled, the uncredentialed— a man without a list, in short. And without a list, and another list to count on beyond it, how is one supposed to know what to do next?

The price of my greater freedom, then, as of any freedom, was that I faced the existential question more urgently—that I faced it unsheltered and unassisted. I could now figure out for myself what I wanted to do, but that also meant I had to figure out what it was I wanted to do. It was a state both exhilarating and terrifying. As Thomas Carlyle writes in his Sartor Resartus, a "man without a Profession" is like a ship without a fleet. On the one hand, it has the power of pursuing a "course of its own"; on the other, it is deprived of "all manner of loans and borrowings," by which each ship that stays within the fleet "could manifoldly aid the other."

It is perhaps not the safest or the wisest choice, to live life outside of the fleets, outside of the lists. It is, perhaps, as Will Self writes in a recent memoir, a form "of hubris—of daring to differentiate [oneself] from the great mass of individual wills simply striving to exist," and as such will in the end be punished like all hubris. It is the mistake of seeking to belong to the class of unhappy souls whom Orwell describes in a beloved essay as "willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end." It is to be a person without a list, a hamster without a wheel, a ship without a fleet. Lost, in short. But also free.

And now, having written all this, I realize that I have not given up any of my high school freshman romanticism after all, despite my many confrontations in the years since with lists upon lists. Plainly, I am still looking for my chance at renunciation.