Something got started this Fourth of July, or perhaps something came up that just bears attention. Rick Perlstein in his column Independence Day decided he’d recommend a new book, The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America. It’s by Daniel Brook and available on Amazon of course.
There you’ll find David Pitt from Booklist explaining it this way –
Selling out in order to make big bucks used to be viewed with contempt, but, Brook argues, in today’s aggressive society, it has become ever more acceptable, even mundane. For many people the choice comes down to sticking to one’s ideological guns or living a comfortable life, but for “boomerang kids” – college grads so far in debt that they have to move back in with their folks – selling out is the only way to escape childhood. The rising sticker price of the American Dream, to use Brook’s catchy phrase, forces all sorts of compromises, like the anti-Bush activist who earns a very good living doing PR work for Bush supporters. But, Brook shows convincingly, falling into “the Trap” can take a serious toll on a person’s mental well-being. An exploration not only of the economics of compromise but also of the frustration that comes in the wake of putting material concerns ahead of personal beliefs.
Well, in a broader sense, selling out has traditionally been the way to escape childhood, whether or not it involves finding the means finally to leave home when you’re thirty-five. That may be rather rare – living with the folks for years after college and grad school – although you can see why, given the economics of things and those student loans you’ve amassed, it may be becoming less rare. But as a general rule, at some point around your twentieth year you understand that you’re not going to be that jazz musician or opera diva, or that sensitive poet, or that rock star you imagined you’d be, or any of it. You’re going to be, if you’re lucky, a moderately successful and moderately happy middle-manager in a small office in the middle-west. Real life – that self-actualizing stuff where you follow your dream and become what you always imagined – is for other people. You know – special people, the ones you see on television and in the movies and read about in the papers. You do your best, but you have to pay the bills, and in the end it isn’t so bad.
It isn’t so bad unless you think “sticking to your guns” is of primary importance. Most men lead lives of quiet desperation, as Thoreau put it, but only if they persist in thinking they could have been important, or still could be. “I could have been a contender!”
No, probably not. Well, maybe it was possible and still might be, but didn’t your parents tell you that you need to be practical – “Music makes a fine hobby but you can’t make a living doing that.” Substitute what you will for “music” and listen to the voices of those who only want the best for you – be practical, and prudent, and responsible. That’s what growing up is about. You look at the floor and see what’s coming, you see the coming decades lined up like tombstones, and you start to figure out how you’ll adjust (and how you’ll rebel, discretely, now and then). But you get it.
