In 2024, Gallup reported that U.S. employee engagement fell to a 10-year low, with only 31% of workers engaged and 17% actively disengaged. Consistent with this, surveys across Western labor markets repeatedly place pay and occupational prestige near the top of what workers report they care about, even though many report dissatisfaction with how well pay or prestige actually deliver meaning. That is the national backdrop we graduate into. And yet, if you look around at Middlebury or any other elite college, you will notice how many students are quietly steering themselves toward the same narrow set of paths, such as consulting, finance, or law, because those are conveniently framed as the only options worth taking seriously.

The outcome is rarely disaster; it is success that feels thinner than advertised. Landing the offer or securing the title can look like arrival, but too often it settles into a rhythm of work that is stable, well-paid, and oddly empty. Clap politely when everyone around you lands the same job, then quietly accept that this, apparently, is what adulthood is supposed to feel like.

This is not because people are malicious. Goldman Sachs is not Mordor. In fact, it can be a smart bet, if you treat it as a launching pad. The problem is that most do not. Once the paychecks hit, spending quietly inflates to match them. Apartments get bigger, vacations get fancier, the golden handcuffs tighten. You would be surprised how many six-figure earners in New York find themselves living paycheck to paycheck. What began as a two-year stint to “gain skills” becomes a decade of skillfully rationalizing why you never left. Or perhaps you will, as burnout rates in finance consistently top 50–60%. Call it the industry’s unofficial exit strategy.

Humans are mimetic creatures. We want what others want because it signals status, belonging, or safety. You can see this on Wall Street, in tech, and even here at Middlebury. Everyone swears they are “following their passion,” but somehow those passions keep lining up perfectly with firms that send their employees in suits to Davis for coffee chats.

This paperchase is not some quirky Middlebury obsession. A study of Harvard and Stanford undergrads found that over 60% of students ended up clustered in just three industries — consulting, finance, and tech — regardless of their initial interests. Nobody arrives on campus declaring a lifelong dream of reformatting pitch decks. The funnel works subtly. The first visible signals of ambition on campus are 45 blazers packed into Axinn for Wall Street prep, the free pizza luring students into recruiter presentations, and the internships available as early as sophomore year, almost all concentrated in those sectors. Against that backdrop, ambition at Middlebury isn’t something you define for yourself; it’s preloaded, and you’re either serious

about it or you’re slacking. Students experience this osmosis through steady exposure, until the ambitious option and the funnel are indistinguishable.

And here's the brutal part: You might actually be successful in some of it. You might land the job. You might check the boxes. At Middlebury, odds are you will — and then what?

Consider what you are truly bargaining for, the supposed promise bound up in that extra 30-40,000 a year. Think about the legacy of someone who maximized earnings, names like

Richard Fuscone, a former Merrill Lynch executive who retired young with millions only to face bankruptcy, or the countless anonymous hedge fund managers whose fortunes outlived their reputations. Now set that next to the career of Donald Henderson, the epidemiologist who led the campaign that eradicated smallpox, credited with saving hundreds of millions of lives, an achievement that renders any accumulation of earnings insignificant by comparison. Norman Borlaug, through the Green Revolution, helped avert mass famine and is estimated to have saved over a billion people from starvation. Michael Kremer’s work on deworming showed how a cheap, overlooked intervention could transform educational outcomes for children in

low-income countries. These names rarely surface on your feed, yet their impact towers over those who merely chased prestige. At Middlebury, it is worth asking which legacy you are really signing up for: a padded résumé or a footprint measured in lives changed.

The alternative?

We do not simply live in “interesting times.” From the outbreak of Covid-19 to intensifying global weather extremes and the accelerating rise of artificial intelligence, the world faces compounding risks on multiple fronts. Covid-19, which killed nearly 20 million people, was only a dress rehearsal for synthetic outbreaks. If a pathogen spread as widely but killed like Ebola, with 50% fatality, the toll would be in the billions. Or at just 1.2 °C of warming today, climate change has already made extreme weather such as wildfires, floods, and hurricanes 74% more likely.

Perhaps consider how leading Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers, including Geoffrey Hinton, Stuart Russell, and even tech leaders like Sam Altman, now openly warn that advanced AI systems could pose existential risks within the next decade. Add the fact that nuclear escalation risk is higher than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, and you have the greatest concentration of global risks humanity has ever faced.

This is the context in which you will spend your one career. Think back to the moments when you felt most alive. They were the moments when your presence mattered: When you stayed with a friend through their worst night, when you gave time you didn’t think you had, when you solved a problem that actually lifted a weight off of someone else. Strikingly, what makes these moments powerful is that they are rarely pursued directly. You did not set out to feel fulfilled; the feeling arrived as a side effect of doing something that mattered to someone else. This is the crucial clue: Fulfillment resists direct pursuit, but emerges reliably as the byproduct of contribution.

In a century defined by existential risks and transformative opportunities, your career will be the most important moral decision you make. This is the premise of our upcoming book, How to

Want Better Things, which I’m co-publishing with collaborators at Middlebury, Harvard, and Oxford. If you are interested, I invite you to join the email list or receive early drafts or the final product here.