Megan Sullivan

Once they get their first job, then they realize what Marks is talking about.

They're like, oh my gosh, it can be such a grind to have to trade away a third to a half of your life to just try to earn money to pay your rent.

And so I think these are definite questions you want to prepare people in college to be able to navigate.

And maybe one of the things that I can give my students is not talking them out of those career paths right away, but helping them develop the sorts of skills and virtues that are going to accompany them, again, when they're 30 and they realize that they're not on the right path.

Oh, absolutely.

I'm in this phase of life.

I'm 43, so I'm in this phase of life where this is like everybody I know that's going through this great rethinking.

And in our current system, the winners get richer and the losers get poorer with each successive cycle.

And we sort of realized, this is what Marx was on about too, is, my gosh, you make a bet when you're 18 years old

You take out a bunch of debt to become a computer science major, making this kind of calculation that that's going to be a very lucrative job when you're 23, 24.

And then it turns out that powerful artificial intelligence hits the economy, and there's actually no jobs for computer programmers anymore.

But how on earth were you supposed to know that when you were 17, 18 years old?

And now you've got this big college debt you've got to pay off, and you've also been training for a career that doesn't exist.

And capitalism is utterly merciless in helping you figure out what you're supposed to do next.

And philosophy is not going to be able to take the risk out of the equation.

I think the best philosophy can do, which is still pretty good, is helping you realize that you might have gotten set on a particular option and can maybe help you ask some questions that cause you to see side quests or paths that you didn't know were available before.

Yes.

Yeah, well, and also develop responsibility too.

Be able to know when they're the one that has screwed something up and need to ask for forgiveness or need to take a step back and redial.

That's another kind of skill that you learn from a really good ethics education that I think we look around right now and we think, man, I wish there were a whole lot more people in government who had developed that virtue before they got access to all this power.