JUST A FEW GENERATIONS ago, most people didn’t wake up in the morning and fret about whether or not they were living their lives to the fullest. Freedom has always been built into the American experiment, of course, but the freedom to take off and go rock-climbing for the afternoon, or to study engineering, or even to sneak in ten minutes for ourselves in the morning to read the paper—these kinds of freedoms were not, until very recently, built into our private universes of anticipation. It’s important to remember that. If most of us don’t know what to do with our abundant choices and the
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