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Sometimes the match between person and choice is so poor that even commitment will not suffice to bring about the desired end.
They may turn to casual identification with avant-garde artistic exploration or treat the attendant despair and aimlessness with the pursuit of hard-core alcohol and drug use and their instant gratifications.
The people I knew who finished their undergraduate degrees or trade programs were better for it. Not “good,” necessarily. Not functioning optimally. Not necessarily thrilled with their choices, or devoid of doubt and misgiving. Not even certain to continue in pursuit of what they had studied. But far better than those who withdrew and drifted.
Everywhere, the cynic despairs, are bad decisions. But someone who has transcended that cynicism (or more accurately, replaced it with an even more profound doubt—that is, the doubt that doubt itself is an ultimately reliable guide) objects: the worst decision of all is none.
A child must be sufficiently self-organizing to be desirable to his or her peers by the age of four or risk permanent social ostracism.
This, it should be noted, is not repression. This point must be made clear, as people believe that the things discipline imposed by choice prevents us from doing will somehow be lost forever. It is this belief, in large part—often expressed with regard to creativity—that makes so many parents afraid of damaging their children by disciplining them. But proper discipline organizes rather than destroys. A child terrified into obedience or shielded from every possible chance of misbehavior is not disciplined, but abused.
It is certainly possible—and reasonable—to have some doubt and to argue about which game might best be played here and now; but it is not reasonable to state that all games are therefore unnecessary. Likewise, although it may be possible to argue about which morality is the necessary morality, it is not possible to argue that morality itself is thus unnecessary.
