Twenty-three years ago, David Brooks published in The Atlantic a long essay based on interviews with Princeton undergraduates. He found the students busy: overscheduled, achievement-oriented models of meritocratic success. They were “extraordinarily bright, morally earnest, and incredibly industrious . . . responsible, safety-conscious, and mature.” Alluding to The Organization Man, William H. Whyte’s 1956 book about the new postwar class of corporate managers, Brooks dubbed the Princeton students “Organization Kids.”
The products of an upper-middle-class ethos, with parents who cared about “brain development,” scheduled “play dates,” and might have been too compliant about Ritalin prescriptions, this generation of elite students took for granted the goods of safety and stimulation. They were conditioned to be productive. Consulting firms and investment banks courted them as “Strategists, Quick Thinkers, Team Players, Achievers.”
With a touch of romanticism, Brooks lamented that “the code of the meritocrat” at Princeton in 2001 lacked the “moral gravity and . . . sense of duty” that characterized earlier generations. The old Princeton had subscribed to a “chivalric code” that emphasized “courage”; Ivy League organization kids were used to being protected. Still, Brooks clearly was not blaming them. “When it comes to character and virtue, these young people have been left on their own.” They had been formed by “adult institutions” that “no longer try to talk about character and virtue,” which had been replaced by the goals of security and success.
The brightest and most industrious young people, the future leaders of the nation, lacked basic conceptual resources, including a language for virtue and sin. These diligent workaholics were unable “to discuss what is good and true.” They could not describe “eternal life” or “what it would be like to be a saint.” They were not trying to be saints, nor is it even clear that they felt anything was missing from their lives. Brooks viewed the students as alienated, but they did not experience themselves that way. “‘Alienation’ is a word one almost never hears from them.” They were uninterested in, and incapable of, discussing what Brooks thought they were missing: the elements of a spiritual life.
Such students may still exist today, but dramatic shifts have occurred over the past two decades—the lifetime of current college students. Cultural signals indicate that spiritual malaise has become palpable and impossible to ignore. Students today, even privileged students, feel less secure, less confident, more socially dissatisfied. Their economic and ideological landscape is unstable. Anxiety, depression, and loneliness, which feature not at all in Brooks’s observations, are common on college campuses today.
A keen and influential contribution to popular sociology, Brooks’s essay was also one of the last glimpses of a pre–9/11 America. About ten years ago, my friend Mark Shiffman revisited Brooks’s essay and found that the dominant mood of college students in 2014 was not confidence but anxiety. In his essay for this magazine, he described students who lacked the economic and cultural security of Brooks’s organization kids. They might still be busy—overscheduled, double-majoring, and competing for internships—but not because they took for granted the path of meritocratic careerism. Students in 2014 were “majoring in fear.”
Another ten years, and another psychocultural shift is perceptible on college campuses. The meritocratic ethos comports awkwardly with the new doctrine that meritocracy has always been a myth. Even on elite campuses, students feel insecure and socially alienated. Ideologically and existentially, many find life in 2024 uncertain, unfair, even unjust. Various economic and political developments may have caused this tectonic shift. But one clear driver is technology: Since Brooks’s essay appeared, an entirely new environment of attention has emerged, occasioned by constant digital connectivity.
The internet was still young in 2001, and smartphones didn’t exist. (Brooks’s only mention of cell phones is in reference to parents’ concern that a nanny might use one while driving.) Today’s college students do not remember life without smartphones; most have carried one since middle school. They have always depended on messaging apps for social interaction. If they have had voice conversations with remote friends, they have more likely done so through video game headsets than through their phones. Grade information has been presented to them constantly on digital course management systems. They have streamed silly videos and traded memes at will.
“Digital natives” who grew up with mobile connectivity, touch screens, and algorithmic social media are already tired of their elders declaring how revolutionary this technology is. Still, it is important for parents and teachers to recognize how much it has transformed the sociocultural landscape, largely by transforming the inner landscapes of young people.
The vice of acedia is always a risk for college students, but in 2001 it manifested itself mostly in restlessness, the disordered overactivity of the person who never stops to ask what is most important. By contrast, today’s digital natives are keenly aware of themselves as distracted. Their characteristic vice is curiositas, another daughter of acedia, but specifically a vice of wandering awareness, a disordering of attention. No wonder social media have opened up discussions of mental health, including by destigmatizing those discussions. Ask even the highest-performing students to reflect on their strengths and weaknesses, and many will claim psychological diagnoses and psychiatric prescriptions that were never mentioned to David Brooks in 2001. Whereas organization kids were made nervous by questions of virtue and character, the distracted generation is wounded and eager for help, especially in articulating their questions about how to direct the energy of their souls.
Brooks’s observations about busyness at elite colleges were disturbing above all because college has, historically, been a time of orchestrated leisure. It insulated students from certain practical concerns so that they could attend to the cultivation of intellectual and social habits. The classical college experience democratized an aristocratic privilege: It offered strategically engineered leisure, an opportunity to develop practices that were not immediately useful but were deeply humanizing. The loss of this culture of character development through leisure, more than the loss of a previous generation’s chivalric code, was the real transformation Brooks discovered on elite campuses.
Today’s college students are more ready than were Brooks’s organization kids to realize that their souls were made for leisure. Ironically, the advent of AI chat tools may intensify this awareness. Often and correctly bemoaned as another temptation to cheat—chatbots are essentially automated personal plagiarizers—AI is also making clear that schoolwork always had an element of busywork and BS. Academia may bifurcate over the use of AI. Already, some communities are embracing it; others will renew their dedication to developing reading and writing skills—skills that address the soul’s desire to know itself.
I doubt that the keenest college students will embrace AI as another shortcut to thinking. Twenty-three years ago, perhaps they might have. Brooks’s organization kids were suffering, but they did not feel their suffering and so did not inquire into it. In the distracted suffering of the anxious children of the smartphone, I see a chance for a renewal of spiritual seeking, and even for the traditional psychological language of philosophy and theology to find new purchase. For though the busy soul may be able to forget that it is a soul, the distracted soul, through the very experience of distraction, receives constant reminders that it is a soul, and that it is unfulfilled.
Joshua P. Hochschild is professor of philosophy at Mount St. Mary’s University.
Image by grits2go, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.
