Evaluating Happiness: Rejecting Cognitive Dissonance in Law School

Careful with "we." This narrowly achievement-based view of happiness is by no means universal. Thinking more closely about how such an upbringing differs from other possibilities—about the psychic as well as cultural roots of such an approach to bringing up children, about which traumas one inherits if that's the particular psychic context in which one grows up—will turn out to be valuable for you.

Therefore, in law school, the easiest way we think will help us achieve happiness is the same: meeting and becoming friends with our classmates, achieving the highest grades, going to a top-ranked firm.

Obviously a really terrible source. From that supposed definition, one might suppose there was no such thing as religion in human society, for one thing.

One great benefit of being at Columbia is that from CU Internet addresses one has free online access to the Oxford English Dictionary. That's the history and meaning of the English language, word by word. Looking up sacrifice there might be helpful for putting the word in a deeper context. The first (1597) use of the word for the denotation you are preferring may also both pique your interest and offer a small enlightenment.

The suggestion is that once we give it up, we may not be able to get it back.

Such people might tell you that a real life lived in the law doesn't consist of choices among those "paths." Such mentors would probably point out that life trajectories lived by people they admire took many turns through different roles in different areas of society. They may say that part of what made admirable those people they admire was the breadth of experience that contributed to their lives. At any rate, you might want to give some thought, and conduct some conversation with knowledgeable people, on the subject whether "narrowing" paths is one of your strategic objectives.

No matter what, I expect that if I am able to learn practical skills while I’m here – to work with counsel and learn how to counsel, then I may feel like my time here was worthwhile. This might mean “sacrificing” black letter law classes, leadership positions, or time spent memorizing out-of-date cases, but in order to get what I really want from law school, I’m willing to do so.

That's not sacrifice in any of the meaningful senses: that's a matter of agreeing to give up what you don't think you want, otherwise known as giving away ice in the wintertime. It's a negotiating tactic, not a valid form of self-investigation. Good thing, wrong place.

Expecting law school to reinforce your character is probably not a good bet either.

There are relationships with other human beings that will occur, not a relationship with a law school, or some fragment of its operations, that will contribute to your personality development (including "character management") during this very significant, rather short, phase of your life. But they won't determine whether you become selfish: They will affect the development of your self.

This last seems a correct conclusion. If the purpose of the draft was to make sure you could take the step to arrive there, it has served its purpose well. I think there are two points through which it might now turn into something serving the "next" purpose for you, beyond this strip of territory so expensively achieved.

1. The philosophical importance of the definition of sacrifice arises from a basic, realistic insight that like most realism is hard for people: every human choice involves loss. This reality, like other realities against which human beings protect themselves at all costs, by dissociation, in order to avoid going crazy—the inevitability of death; the inadequacy of marriage; those cases in which parents don't love or even like their children—is surrounded by anxiety even when it is for a moment forced into conscious view. Young adults want especially hard not to see that reality, even in less socially-uncertain times than the present: faced with plethora of choice at the inexperienced onset of adult responsibility, they like to narrate to themselves situations in which nothing is lost by the choices they are making. Is it not particularly appropriate that the OED can show you the modern dissociative, rationalizing denotation of "sacrifice," as utilitarian algorithmic living, growing out of a poem about two adolescents whose dream of choice without loss is going to wreck them and everything around them? So perhaps the next coasting destination, as you navigate yourself towards open water, is to accept that choices involve losses but life's course is too inventively uncertain to make calculating gains and losses from moment to moment a sufficient, or perhaps even necessary, mode of self-understanding.
2. Knowing that you are not "going to fall prey" is an important step. Feeling hunted is not a good mood in which to do planning. But the form of words is still holding a real meaning: you aren't ready to see yourself as the hunter rather than the hunted. Lawyering is making things happen in society using words. No matter what you use your skills for—whether you are choosing prey for virtue, or for money, or for sport, you are stalking a locale in society, some place, some time, some action, in which mechanisms you have made with words are going to make something advantageous happen. Even if no one is going to lose—which isn't usually the case—you were preying, not being preyed on. That's the job.