A Good Life Isn't a Résumé

An expectations-based culture conditions compliance through markers of success (grades, promotions, appearances) that narrow what counts as a life well lived. These pressures reach past culture into the economic, psychological, and social systems around us, so the barriers to fulfillment feel personal even though they’re structural. Student debt is the plainest place to watch it happen, because there the marker comes with a payment schedule.

Raised to Chase Outside Approval

From childhood we’re conditioned to chase externally validated success: high grades, prestigious careers, material wealth. Schools and universities often focus on measurable outcomes like test scores and diplomas. That turns education into a pathway to economic productivity rather than a place for self-discovery or critical thinking. The conditioning carries on into professional life, where people are expected to follow a set career track.

Education Sold as an Investment

Society invests heavily in keeping this culture going, particularly through education and the corporate workplace. Human capital theory, as Gary Becker laid it out in 1964, frames education and professional development as investments in future economic returns.1 That view reduces people to financial assets whose worth is measured by productivity, salary, and job title. Students are encouraged to treat their education as a transaction. The goal is a high-paying job that justifies the cost, and personal fulfillment is left out of the calculation.

Debt is what makes the transaction binding. Americans owed $1.585 trillion in student loans in mid-2024, by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s count.2 A loan turns the promised return into a bill with a due date, whatever the graduate wants to do next.

Economists have measured what the bill does to career choices. In the early 2000s, a highly selective university replaced the loans in its financial aid packages with grants. Jesse Rothstein and Cecilia Rouse used the switch as a natural experiment and found that debt caused graduates to choose substantially higher-salary jobs and made them less likely to take low-paid “public interest” jobs.3 At NYU’s law school, Erica Field studied two randomly assigned aid packages of equal value. One was a loan the school would cancel if the student took a public interest job. Under the other, a tuition grant, the student would have to repay the school on leaving public interest work. Students who got the grant were 36 to 45 percent more likely to end up in public interest law.4 Both packages were worth the same; what differed was whether the student started out owing.

A graduate who takes the higher-paying job experiences it as her own decision, and in a sense it is. Debt did part of the deciding, though, and it doesn’t show up in the story she tells about why.

I saw the bill arrive in medicine. At Andwise, the company I co-founded to help physicians with money, we saw residents about to sign their first job contracts with student loan bills looming, so we built loan tools that connected with servicers and surfaced better repayment or refinancing options.

A federal remedy exists, and it shows how much undoing takes. Public Service Loan Forgiveness, created in 2007, forgives the remaining federal loans of borrowers who work for qualifying public service employers for at least ten years while making 120 payments. Escaping debt’s pull away from public service takes a decade’s commitment to public service. As of March 2019, the Education Department had denied about 99 percent of forgiveness applications, close to half because the borrower hadn’t yet made the 120 qualifying payments.5

Burnout Gets Filed Under the Person

Burnout runs the same route from structure to self. In ICD-11 (the International Classification of Diseases, eleventh revision), the World Health Organization includes it “as an occupational phenomenon,” a syndrome “resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed,” and says it “is not classified as a medical condition.”6 The classification puts the cause in the job.

Yet the usual remedy still goes to the person, as if burnout, perfectionism, or anxiety were something to cope with alone. Workplaces, schools, and social norms that sustain unrealistic expectations are rarely held accountable. Addressing the mental health epidemic means supporting people and also dismantling the systems that create the pressure.

Free to Pursue Your Own Good Life

What follows from the debt is narrower than a new society, and easier to test. Where an institution can replace loans with grants, as the university in Rothstein and Rouse’s study did, its graduates’ choices widen. Where forgiveness is the remedy, it has to be reachable by the people it was written for, and a program that turned down 99 percent of its early applicants leaves most of them where the debt put them.

The question to put to a school is what share of its financial aid arrives as loans, since that share helps decide what its graduates will be free to do.