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Building character

Every so often, you might go to an academic honor society initiation or a religious gathering and hear some sort of exhortation to do good deeds or be of good character. It’s quite an interesting experience, and it sort of feels like you’ve been transported back in time to an era in which talking about moral values was the norm. Nowadays, we tend to be more pessimistic about the reality of how the world works — do we really think exhortations are going to change anything? Do we really need to focus our lives so much on being good people?

At Princeton, maybe it’s that we’re just tired of doing things right all the time. We’re already aiming for good grades, doing the extracurricular activities, contributing to our communities. Perhaps the disinterest I’ve observed in talking about character values is a sort of slight rebellion — it’s a way to proclaim that we are our own masters, that even though we grudgingly cave to the trend of doing all the right things and being successful, society can only dictate our outward actions and not our inner values. Nevertheless, we’re so fixated on success that when we see that our roommates have better GPAs, more friends, and more leadership talents than us, we’re caught up in our own incompetency rather than being happy for others’ success.

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Perhaps there might be a solution to this incompetence and hopelessness we’re feeling, if only we realign our values according to a different standard rather than the dominant standard of success. We might come to understand that education isn’t a competition, but rather an individual pursuit of intellectual satisfaction. That courage means being okay with not running the consulting and finance race when it’s the easy thing to do, and opting instead to really dedicate our lives to public service. That love means not finishing the homework but rather sacrificing the time to comfort a distraught friend.

If we saw these values as better and more important than being successful in the conventional sense, then we would be less concerned about fighting the battle of comparison and more concerned about fighting for each other. But these days, it seems that Princeton’s stated goal of serving humanity is increasingly at odds with our societal perceptions of what actually constitutes good goals. While we might hold certain moral convictions, it’s easy to favor options that seem “better” in the eyes of the public at large. While we acknowledge the importance of helping people, we don’t want it to come at too much of a cost to ourselves.

But I’d argue that’s what we don’t understand about moral values and serving others in the first place. These things are not meant to be easy, but rather are meant to challenge you as a person. Real sacrifice is involved, and it’s scary. But it’s something that’s ultimately rewarding when you realize that there is something better and more beautiful about helping someone else, even at a cost to yourself.

That being said, it’s extremely hard to hold your moral convictions alone, or to develop convictions without any dialogue to help you explore the realm of possibilities. I wish we’d start more conversations about character building, because in doing this we might actually be able to encourage each other to become not just a community of considerate people who are willing to include and respect others, but a community of really virtuous people who are willing to make sacrifices for them. And we might find much more joy in running this race together rather than running the rat race of success alone.

Annie Lu is a computer science major from Brandon, Mississippi. She can be reached at daol@princeton.edu.

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