The 'Access Generation' comes of age

Access can be a wonderful thing.

Thanks to funding sources and connections from the University community, I had the chance to spend last summer in Beijing, carrying out thesis research and holding an internship. During my time there, I got a feeling for that capital's charms and blemishes alike. The old city center, most of which lies within Beijing's second ring road, is an oasis of gentle architecture, trees, old hutong and courtyards. Vestiges of pedestrian-paced life still linger. Beyond the second ring road, however, high-rise offices and apartments recede into the smoggy distance of the metropolis. Beijing's urban sprawl has burst its belt time and again, and every few years the city has had to build new ring roads to speed the flow of traffic around its ever-ballooning perimeter. When I last checked, Beijing was working on a seventh ring.

At every stage, the construction of these expressways has sought to ease the city's notorious traffic, to bolster access to, and freedom of movement among, Beijing's various districts. Instead, each addition of tarmac has only invited more cars, more traffic and more urban sprawl. The ring roads have become seven vicious cycles, each inadvertently compounding Beijing's congestion and smog. Efforts to boost convenience, it seems, sometimes have the effect of breeding inconvenience, or worse.

It is for the above reason that the "access generation" of which my classmates and I are a part may not have things quite as good as we think. We live, of course, in a world of outrageous material convenience. Like the generations preceding us, we have for the most part grown up in a society characterized by social and geographic mobility. Armed with email, cell phones, search engines and iPods, we are the first generation truly to have come of age with the world at our fingertips.

Our preoccupation with access, ease of motion and freedom of circulation, however, runs deeper. Our technological surroundings are not so cleanly separated from the social and psychological worlds we inhabit. Many of us have come to prioritize access to people, places and pursuits — the theoretical possibility of making certain connections — to the development of real bonds. This group, of which I am hardly the only member on campus, is bent on keeping its academic prospects, job opportunities and social horizons open. Though we undertake many obligations on and off campus, we play our cards carefully and prefer to avoid committing ourselves to people and undertakings blindly and wholeheartedly, in a way that might happen to constrict our future options.

We invest a great deal of time and energy keeping doors of personal or professional opportunity open to us, on the off chance we might one day decide to walk through them. Instruments of communication and access, which are supposed to lighten our load, end up dominating a good part of our lives. Our days are filled with emails, phone calls, appointments, coffee dates and similar acts of maintenance. The time they save us is promptly reinvested in the pursuit of opportunities elsewhere, and the congestion of our schedules worsens. We pace the halls of possibility rather than taking time to explore the rooms that open off these corridors.

That I will leave Princeton with little more idea about what do with my life than when I arrived here does not alarm me much. Indeterminacy, I realize, may have been part of the plan all along. What haunts me is a suspicion that I have not made the best use of what this place had to offer — that I did not spend enough of my time here exploring rooms. Attending to some old ideal of well-roundedness and a desire to keep my options open, I avoided indulging with too much abandon in any one piece of my academic, extracurricular, or social life. Cutting short a fun stint at WPRB, walking away from an academic department after taking my favorite class to date, dropping drum lessons — these were choices I made along the way.

Angling for a little access to everything, many of us spread our spare time thin among different people and activities. We spend a lot of time in transit, shuttling ourselves across the length and breadth of these beautiful grounds, headphones in or cell phones in hand, faces and curious scenes flitting past us unengaged. We are captivated by the thought that the more we involve ourselves on campus and beyond, the fancier our opportunities will become. As promised, this preordained rushing about — from class to practice, practice to meeting, meeting to discussion, discussion to rehearsal, rehearsal to Street — brings us remarkable exposure to people, places, ideas and activities. Still, something in our way of life is compromised. We come to think very little about what it is we do, and dwell instead upon how much more we could be doing. We experience the world around us fleetingly, a cityscape whirring by a motorist.

The forces, internal and external, that act upon and pattern our lives here at Princeton have something in common with those that bedevil the urban planners of Beijing. Our careless worship of mobility, novelty and access, absent a firm grasp of the ends to which these means are attached, produces a centrifugal tendency in our lives. Unless we limit the scope of our attention and acquire anew the art of investing ourselves patiently in the things we love, our daily routines, like overgrown cities, lose in density and gain in congestion while we ourselves turn into perpetual commuters.

What people like us need is the audacity, once in a while, to bring our cars to a standstill in the midst of this thundering freeway. You know, to stop and smell the roses before the smog makes even that impossible. Kyle Jaros is a Wilson School major from Palo Alto, Calif., and a member of the 'Prince' Editorial Board. He can be reached at kjaros@princeton.edu.