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The Lattice Group hosted its first organized discussion forum, a Lattice Talk, at Middlebury College on December 6th. Snow was flurrying outside and finals were hailing inside, but a solid group of students made it to the McCullough social space nonetheless to spend an hour talking about working and living in the USA.
The Lattice Talks are based on a Deliberative Dialogue model developed by the National Issues Forums , and is made to facilitate deliberation and discussion rather than debate. The goal is that the group will be able to reach some kind of common ground at the end of the talk. Here is what the Middlebury Lattice Talk group came up with: 1.) It is time to begin re-evaluating our measurements for success
The consensus among the participating Middlebury students was that they were unhappy with the age-old American way of measuring success in economic terms. Several students expressed the desire for a new way of evaluating progress in terms like “good parenting,” “self-fulfillment,” “emotional happiness,” and “community involvement.” The discussion centered around the question: is balance unrealistic? In response, one student commented that it is impossible for a family to have two successful careers since a career is a full-time commitment that you can’t split up between people. He said, “You can’t each have half of a career. And so, one ends up having one and the other one has to stay at home.” He added that it wasn’t a gender issue in his mind since, “If the woman is the one with the career while the man stays home it’s still the same problem: someone is working too much.” But what if we reassess what a successful career means, what a successful life means? Hear what two of our participants had to say about that:
2.) America is based on a culture of industriousness
The students concluded that the American workhoholic is naturally bred from an inherent culture of industriousness. Fundamentally, the USA is a nation founded on immigration. Most Americans can trace their roots back to a forefather who emigrated from an “Old World” in order to seek a better life in the “New World.” These were people who chose to leave everything they had behind to start over from scratch. In short, they were exceptionally hard-working people, and the culture they created was one of constant striving in a society where upward social mobility was possible in a way that it was not in Europe. Because of this culture of industriousness, Americans have been born and bred to be productive. But are many of us in the younger generations so far removed from our immigrant forefathers that we’ve lost our blind faith in hard work? Check out what one of our participants had to say about this:
3.) It takes a movement to instigate change
All the Middlebury students seemed to agree that they were unhappy with the current state of the American workforce that they considered not only unbalanced but inefficient (one student commented that from his internship experience it appears as though a lot of time is wasted at the office because it is how long you spend there that matters rather than what you produce at the end of the day). But they also agreed that one person can’t change this system on their own— there needs to be a larger movement against now dated work practices, such as the value of “facetime” in a world where technology is allowing us to be so remarkably mobile. This is what one student had to say:
4.) It's Hard to Think Outside the Bubble
Most striking about the Lattice Talk was how hungry the Middlebury students were to talk— reinforcing what a hot topic work-life balance is to this generation.  But the talk also showed that these young people have a great deal of trouble thinking outside of themselves and their micro-context. A significant part of the Lattice Talk was spent focusing on the pressure students feel to work too hard and be trained into working machines on a college level, while topics relating to a greater social context were difficult for them to relate to. This showed what the real challenge is for The Lattice Group: how to make our generation engage with work-life conflicts on a larger scale; considering the responsibilities of employers and governments in instigating change, and what each individual can do to make this happen. - Astri and Vetta photos by Emily Temple
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