I'm very proud of my son and anyone who has someone on the spectrum in their family feels the exact same way. - Andrew Yang

Unfortunately, hardworking, academically gifted young people are kind of lazy when it comes to determining direction. If you give them a hoop to jump through, jumping through that hoop can take two, twenty, or two hundred hours, and it won’t make a big difference. But they are quite lazy when it comes to figuring out what path to take or — more profoundly — building their own path. They’re trained to get the grade or ace the application. That is what has made them successful in most every conventional respect each step of the way up to their senior year in college, at the point that this process is well under way.

We are constantly asked to choose between family and function, and fear that if we let up for even a little while our race will be lost. Women choose between time with their children — or having children — and keeping their job. Men choose between life on the road and being bypassed. Children get used to seeing one parent routinely, or maybe no parent at all.

But more profoundly, there is something deeply wrong if even the winners of the mass scramble to climb into the top of the education meritocracy are so unhappy. They are asking, “What are we striving and struggling for?” No one knows. The answer seems to be “to try to join the tribes in the coastal markets and work your ass off,” even as those opportunities become harder to come by. If you don’t like that answer, there are very few others.