Such is the fluctuation of a mind overcome by distress, that if for a moment a ray of hope cheers its darkness, it vanishes at the touch of recollection. The situation is very different now. In a recent study, we asked a few thousand representative American teenagers what jobs they expected to have when they grew up. The results were impressive. Apparently, adolescents have extremely high expectations of becoming professionals: 15 percent of them expect to become either doctors or lawyers. Affluent teenagers actually work more often in high school than children who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, even though they do not have to.  And exposure to productive tasks in the home, the neighborhood, and the community is much greater for children who grow up in wealthy and stable environments. There one can actually find fifteen-year-olds who plan to become architects and who have learned to draft in a relative’s architectural firm, who have helped design an extension to a neighbor’s house, who have interned with a local construction company—although overall such opportunities are infrequent. In an inner-city high school, the most popular informal career counselor was a school guard who helped sharp young boys find jobs with the gangs, and directed good-looking girls toward so-called modeling jobs.  

 According to the ESM results, it seems that young people learn their elders’ ambivalence toward work quite early. Bu age ten or eleven, they have internalized the pattern that is typical of society at large. When they are asked to say whether what they are doing is more like work or more like play (or like both or neither) sixth graders almost invariably say that academic classes in school are work, and doing sports is play. The interesting thing is that whenever adolescents are doing something they label as work, they typically say that what they do is important for their future, requires high concentration, and induces high self-esteem.  The World is a moving World, it never stands still; and its sands are forever shifting. Yet teens are also less happy and motivated than average when what they do is like work. On the other hand, when they are doing something, they label as play, they see it as having low importance and requiring little concentration, but they are happy and motivated. In other words, the split between work that is necessary but unpleasant, and pleasant but useless play, is well established by late childhood. It does get even more pronounced as adolescents go through high school. Good fortune is never more doubtful than when it wears the sweetest and most promising countenance.  

Nothing is more unaccountable than the spell that often lurks in a spoken work. When the same adolescents eventually start working, they report exactly the same pattern of experience from their workplace. In the United States of America, almost 90 percent of teenagers are employed sometimes during high school, a much higher proportion than in other technologically advanced countries like Germany or Japan, where there are fewer opportunities for part-time work—and where parents prefer their children to spend as much time as possible studying, rather than being distracted by jobs irrelevant to their future careers.  The secret of great work: to persevere and still keep the passion fresh. Intellectual work is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is tis own highest reward. In our study, 57 percent of tenth graders and 86 percent of twelfth graders have held paying jobs, usually serving fast food, as clerks or salespersons, or as baby-sitters. When teenagers are paged on their jobs, they report very elevated self-esteem. They see what they do as important and requiring great concentration. However, they are less happy than usual (although not as unhappy as in school), and they do not enjoy themselves. In other words, the pattern of ambivalence is set by the very first steps of their working lives. So seldom do they ever exert themselves, that when they do work, they seem determined that so meritorious an action shall not escape the observation of those around. However, work is definitely not the worst thing adolescents experience. The worst condition they report is when what they do it neither like work nor like play. When this is the case—usually in maintenance activities, passive leisure, or socializing—their self-esteem is lowest, what they do has no importance, and their happiness and motivation are also below average. Yet for adolescents neither work nor play takes up on the average 35 percent of the day. Some, especially children whose parents have little education, feel that half or more of what they do is of this kind. A person who grows up experiencing most of the day as neither important nor enjoyable is unlikely to find much meaning in the future.