One Tuesday afternoon a little less than 10 years ago, I sat numb in my prep school dorm room binge-watching, unforgettably, The Celebrity Apprentice. I had just been pummeled with a wave of rejections from America’s most selective schools, and I couldn’t work up the energy to leave my chair. It wasn’t just that I had mishandicapped my prospects of admission, though maybe I had; it was that I had tied my self-worth to the outcome of a slapdash process that had just slapped me around, and back then I lacked the perspective to see that.
Oh, sure, the guidance counselors were there with words of advice, life goes on, that sort of thing, which was welcome enough, if incomplete, and inadequate for squelching the conspiracist whispers traveling through campus in the days after we got our letters.