I understand the joke, 'first-world problems' – it's what we say when the refrigerator breaks or our flight is delayed. The sense is that we are rich and expect everything to be easy, and that our biggest problems are details, minor frustrations, compared with those in other parts of the world.
Especially when several other parts of the world are having rather spectacular, and better publicized than usual, meltdowns...
But there are first-world problems that I take seriously – every year, fifteen to twenty of my students apply to go abroad for an exchange year; and inevitably several of them are rejected. Not because they aren't good students – indeed, they are often among our best – but because of some chance mismatch between a student who plays a too-common instrument and an overcrowded conservatory, or a university department that abruptly feels as though they have enough local students at the moment.
And frankly my heart bleeds, a bit, for this. Every year I send e-mails, make calls, and badger colleagues at other institutions, who are often on vacation, in an effort to find an attractive place for these kids.
I know it must seem trivial: you are already at a respected Western university getting a degree, why are you complaining that you don't get a year abroad?... but for me it recalls despair and anger at not getting into certain schools (Claudio Spies, since you interviewed me, I'm looking at you – back in 1973 you probably thought, aah he's a flake, doesn't know what he's talking about, reject him).
And I unfortunately remember the long-term damage I did to my own expectations of life, success, and happiness, as a result of those rejections... I often try to tell our students they shouldn't take these things too seriously. At which point I am of course talking to my younger self, who was a fool about this type of thing, to his own misery.
And yes, okay, it's all very first-world: but the first world, if it is a place with money and security (even despite the chaos in Greece, or in the US for that matter – all of which remains relative, when you consider centuries of starving children catching bugs for dinner), is also a place of crowding, and thus of competition and rapid narrowing of higher levels of opportunities. We do have a system that tries to justify itself, in a rationalistic quasi-Adornian-Deleuzian manner – that says, if you were rejected before, even for an irrational or unfair reason, we will take advantage of the situation to reject you again, because simply making decisions is... difficult.
Ah, well...
But there is usually a happy ending: I am generally successful in finding my students a place – often in an unexpected city; but for the most part students have been (eventually) ecstatic with the results.
Even if I have to badger various Italians, Austrians and Spaniards, and lean very heavily on our previous friendships, to get it done... even today, on a Saturday.
Hmm, I probably owe my opposite numbers dinner, don't I?...
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