"I haven't decided if I want to be a brain surgeon or a short order fry cook."
I use to hear this growing up from my grandparents, it was from the show The Beverly Hillbillies, but it was accurate to my teenage years.
I learned and played the Trombone, loved the Trombone, kept playing it in college for any group that thought I was good enough to join.
I also loved engineering. There was something about taking the abstract concepts of science and math and finding practical application. I loved solving problems too.
By the time I was in high school and people start asking what I wanted to do with my life, I very seriously said I wasn't sure if I want to be a Professional Engineer or a Jazz Trombonist. I did both for as long as I could but only one of those was a tried and true career path. It didn't stop me from minoring in jazz arrangement. I even wrote a disco song for jazz ensemble that I called "We're Fabulous". When your in the your late teens or early twenties and gay, everything revolves around your sexuality, so of course that is what I did for an original arrangement.
We're Here, We're Queer, and everything is Fabulous.
Get on your feet, we're gonna have a good time tonight.
(I don't remember the rest.)
Thankfully I stuck with engineering.
This was also when I started to get really interested in public policy. An important part of engineering ethics is case studies on how politics can put heavy pressure on engineers to make the wrong decision. Everyone learns about the Shuttle Challenger accident and the Flint Michigan water crisis. It is also hard to miss how living in a city with a major university puts a lot of upward pressure on housing costs for the entire city. I also had friends and people that I knew through campus groups that were being effected by "anti-woke" culture war laws and debates.
For as much as being gay and 20 feels like performing a kick line down the street while singing "Ain't nothing gonna stop me now." there were also real events happening in the world that effected us. College kind of isolates you from some of that, there is some truth to that Snowflakes In Their Ivory Tower accusation. In college you can easily isolate yourself in ways that you didn't have access to when you were in high school and that you won't be able to control when you enter the career world. In that way, college is kind of a training bra for adulthood. Even though there are more freedoms to act and more consequences for your actions it is still very structured and tribalism is very much a thing in college. The pep band largely all hangs out together, Fraternities, Sororities, Gay Straight Student Alliance, ect... We all isolate by the social groups we keep, and then you have the "What's Your Major" tribalism. Even inside of engineering, after your basic math and physics classes the civil engineers don't mix with the mechanical engineers, or the chemical engineers, ect...
So tribalism keeps you isolated from differing view points and contentious conversation, which just isn't sustainable after college. It is also not conducive to being a well adjust member of society. After college we jump right back in to tribal definitions, college educated vs trade school vs military vs what ever else.
Within the first couple years of graduating from college i found myself wishing I knew more of the skills the trade school people had learned and had more of the experiences the military people had. We should always be grateful to the men and women that sign up to serve our country, but the hijinks they get in to away from the public eye... lets all get a group of marines together and have them write that book.
Even though I was a part of the college tribalism, I also saw it for what it was and I always remembered that there was a much wider world out there.
Some of my own interests at the time helped. As someone that was always interested in the environment I took a lot of my electives with an environmental angle to them. I was especially fascinated with the Colorado River, which is as complex and interdisciplinary as any problem could be. In one problem, there are engineering issues, policy issues, international relations, climate science, geology, agriculture, ect... One problem that no one can solve from a tribal approach to the problem.
Culture war issues, and political gridlock all comes down to tribalism. The day after I won the presidency my campaign chair came to me with wagon load of statistics that broke the electorate down in multiple ways and every news organization was doing the same. Like no one could believe I had won and everyone was back calculating the numbers to figure out how I did it. Everything from how did I do with men vs women, all the way down to how I performed with cat ladies based on the number of cats they owned. Tribalism to an absolutely stupid degree.
This is an important part of why I never governed from the idealist point of view. Idealists are tribal, everything they want to do if elected is comes from a world view they have because of their tribal identities. I always stuck to data driven pragmatic governance, yes I have my tribal influences, but if the data doesn't support your argument then it is time to review your world view.
I great example of this is my ever evolving feelings on gun policy.
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