From David Brooks' column, offering advice to people in their 20s:
If you are going to be underemployed, do it in a way that people are going to find interesting later on. Nobody is ever going to ask you, "What was it like being a nanny?" They will ask you, "What was it like leading excursions of Outward Bound?"
This is bad advice in so many ways. First (in unfortunately classic David Brooks fashion), it is outward-directed rather than inner-directed. Who are these "people" that Mr. Brooks thinks one should live one's life to impress? Isn't it instead better to live in a way that suits one's own character? If someone loves little children but hates the woods, maybe that person would be better off as a nanny than as an Outward Bound leader. Maybe the person has other family obligations or social ties that make the nanny job geographically feasible or desirable but would make the Outward Bound job, requiring extensive travel in remote wilderness locations, a strain. Moreover, what it to say that either being a nanny or being an Outward Bound leader makes a person "underemployed"? Maybe those jobs are the right calling for some people. Not everyone can be, like Mr. Brooks, a New York Times columnist, bestselling author, NPR commentator, and Yale professor, and not everyone who isn't all four of those things is "underemployed."
I used to hire a lot of people, and I still do some college interviewing and scholarship application reviews, and when I find that someone has child-care experience, I don't view it as their having been "underemployed," I view it as having been valuable training in humility and patience-building. Sometimes I do indeed ask about it. And, while, as an Eagle Scout, I also value wilderness experience, all other things being equal, I might even prefer the person with child-care experience over the Outward Bound person, because the Outward Board person has a higher risk of having the sense of entitlement that is a killer in a workplace situation. The nanny may have changed dirty diapers, while the Outward Bound leader person may have guided people whose parents paid thousands of dollars in hopes that their children would experience a challenge that had been absent in their lives so far. New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. — Brooks's boss — is a well known Outward Bound graduate and former board chairman, so in addition to being wrong, Mr. Brooks's point allows him to score brownie points with his own employer (or one of the four of them).