[...] I read about housing inequality in Matthew Desmond’s Evicted and find that this story is so often a story of mothers and children. These are the people our society claims to love and support above all others, and yet their suffering is endless and untenable, and the reason is simple, really: they are not good workers. Often, they are not workers at all. What good are they? What do they produce? Why should our country take care of them, if they cannot buy their way into safety? Isn’t the inability to purchase safety proof that you deserve whatever harm befalls you?

This is the story Americans have been sold: the one that pardons the powerful and makes us pay for our own numbness. We submit to a story that tells us we will be good—that we will be made good, and therefore safe—as long as we follow the rules, as long as we forget that there are rules. We enter the castle gates because there can be no danger here, no cruelty, and no adulthood, for as long as we believe: we will be saved not just from the harm that comes to those who are of no value here, but from the knowledge that they even exist. The dream still works, and it will work for at least a little longer. Buy a ticket. See if it’s worth the price.

For the old rich, an Ivy berth means status preservation. “You’ve got people trying to make sure their kids don’t fall down a class, basically,” said Kara, a consultant who asked to go by a pseudonym so as not to offend her clientele, which includes Middle Eastern royalty and scions of multinational conglomerate fortunes, as well as teachers and hairdressers. “They want what we all want, which is for their kids to have it at least as good as they do.”

It’s a different proposition, of course, for parents who came from less. In their careers, they might have seen Ivy grads glide ahead on the viscous trails left by alumni networks. Here, the thinking is: “I want to buy my kid into this system that I had to claw my way into,” Kara said. “I’d like to help them skip a few steps on the Monopoly board if I can.”

Who can blame them?

If you had to construct a higher education system de novo, and you were given only two prerogatives—to transmit generational privilege while projecting an air of meritocracy—it would be hard to improve on the current setup. If the emotional well-being of young people were a priority, however, you might want to start fresh.

Students at high-achieving public and preparatory high schools have suffered a historic escalation of stress and burnout at application age. Guidance counselors see college-going students treating stress as a sort of “cultural currency” among their peers. Public health researchers have identified admissions anxiety as a cause of teenage substance use.

If elite college admission is a ritual of class selection, with a cottage industry of private escorts administering the rites, then here is its deeper psychological function: instilling a sense of desert into the future ruling class. For the investment banker’s son from Phillips Exeter who gets into Yale as a varsity rower, the natural question is, well, how couldn’t you get into Yale. His response: Why don’t you ask all my old classmates who didn’t? As well you might. Maybe they would holler about busting their butts; or perhaps they’d have some ideas about how the entire system is an elaborate lie.

It is common for dreams to involve nonsensical objects or borderline categories. People who are two people, places that are both your home and a spaceship. Dreams explore the statespace and in doing so warp and play with the categories, the dimensions of perception itself, stress-testing and refining. The inner fabulist shakes up the categories of the plastic brain. Their authoring avoids a phenomenon called overfitting. Overfitting, a statistical concept, is when a model is too sensitive to the data it’s been fed, and therefore stops being generalizable. It’s learning something too well. For instance, artificial neural networks have a training data set: the data that they learn from. All training sets are finite, and often the data comes from the same source and is highly correlated in some non-obvious way. Because of this, artificial neural networks are in constant danger of becoming overfitted. When a network becomes overfitted, it will be good at dealing with the training data set but will fail at other similar data sets. All learning is basically a tradeoff between specificity and generality in this manner.

The most common way to get around the universal problem of overfitting is to expand the training set. But for real brains, the learning process that produces our experiential landscape relies on the training set of life. That set is limited in many ways, highly correlated in many ways. Life alone is not a sufficient training set for the brain. Dreams prevent our brains from overfitting our experiential statespace, blurring categories and taking unlikely trajectories. The fight against overfitting every night creates a cyclical process of annealing: during wake the brain fits to its environment via learning; then during sleep the brain “heats up” through dreams that prevent it from clinging to suboptimal solutions and models.