“There is definitely this sense that you are putting work into activities so you can get some sort of payback — admission to a top college — and afterward, your work is done,” said Ella Biehn, a senior and a songwriter and guitarist at DeKalb School of the Arts near Atlanta . She plans to keep performing in college, majoring in vocal music, and yet, “In a lot of cases I feel like a spent battery.”

Ironically, in placing so much value on activities that our children came to out of love or interest, we grown-ups replaced the intrinsic motivations we often claim to value with extrinsic ones. When you’ve been taught that every action has a purpose, it’s harder to find meaning in just doing something you enjoy, and much more difficult to persuade yourself to do it.

And so, with an anticlimactic awards ceremony and a round of applause and tears, we welcome our former student athletes and artists into the real world, where art and sport beckon alluringly in other people’s Instagram feeds, but leisure itself — the act of engaging in something merely because we enjoy it — is not much valued. The opportunities are there, but the will to take advantage of them, to make choices for reasons other than profit or productivity, has to be yours.

Maybe this is the most important lesson our new graduates can learn. “This is part of the human experience,” said Susan Avery, a college counselor at Harvest Collegiate High School in Manhattan. “These kids have spent 17 years listening to adults. Now they have to learn to listen to themselves.”

Ms. Avery’s daughter, a dedicated pre-med student who never pursued the arts in high school, signed up for theater club for fun at a freshman fair in college and will soon be graduating as a theater major. “When she first mentioned it, I was like, ‘Do it!’” Ms. Avery said. “‘I like it, I want to try it’ — that’s a good reason.”

The secret of adulthood, the one those high school seniors don’t know but soon will, is that there are some questions we never really resolve. Do you still do your thing — whatever your thing is — when no one is watching? Both the magic of that question and its existential angst lie in the freedom it presents. Maybe you do. Maybe you don’t.

It really only matters — really only has to matter — to you.

KJ Dell’Antonia is the author of “How to Be a Happier Parent” and the forthcoming novel “The Chicken Sisters.”

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