by Meghan Daum
You might say these numbers are reflective of people’s ignorance or incuriosity about the political process and the world around them. But what was most striking about this research is that the more respondents said they “closely followed the news,” the more misinformed they were about the other side. This was not a poll of Twitter users. A poll of Twitter users, I’m convinced, would have shown that 100 percent of people believe that 100 percent of those who disagree with them are either evil or mentally ill.
Not to burst anyone’s social-media-enabled bubble, but there probably aren’t as many evil people out there as some like to insist there are. There might be a lot of assholes, but the number of literal Nazis that walk among us, as with the number of men who hate women, likely doesn’t live up to the hype. But I am beginning to think the culture is effectively mentally ill, or at least notably unwell. I believe there’s never been a civilization as emotionally needy as this one. I believe we’ve never spent more time lying to our friends on social media—You look amazing! You’re a genius! You’re a goddess! You’re a badass! You’re brave!—for the sole purpose of getting those friends to lie back to us. When we hear these lies, our egos can remain sufficiently doped up for a few more minutes.
I am convinced the culture is effectively being held hostage by its own hyperbole. So enthralled with our outrage at the extremes, we’ve forgotten that most of the world exists in the mostly unobjectionable middle. So seduced by the half-truths propagated by our own side, we have no interest in the half-truths roaming in distant pastures. So weary from trying to manage cognitive dissonance kicked up by our own gospel, we forget to have empathy for those grappling with the confusions of their own doctrines. We forget that, in the end, to be human is to be confused.
In the middle of writing this book, I went to my twenty-five-year college reunion. In full disclosure, I crashed the reunion, driving up there for the day, without a reservation, after a friend convinced me at the last minute that I should go. I’d never been to a college reunion. I have complicated feelings about college, most of them stemming from guilt over the fact that I often didn’t bother to get to know people as well as I could have. Because I often felt like I was impersonating a college student, I had a hard time believing other people were actually for real—those protesters, for instance, the imitation radicals with their preposterous demands.
Seeing my classmates in middle age, though, I felt I did know them. I knew them because I recognized my weary face in their weary faces. I saw the ways in which the passing of time had yanked some of our certainty out from underneath us. I saw how life had grabbed us by the shoulders and shaken us ever so slightly loose from our foundational coolness. Not that we weren’t still cool. We were just human now, too. We were human in that way you have to grow into. We were human in the way you can’t be when you’re twenty or even twenty-five. By which I mean we were in direct dialogue with our failures and limitations. Decades earlier, we’d been bright, shiny nothings. Now we were fully formed somethings in various states of disenchantment and disrepair.
At one point in the afternoon, in search of a bathroom, I turned a corner in a dark dormitory corridor and ran smack into an old friend. We hugged. How long had it been? Twenty years at least. She was in the middle of getting divorced. My divorce, as it happened, had recently been finalized. We hugged again.
Who would have thought it would be like this? How did this all come to pass?
How could we have expected it to be any other way?
I heard iterations of these questions throughout the day. People were getting divorced, getting laid off, having child custody disputes, having money problems and health problems and dying-parent problems. People were despondent over Trump, but they were also following news coverage of the tides of student activism and thinking the waters were starting to lap a little too far over the shores. Back in the day, we had campaigned for South African divestment. Now the kids were calling for boycotts and divestment in Israel. We had been fierce advocates for gay rights. Hell, we were one of the gayest colleges in the country! (In our time, the most popular student social event of the year had been the Homo Hop, a rave party sponsored by the Gay-Straight Alliance.) Now gay was passé. Transgender activism had students turning in their professors over improper use of pronouns. Dormitory bathrooms were labeled gender neutral, which was fine! But we couldn’t help but remember the unisex dormitory bathrooms from back in our day, when men and women thought nothing of showering in adjacent stalls. So why the big production? And, by the way, why so much racial discord? We knew it was time for a national “reckoning” with structural racism. We read Ta-Nehisi Coates. We supported Black Lives Matter, or at least said so on Facebook. But now, from what we were hearing, the entire Western canon of art, literature, and philosophy was being written off as white supremacy. How had this happened? What was wrong with these kids? Or was there something wrong with us?
It was like we could taste our irrelevance. It was the sour taste inside our very mouths.
It was a warm June day. The pansies and marigolds in the Shakespeare garden were in full bloom. The tulips lining the quad were holding on to the last breaths of spring. Wearing sandals and clutching bags of souvenirs from the bookstore, the alums strolled along the brick paths of the campus. In the time since we’d graduated, many walkways and buildings had been retrofitted to better accommodate people in wheelchairs. This had been one of the demands of the Coalition of Concerned Students during the Moynihan uprising in 1990. Other demands, such as hiring a rabbi, offering kosher meals, and establishing an intercultural center, had also been met long ago.
Those demands, at the time, had seemed so radical. Today they seemed so reasonable as to be a matter of course.
Oh, the irrelevance! The obsolescence! The creak of aging out before you even get old. The phantom of time haunted me as I drove back to the city in my seventeen-year-old Volvo. It followed me back to my apartment, where, for nostalgia’s sake, I poured myself a glass of wine, typed “Peter Gabriel and Laurie Anderson” into YouTube, and listened to “Excellent Birds” with all the lights turned off. (The effect wasn’t quite the same without the cigarette and the stereo lights.) I was in bed by ten.
In the ensuing year, the feeling of irrelevance became a near-constant companion. It clouded my vision like the membrane on the eye of a lizard, shielding me from what I couldn’t comprehend, sparing me the mortification of my own cluelessness. It had me both staring at myself in mirrors and avoiding mirrors. It had me lying awake at night, contemplating the end of the world. Or maybe just the end of my world.
Woke me when it’s over.
It’s never over, though. Every day becomes yesterday before you know it, but there are always tomorrow’s problems to look forward to. Tomorrow, the young people now nipping at my heels will be walking the brick paths at their own school reunions, feeling some combination of embarrassment and pride in how they used to be. The day after tomorrow, their kids might be colonizing Mars.
In the end, I think I’ve come to I realize that the problem with everything isn’t meant to be solved. It’s meant to feed us. It’s meant to pump oxygen through our lungs. It’s meant to give us something to talk about. It’s meant to fuel comedy and inspire great art. It’s meant to keep relationships alive until the last possible hour. It’s meant to invite our smartest selves to join hands with our stupidest selves and see where the other leads us.
The problem with everything is meant to keep us believing, despite all evidence to the contrary, in the exquisite lie of our own relevance. What a gift. What a problem to have.
Acknowledgments
No book can be completed without the help of wise, generous, and patient friends and colleagues, but this one was the beneficiary of more wisdom, generosity, and patience than usual. My agent, Tina Bennett, has had my back for nearly twenty years now and I am indebted to her and to so many others at WME, including Anna DeRoy, Svetlana Katz, and Laura Filion. The extraordinary Aimée Bell a
t Gallery Books understood this project down to its core and had the courage and vision to bring it to fruition in just the right way. I am grateful to her and to the whole Gallery team, which includes Aimée’s exceedingly intelligent and organized assistant, Max Meltzer, as well as the magnificent Jennifer Bergstrom, Jennifer Long, and Jennifer Robinson (they put the Jen in Gen X!). Benjamin Kalin provided meticulous and invaluable fact-checking and Jim Cholakis did beautiful copyediting work. I also thank Celeste Phillips for her sensitive and adroit legal guidance.
For their insightful and rigorous editorial guidance on any number of fronts (and whose assistance does not necessarily equal ideological agreement), I am grateful to Ruth Barrett, Kate Bolick, Aaron Gell, Vanessa Grigoriadis, Siobhan O’Connor, Alex Star, and Alan Zarembo. For their friendship, old and new, and for their willingness to have endless—and at times contentious—conversations about the topics covered in these pages, I thank Ingrid Abrash, Carina Chocano, Sara Eckel, John Franggos, Steve Friedman, Lisa Glatt, Cathi Hanauer, Heather Havrilesky, David Hernandez, Laura Kipnis, Tim Kreider, Dinah Lenney, Alison Manheim, Thorpe Moeckel, Anna Monardo, Sarah Wolf, Emily Yoffe, and all the students I both tortured and learned from over the years. Without their thoughts, my own would hardly be worth the trouble.
About the Author
Meghan Daum is the author of five books and writes a biweekly column about culture and politics for Medium. Her most recent book is The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion, which won the 2015 PEN Center USA Award for creative nonfiction. Her other books include the essay collection My Misspent Youth, and she edited theNew York Times bestseller Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids. From 2005 to 2016, Daum was an opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times. She has contributed to numerous magazines, including the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, and Vogue. A recipient of a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, she is on the adjunct faculty in the MFA Writing Program at Columbia University School of the Arts.
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Copyright © 2019 by Meghan Daum
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First Gallery Books hardcover edition October 2019
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Jacket design by Jason Gabbert
Author photo by Nina Subin
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-1-9821-2933-0
ISBN 978-1-9821-2935-4 (ebook)
