But What if I *Am* You?
I read an essay in Harper’s (“Going Soft: Future-proofing the American worker”; by Lily Scherlis) about the new current soft skills crisis. We have one every few decades, apparently. The fact that a soft skill is hard to define perhaps makes it a subject especially attractive to crises. If you haven’t gone to the trouble of surveying the land you feel you’re losing, you can stalk the grounds vaguely assured that encroachments are occurring all around.
Talking about this with my friend John while treading water in a pool featuring, rather than lifeguards, cocktail waitresses, we briskly limned the domain of the soft skill. Attentive listening, problem-solving, critical thinking… “Isn’t that just being a person?” he said. I told him that, according to David Brooks, listening should be a calorie-burning activity; didn’t get around to Charles Duhigg’s emphasis on the well-timed probing inquiry or vulnerable admission. His question had reminded me of something I’d read in a review of the new Amanda Hess book about parenting in the 2020s.
Hess describes a millennial mom, Nev, whose friends politely decline free babysitting. Nev poignantly yearns for her grandmother’s community, where “you just drop in on each other and bring food and kind of do life together.”
I was a little flattened by Nev’s nostalgia. This would have been sitting on my porch the day before, drinking a beer in ebbing sunlight and clapping squirrels away from the birdfeeder. kind of do life together were five perfect words in sequence. A crystallization of a nebulous thing—perhaps the nebulous thing—that we’ve lost. A crisis necessarily fuzzy because boundless, a survey of the known world. “kind of” hints at, approaches, is careful, the way we’re careful when asking as to whether or not anyone else can hear a persistent, unidentified sound. “do life” is all-encompassing, an anthropocentric gloss on live (everything alive lives; only human beings do life). Finally “together”, a tombstone word, a word emblazoned on the hull of a ship sinking beneath the waves. Species-wise, we grew up together. Over millions of years, from bands to clans to tribes, etc. We evolved in necessary collectives, sleeping in groups, rearing each others get. But that’s all over now. Say Steve Jobs killed it in ‘07 with the same blow that felled taxi cabs, democracy, and the bathroom-reader publishing industry.
The Harper’s essay refers to the anxieties of employers who have such a hard time relating to their employees that they invest billions of dollars a year in soft skills training. Covid Zoomers don’t really believe in their colleagues, it says. Not like people in previous generations did and do. Colleagues are pixels on a screen.
In the pool I told John about the celebration of life we’d attended the weekend before in A.’s hometown. The dad of her best friend growing up. A man who’d done hippie communes and computer science, an early adopter in the Jobsian mold whose foray into entrepreneurialism Apple nipped short, whose adult flourishing was characterized by deep simultaneous commitments to motorcycles and golf (endeavors that it occurs to me now are asymmetrical in lots of interesting ways, especially—though not necessarily—socially, but which are both anchored on getting out into the world).
A crush of celebrants filtered into the event room at the winery. We organized largely by age. My cohort was uncomfortable with small talk, relatively speaking. People arrived in pairs that never separated. They navigated the afternoon’s summoned village a bit dazed, pressed, stiff.
We tell ourselves it’s natural; no one likes these things; everyone’s an introvert or has social anxiety. Every year we are better practiced in reassuring ourselves that however we are being, it’s all right.
It’s hard to avoid the sense that we have lost the thread, that we don’t really know how to live anymore. Watch any movie from the 20th century: the streets teem with people. They are everywhere hanging out, killing time, shooting the breeze, causing scenes, making trouble. Entire plots pivot on the interactions of strangers.
Therapy helps replace some of this lost community but also might exacerbate it. The absence of a best friend might not be so acutely felt so long as one has a therapist.
I’m using hedging language because what do I know? Also because if given the choice, to hedge or not to hedge, the obvious way forward, given the prevailing structure of feeling, I mean, the safe thing, is surely, always, to hedge. Deep on the inside I grapple with a sneaking suspicion that I am right.
An unforgivable suspicion, that. Toxic. If the world makes me uneasy, I must not be right. Conviction is the taproot of inflexibility. “A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel,” said Robert Frost. And what am I, if not liberal? Therefore, I must not be right. I must guard against that inching-forth of narrow certainty, must do Fitzgerald’s work of holding in balance contradictory beliefs: the world is wrong; no, I am. Or maybe: Yes, but I am also wrong.
Drama queens can be fun a lot of fun to hang out with, but no one likes a white man griping about cultural degradation. It isn’t a good look—which is where so much of the work is being done now. Looks are easier to police than the billionaires who steer our institutions into profitable paralysis, easier to police than the police. Looks and language (one of the biggest looks of all) are easy to police, easy to signal, pretty much free. It is not surprising that in a society drained of political agency and drenched in branding, this is where we live.
Probably every generation comes into a unique inheritance of loss, something its forebears couldn’t or didn’t convey. Some tradition they broke or resource squandered, some calamity invented or benefit defunded. (They: a declawed we.) Even white Boomers, in so many ways our era’s unforgivable rich kids, were among the first to have matured within the icy shadow of sudden global annihilation. Imagine the ire of kids today when they realize that the thing that was taken from them, diverted for the profit of the few and the convenience of the many, was the natural development of their minds. Expropriated into the care of Mark Zuckerberg, who noted in a recent interview that the average American has three or fewer friends, a social impoverishment AI chatbots have arrived just in time to correct.
My friend John is the deliriously happy father of a little girl. In this way he is like almost all the other fathers in our set, who each planted one baby girl on the planet and then agreed with their wives to call it quits. I think about the reality these kids will inherit—a generation of only-children. When we talk about soft skills, about being a person, about kind of doing life together, aren’t we necessarily talking about growing up in a family, negotiating sibling rivalries and relationships, knowing the brothers and sisters of our best friends, learning to deal with flesh and blood people, about having choices, and not having choices, in with whom we grow up?
They’ll lay their hands over their hearts in grade school of a morning:
I admit affiliation
with the flag
of the bordering states of America,
and to the plutocracy
for which it stands:
one nation
under screens,
coming apart,
with liberty and justice for sale.
A hedging caveat: I’m a hypocrite, of course, and more privileged than most, and certifiably lazy. That’s why I’m in the pool, on the porch, reading books, clapping at squirrels. I long ago took Vonnegut’s advice very much to heart:
“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.”
Whenever A. and I feel compelled by creeping unease or abject horror to gtfo of the country we are stayed by the presence of our friend group, which is large and various. And nobody asked me to speak for them. Quite possibly I am more alone on this island than I think.
To be sure, we are routinely discouraged from assuming commonality with other people. We can’t know what they’ve gone through or are going through. Empathy isn’t as fashionable as it was a couple decades ago. It’s not just a mistake but an impertinence to assume anyone else is like you. Never mind that we are each about 99% genetically identical, speak common languages, exist mostly within structures of capitalism that vary country to country only by degrees, “sleep at night and shit in the morning” as James Bridle puts it in Ways of Being, under the same unvarying constellations since time immemorial and so forth, drawing throughout our lives on enormous treasuries of assembled culture et cetera.
It is tempting to point the finger at surge capitalism for these minorities of one we tend to make of ourselves, or let others make for us. First there were Soccer Moms and BBQ Dads, categories drawn within demographics for the more expedient allocation of political advertising, then we got carried away, and Big Data happened, and…one-two-skip-a-few…each person is an individual market, selves crushed into diamonds by the pressures of extractive profiteers horning in on all sides taking everything within their constantly expanding reach.
It is tempting to harken back to Terence, the former slave turned Roman playwright: “I am human; I think nothing human alien to me.” Terence would have a rough go of it in today’s partitioned opportunity space.
We are urged, by whatever it is that urges, to acknowledge each other and to think of ourselves as discrete and unknowable packets of identity, each bearing its own unassailable truth. This makes for a robust therapy industry but lousy parties.
My favorite sign spotted at a protest this year read simply I AM YOU. A young black woman held it, but it could have been anyone.
It could have been all of us.
I admire your acceptance of who you are, Devin. ;-)