Flotsam, Jetsam, Liam - Issue #8
“The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough.”
Originally published on Revue - May 11, 2020
Twenty-Somethings Amid The Tectonics
With the world as we knew it upended, I’m guilty of the occasional pang of schadenfreude. Watching self-aggrandizing bigwigs and black-and-white thinkers throw their hands up and concede to the uncertainty provides fleeting reprieve from the collective dismay of not knowing where or to whom to turn for answers, for insight, for assurance.
Whatever personal pride I take in staying well informed has morphed into an uneasy sense that it is probably healthier to switch off; the whole plethora of pontification out there is speculative at best.
In fact only by turning to science fiction last weekend for the first time in years did I find my bearings getting any straighter. Ursula Le Guin’s 1971 thriller ’The Lathe of Heaven’ depicts a well-meaning neuroscientist manipulating another man ’s far reaching dreams. What transpires serves to caution against thinking we know what is sweepingly best for people and contends that in ridding ourselves of all of life’s messiness, we risk washing away much of its beauty. Timely messages, I’m finding.
Additional introspection has been a natural byproduct of our current moment no matter how old you are, but twenty-somethings find themselves at a particularly treacherous impasse. We have accumulated enough independent life experiences, accomplishments, regrets, and relationships to have become principled, yet remain unversed and malleable enough that little is truly unflappable.
In an effort to elucidate which unsung truths have emerged as especially self-evident and which lies we tell ourselves feel more hollow than ever, I conducted a loosely methodical survey asking my twenty-something peers (who I feel fortunate to have as subscribers) answer the following two questions:
“What is one thing you think people our age seriously undervalue and/or should pay more attention to?”
And conversely:
“What is one thing you think people our age care too much about?”
Their responses are artistically summarized below:
I was truly amused by the array of concrete to abstract interpretations that stemmed from my unintentionally ambiguous phrasing. Upon reflection, asking about “people our age” invites a different kind of projection than if I had personalized the questions, yet the patterns that emerged as the responses rolled in were remarkable.
One caveat before I offer my analysis:
My social circle largely inhabits the upper echelons of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (from my vantage point, many of you are staring down self-actualization). Twenty-somethings struggling to make ends meet may have very different perspectives on what is under and overvalued that are not captured here.
The forensics on nearly every response that came back revealed DNA of a crippling fear of veering from the ‘perfection’ blueprint. A whole generation has been prescribed a rigid regimen of narrowly defined success pills convinced that skipping a day would result in disaster, shame, and ridicule.
As a result, twenty-somethings may be more talented, more idealistic, and brighter than ever, but instead present as risk averse and overly image conscious. Furthermore, being so extrinsically motivated has somewhat counter-intuitively had the effect of making us more self absorbed. Desperation for success has left us ill equipped to reckon with our own feelings and desires, terrified of initiating action, and poor at celebrating the accomplishments of our peers.
For the record, the demons we are fighting are legitimate; we’ve grown up in a winners take all world underneath a shroud of FOMO with less privacy and fewer 'good’ jobs. We are, however, guilty of granting these demons more power than they deserve, as evidenced by the responses to what we overvalue above.
What my peers have also identified though is a way to fight back, one that co-opts the mantra, “don’t let 'perfect’ be the enemy of good.” Across a spectrum of arenas - sustainability initiatives, prison reform efforts, dating apps - we tie ourselves up in knots devising reasons for why not. Saying yes, reaching compromise, trying something, anything is the only way to generate proof of concept and establish a foundation for clever, collaborative minds to build upon. For all the preaching of the gospel of entrepreneurship, young people are less entrepreneurial now than at any other point over the last 100 years. Waiting for cues from everyone else is not a recipe for progress. Let’s leap, however imperfectly.
Allow me to posit one additional, affiliated strategy: be the remedy to Tall Poppy Syndrome. This psychology phenomenon typically attributed to Australian culture encapsulates an instinct towards trivializing, dismissing, or outright chastising others’ success. Sound familiar, twenty-somethings?
At times TPS-flavored conversations get downright nasty - college admissions, job recruitment, the woke olympics. More often though, the syndrome is no pantomime villain; it is channeled through a reticent, every-man/woman-for-him/herself mindset.
For me, this adaptation was the most difficult part of the transition from high school to college. My classmates were just as, if not more impressive, but with everyone’s focus on how to individually get ahead, far less effort was dedicated to building each other up. Not only does an environment like this exacerbate everyone’s anxiety and breed shallower relationships, it also plays right into the hands of egoistic self promoters, not my preferred brand of role model.
If:
we perceive those alongside us not as threats on the pathway to perfection but as fuel and inspiration
we celebrate others both for their achievements and simply the enrichment they bring us
we tell close ties, weak ties and strangers what traits of theirs we admire
, then we twenty-somethings could prove a force to be reckoned with when the times come to piece the world back together. Our move.
To readers who no longer identify as twenty-somethings, I welcome your wisdom on whether these insights are at all unique to this chapter of life and/or to my generation. I suspect we may be in for a longer ride than expected, but perhaps we are not as alone as we think.