Uniquely New York
I linked a while back to Ranjan Roy’s The Sweetgreen-ification of Society. This was primarily what grabbed my attention:
“We are losing the spaces we share across socioeconomic strata. Slowly, but surely, we are building the means for an everyday urbanite to exist solely in their physical and digital class lanes. It used to be the rich, and then everyone else. Now in every realm of daily consumer life, we are able to efficiently separate ourselves into a publicly visible delineation of who belongs where.”
The New York City beach trip is like this. All of you know where I’m going – there’s a connection to wealth when it comes to which beach you visit each summer. The Hamptons (East, West, South) are incredibly nice, as are some beaches in Jersey (Avalon, Long Branch, etc…). Montauk, Belmar and I’m sure a couple others are where wealthy young adults go to party. The city beaches – like Rockaway, Coney Island and Jacob Riis – are gross and overcrowded. They’re to be avoided at all costs.
That’s an oversimplification, but it largely holds true. If you have the money to rent or own a place farther from the city, you do so, and as a result you surround yourself with other people with similar resources. This isn’t news to anyone but it’s a necessary set up.
The last two Sundays, I have gone to those gross and overcrowded beaches. A beach is a beach, right? And both times, I’ve been blown away! Rockaway Beach is incredibly nice. There are million dollar homes beyond the dunes, white, smooth sand, and beautiful warm water. It’s a stone’s throw from the city, and hands down the best day-trip I’ve taken since moving here. It feels like the most democratic beach experience you could find.
Only it isn’t! Like everything, there are class divides within the class divides. Here’s what I mean:
- I have a friend with a car, so we drive to the beach (cutting down on 75% of the nightmarish commute on public transportation)
- We’re all white, so we can easily park “illegally” on residential side streets and remain inconspicuous
- We go to Belle Harbor, not Rockaway itself, a much nicer, quieter and less crowded option, only accessible because of our car and parking
- On our way out, we guiltily drive past the families waiting in line to park in the obscenely crowded Jacob Riis lot
- Life just isn’t fair
I think a lot of us are going through a somewhat existential moment where we know change is needed, and we want to be a part of that change, but we’re not sure exactly how far we’re willing to take it. I will say it – it’s very hard to peel back all of the ways that I benefit from inequality and determine exactly how much I’d be willing to give back. Maybe Sweetgreen feels like an innocuous example, but there is something I find truly eerie about the chasm between the people who eat there and the people who work there. And yet the last time I ate at Sweetgreen was the same day that I went to Belle Harbor, a beach inaccessible to a large swath of New Yorkers.
This isn’t a call to action so much as a call to reflection. I think there’s this unquestioned logic that those who can afford greater convenience should have it – they should order their groceries, sign up for TSA Pre-Check, and Uber everywhere they can. This is all viewed as a positive because it’s assumed that the convenience industry provides jobs and value where there previously was none.
I’m not questioning that logic (although Roy’s writing does an effective job of that), but I am starting to worry about the impact that segmentation has our our ability to share public spaces with one another. A world where you can buy the exact experience you want seems great until you look around and realize the only other people you’re sharing that experience with are carbon copies of yourself.
This past Sunday, I saw a couple pieces of trash in the ocean, and for a moment I thought: “This place is kind of gross, maybe I shouldn’t swim here.” Then I remembered that Belle Harbor was much nicer than the beach a mile or two away, where families packed in tightly and where you actually have to wait in line for access, and that those beaches were much nicer than unswimmable waters in other parts of our country and in other places around the world. What is yucky to you is almost always yummy to someone else less fortunate.
It’s easy to convince ourselves that we need our current level of quality – “I couldn’t possibly wait in line for the beach!” – but maybe we only think that because there are so many segmented levels of quality to begin with.
A New Chapter
Here is how I would sum up the current political conversation on the internet among my peer group of liberal-leaning millennials:
Vote for Biden you f*cking moron!
I’m not sure whether there is evidence that any liberals won’t be voting for Biden, but the energy of the moment is certainly directed at avoiding a loss rather than planning for a win. Instagram is littered with polite rephrasings of the notorious Charles Taylor reelection slogan: “He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I will vote for him.” There’s a popular campaign called Settle for Biden.
I have certainly been there – not so much Biden-shaming as Biden-hating – but there is another way, as Andrew Sullivan reminded me this week:
“The dream is that a clear and decisive defeat for the GOP in November can help shift the narrative set in 2016 so that history records Trump and his enablers as an outlier in corruption, incompetence, and insanity and we are able to cauterize this hideously illiberal period in American history. That was my hope in the first six months of this nightmare, until I began to despair at the resilience of Trump’s support. Now, suddenly, we have a chance to bring it to fruition.”
I am going to make a conscious effort to be excited for the possible good to come from all of this, rather than despair at the possible bad. If this is indeed a unique moment in history, then there is no reason to think that Biden won’t win in a landslide, Trump’s incompetent cronies won’t go back to whatever dark hole they came from, and some meaningful economic and social reforms won’t lead us into the next four years.
Brad Feld said something similar on his blog that ties this out nicely:
“I have no interest in a new normal. I’m only interested in something much better across our society than what was the old normal.
I encourage leaders to embrace change. Embrace complexity. Embrace uncertainty. I certainly am.”
That seems like a good mentality for us all to take into 2021.
The Value of Perspective
Joan Didion said “I don’t know what I think until I write it down.” Often, I don’t know what I think until I talk to someone. It can be incredibly easy to get caught up in my own thoughts, whether they be feelings of anxiety, self-righteousness or certainty.
One of the best things to come from this newsletter has been the opportunity to challenge those opinions, to puncture my certainty that how I feel about something is right. Or, that how I think I feel is right. Because I won’t kid myself – I’m 27 years old and am hardly ever sure of exactly how I feel about something.
This week I reached out to a friend of a friend who has been a great sounding board for the newsletter so far, and asked her what she thought about Bari Weiss’ resignation letter from the Times. It’s a well-written take on cancel culture, and on first read, I felt like it was a reasonable assessment of the toxic environment in the media today. I’ve read similar pieces by other writers in this mold and found them equally convincing.
That was what scared me. I am constantly reminded of the question: “What are people saying about this that I’m missing?” It seemed very possible that the people doing the “cancelling” had an opinion of their own, and that not all of them were disingenuous, stupid, or – most insulting of all -misinformed. So I reached out to this friend in the hope that she would expand my understanding of the argument.
And expand she did. Here is one thing she said that resonated very strongly with me:
“The problem with taking a devil’s advocate stance on something that doesn’t directly affect you is that you will seem more ‘rational’ than the person you’re debating, who might be personally affected and thus emotional in their argument.”
That is a pretty good representation of my role in many arguments, from high school until today. The smug a**hole who’s just “laying out the facts,” and doesn’t understand why the other person is getting upset. And that seems like a fundamental weakness of the cancel culture debate – a lot of powerful people want to protect their ability to make arguments that offend other people.
I can’t overstate how refreshing it’s been to have exchanges like these more frequently with friends, family and coworkers. Substantive conversation is a critical and often-forgotten piece of the self-improvement puzzle, and our ability to talk to one another is one of the reasons I’m still obnoxiously optimistic about the future of our country.
A Call for Women!
A shrewd reader of this newsletter will have noticed that I’ve changed the format around a little bit to cover a variety of things I’m thinking about each week. An even shrewder (?) reader will have noticed that my links skew heavily towards male writers, particularly when it comes to contemporary commentary. This week I decided to fix that.
Guess what! It’s pretty damn easy to fix. There are a ton of women out there (Jenny Odell, Annie Lowry, Jia Tolentino, Roxanne Gay) that I can make more of an effort to read on an ongoing basis. Please share anyone who you like and I will take some time to read their stuff.
Here’s a thought-provoking blurb from Anne Helen Petersen, who wrote one of my all-time favorite essays on millennial burnout and who, surprise, surprise, has a great newsletter like every other good writer these days:
“[After four months of quarantine] there are probably some behaviors or patterns that you’ve fallen into that make you feel shitty and/or actively make your situation harder. You don’t like them but inertia is a bitch and you’re too exhausted to deal with them. But now’s the time to see those things clearly — and figure out if it’s possible to change them before they just become the established backdrop of your life.”
Here’s mine: I become a zombie anytime I’m behind my computer, to the point where I black out entire conversations Anne tries to have with me. That’s got to stop. I have never claimed to be a good multi-tasker, but this quarantine has proven that I am very much a single-tasker.
– Emmett
Recent Posts:
Letters: From a Guy Who Looks at Retention Charts All Day – An insightful response to Statistically Insignificant (7/26)
Response to the Guy Who Looks at Retention Charts All Day – Juicing the stats with my first ever guest post
My Harry Potter Penguin – What a Harry Potter penguin painted piggy bank says about being your own biggest fan
What I’m Reading:
The Promise of Vaping and the Rise of the Juul – Jia Tolentino, New Yorker
The Great Affordability Crisis Breaking America – Annie Lowry, The Atlantic
Even If You Beat Me – Sally Rooney, The Dublin Review
What I’m Listening To:
Managing Procrastination, Predicting the Future, and Finding Happiness – Tim Urban, The Tim Ferriss Show