As someone who turns around a newsletter each week on a self-imposed deadline, inspiration is my queen. I worship her. I spend every day before Sunday scanning the world for ideas, and if I’m lucky I find one before the weekend. Often a writing session early on Saturday produces something I feel good about. But sometimes only a desperate long run on a Sunday afternoon can shake something loose.
That’s what happened this week. I read Anne Helen Peterson’s latest edition of Culture Study, and then went out for a 10-mile run that gave me plenty of time to think about what she’d written. Plenty of time to think about this:
“We recognize that systems of care and community are broken, and want to build them otherwise. We want dependability, we want intimacy, we want to spread burdens and celebrations across a wider swath of people. We want something else. But we have also been well-trained to resist inconvenience, even of the mildest sort: I want what I want, I want it this way, and at this cost, and I want it now.“
I think the honest reader of this newsletter will hear a part of themselves in that last sentence, particularly the young adults. I certainly do. I want what I want, I want it this way, and I want it now. I can think of a handful of fits I threw – in high school! – over family obligations I wanted to skip out on, or chores I wanted to put off. I had other things I wanted to be doing. I’d celebrate a lifetime of family birthdays, but high school wouldn’t last forever. I wasn’t being selfish, I was just being logical.
And even though those fits have gone away, that instinct to evaluate everything against what it means for my free time, for my wellbeing, has stuck around. And how could it not? My privileged life has been organized around maximizing choice and efficiency for myself: where to go to college, what to major in, where to work, how to spend my free time, what to buy.
That’s not to say we should feel ashamed of where we’ve landed, nor is it an indictment of younger generations. Our parents and grandparents are partly responsible as well, because it was them who cleared the road for us and freed us to put our needs first. If their ambitions and opportunities had been partially limited by those around them, then the ultimate gift to us was simply not to be a burden.
Regardless of fault, we’ve become a society focused on first mountain journeys, a term coined by David Brooks that represents a life focused on individual accomplishments: a good career, a new house, personal success. For the most part, the stories we worship are first mountain ones about becoming rich and achieving a life of comfortable efficiency. “Wouldn’t it be nice?” we ask ourselves, imagining big homes, first class flights and hired help.
Climbing this first mountain is often followed by a second mountain, after the realization that a self-centered life is not fulfilling: “It’s not about self anymore; it’s about relation, it’s about the giving yourself away. Their joy is in seeing others shine.” No surprise then that it’s this second mountain, not the first, that Brooks named his book after. The message – and his research – is clear: A life in service of others is superior to a life in service of yourself.
This is on my mind because my family celebrated my grandfather’s 90th birthday this weekend, and something my sister said stuck with me, which I’ll paraphrase here:
“I’m so grateful that we get to celebrate this important milestone with you, because you have been there for every single one of our important milestones. And I don’t think that’s an accident. You make such an effort to be an active part of all of our lives.”
It was echoed by others as well. Involvement in our lives. Care and attention to our needs. No one said anything about monetary gifts, although there have been those as well. No one said anything about his career, which was also impressive. My grandfather’s legacy is in his support of others at his own expense. Not just when it is convenient.
That attitude is what we need in this moment. We’re approaching the end of this pandemic, and among the changes it has wrought in our lives is the undeniable realization that connection matters. If you know of a highly successful person who spent the last year joyfully grinding away in their job, alone in a gigantic house, then send them my way. But more common is the person who, according to Brooks, was “hit sideways by something that wasn’t part of the original plan.” Something, like an isolating pandemic, that “made the first-mountain victories seem, well, not so important.” COVID has accelerated the journey to the second mountain.
I wrote a few weeks back about my experience with mutual aid in Brooklyn and the elderly woman who I’ve been helping out each Sunday. Her name is Flora. She spent her life in social work, supporting children in family court, so she’s more than “earned” my help. But, like all people who feel like a burden, she often asks me why I’m doing what I’m doing. “You must have such a busy life,” she says.
My answer is the same as what I said in that newsletter, that I get “as much, if not more, than what I’m putting in.” That it makes me feel good. And that’s certainly true. But I think there’s another reason I do it, something I learned from my grandfather: I do it because I can. I can walk to Trader Joe’s and get her groceries. I can order her Ubers. I can take her to get the vaccine. I can survive COVID much better than she can.
So maybe I need to rethink what I wrote. Maybe painting duties as selfish life-hacks is detrimental to all of us. I always thought the selfish spin was necessary to drive interest and shift culture, but now I’m not so sure. Wearing a mask, after all, was never about us, but about them. A duty to protect others. As we move on from the pandemic, maybe the notion of duty expands to mean doing things for each other because we’re able to, not because we want to.
How do we accomplish that? How do we change from a duty to ourselves to a duty to each other? In that original piece in the NYT, Brooks writes that “culture change happens when a small group of people find a better way to live and the rest of us copy them.” I don’t know how we copy the best among us. But my weekend, spent honoring my grandfather, left no doubt in my mind that it’s possible. The phrase What Would Jesus Do? may be too religiously charged for broad appeal, but slot in what works for you. What would Grandad do? is mine. Selfish impulses can be countered.
The Culture Study piece that initially sparked this was itself inspired by another article, in The Nation, about life on a commune. The author, who grew up on one, doesn’t mince words about what made it special:
“We do it together, we do it for each other, and we don’t pay someone else to do the things that matter. That was what the commune meant, and it was the most profound lesson of my upbringing.”
That is an example of a culture shifted. I don’t know how we get there, but we can. Another Brooks suggestion is a national tour of service, like a peacetime draft. “What would it mean to the future social cohesion of this country if a large part of the rising generation had a common experience of shared sacrifice?”
Add that to the list for a post-COVID world.
– Emmett
Recent Posts:
Return to the Source – Believe it or not, there wasn’t always a time when bots like me commanded respect. (Fiction, 5 min)
Friday Ramble, March 12th – The happiness equation and some fun with charts. (Blog, 4 min)
What I’m Reading:
We’ve Found Them: They’re the Worst Team Ever – Anthony Castrovince, MLB.com
“This is a story about the lengths people will go to pursue their baseball dreams. It’s the story of baseball in Yonkers. And what a hoot it was.”
OCD Is Not a Joke – Lisa Whittington-Hill, The Walrus
“I once heard OCD described, very accurately, as a record skipping in your head. The checking routine I have before I leave my apartment can take anywhere from thirty minutes, on a very good day, to two hours, on a very bad one.”
What I’m Watching:
I Tried Running for 30 Days and My Life Will Never Be the Same – Zach Highley, Youtube
A friend who started running during quarantine sent me this. A bit goofy but a good representation of how I felt when I started running back in 2016, and how I think a lot of other people feel as well when they’re just getting started.