Existence, Allegedly

There is something almost comical about being young and believing that old people are a different species. You look at them moving more slowly through the world and imagine there must have been some psychological border they crossed along the way. Surely they don't experience themselves the way you experience yourself. Surely an eighty-year-old doesn't still possess the same private interiority, the same unfinished questions, the same flashes of insecurity, desire, jealousy, embarrassment, curiosity, and absurd humor. Then you start getting older. And nothing happens. That's the disturbing part. There is no ceremony. No morning when you wake up and discover that youth has officially left the building. You simply accumulate birthdays while remaining, from the inside, strangely continuous with every person you've ever been. The mirror changes faster than the witness behind it. At twenty, forty looks ancient. At forty, you remember twenty with such psychological immediacy ...

There is a particular kind of loneliness that happens in the presence of people who insist they care about you. It is easier, in some ways, to deal with someone who openly dislikes you. At least contempt is honest. You know where you stand. Ambiguous affection is harder. Someone tells you that you matter, yet something in their behavior keeps whispering otherwise. They call you a friend while treating your presence like an inconvenience. They say they want you around, but you can feel the relief whenever you leave. And then you begin doing something dangerous: You stop trusting your own perception. Maybe I'm imagining it. Maybe I'm being difficult. Maybe I expect too much. Maybe this is simply how people are. That last sentence has kept countless people inside relationships that made them miserable. Human beings have an extraordinary capacity to tolerate contradictions when the alternative is admitting that someone doesn't feel about us the way we hoped they did. Words say ...

 There is a point where rebellion becomes indistinguishable from branding. That may be one of the stranger contradictions of modern culture. We admire people who appear unwilling to conform, so naturally we created an entire economy devoted to manufacturing the appearance of nonconformity. The clothes can be purchased. The attitude can be rehearsed. The aesthetic can be professionally designed. Even authenticity can have a marketing department. And once you notice that, you start seeing it everywhere. People declaring themselves outsiders while desperately monitoring whether the right insiders are watching. People performing indifference while measuring engagement. People constructing identities around rejecting systems whose recognition they secretly crave. We have become remarkably sophisticated at manufacturing the appearance of people who don't care what anyone thinks. That's the paradox. The performance of authenticity can become every bit as artificial as the conformity i...

There comes a point in life when being misunderstood becomes strangely liberating. When you're young, you desperately want to belong to something. A scene. A generation. A movement. A group of people whose approval confirms that whatever you're doing with your life makes sense. You want someone important to look at you and say: Yes. You're one of us. So you adjust yourself. You learn the vocabulary. You discover what's fashionable to admire and what's fashionable to despise. You notice which opinions receive applause. You become slightly more careful about revealing the things you genuinely enjoy. And almost without noticing, you begin editing yourself for an audience. That's one of the quiet tragedies of self-consciousness: eventually you can become so skilled at managing other people's perception of you that you lose contact with the person they're supposedly perceiving. You become acceptable. But less recognizable to yourself. Then, if you're fort...

There is a kind of exhaustion that sleep doesn't fix. It comes from being available for too long. Available to conversation. To friendship. To expectation. To other people's emotions. To the strange social obligation of appearing interested, grateful, energetic, amused, and completely fine long after some private part of you has already gone home. Eventually, even affection becomes tiring. That's difficult to admit because we're taught that love should make us endlessly available. If someone matters to you, you're supposed to want more time, more conversation, more closeness. But human beings aren't built for uninterrupted intimacy. Sometimes you can genuinely love the people in the room and still desperately want the room to empty. There is no contradiction there. There is only a nervous system reaching capacity. I've started thinking that adulthood is partly the discovery that affection and endurance are different things. You can care deeply about someone ...

We have been taught to admire people who wake up early. There is something almost moral about it now. The alarm before sunrise. The disciplined routine. The carefully optimized morning. Wake earlier, work harder, waste less time, become more efficient. As though virtue could be measured by what time you leave the bed. I wonder how many people have spent their lives becoming extraordinarily disciplined at living lives they never actually wanted. There is a difference between discipline and obedience, although society has always benefited from making them look identical. From childhood onward, we're trained to synchronize ourselves with institutions. Wake when you're told. Arrive when you're told. Eat when you're allowed. Work during designated hours. Rest when productivity permits it. Eventually the institution disappears and the schedule remains inside us. Nobody has to tell us to feel guilty for sleeping late anymore. We do it ourselves. That's one of civilization...