The Problem With Everything

 The Problem With Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars, by Meghan Daum

I enjoyed this book, which is pretty much exactly what it says: Daum's thoughts on #MeToo, the 2016 election, and everything that's been going on for the last few years.   She spends a good deal of time meditating upon the differences between people her age -- GenX, like me -- and the other generations, and her conclusion is pretty much that we've always been irrelevant and will never not be irrelevant (well, fooey).

For example.  #MeToo.  When we were young, GenXers valued toughness; we desperately wanted to be tough.  Harassment was inevitable, and ideally we'd come up with some cool, dismissive response that would get us out of the situation and also make us feel like we were too tough to be bothered.  Millennials, logically enough, asked why they should have to be tough in the first place -- why do we have to put up with this?  While I do feel that a certain amount of toughness is just necessary for life, that's a REALLY GOOD QUESTION.  

We were the last analog generation, and one result is that GenX and Millennial women tend not to understand each other too well; Daum says that as far as the younger women are concerned, we might as well be on different planets.

So, an interesting book.  A few quotations, with my favorite first:

[Nov 2016]  Everyone seemed to be reacting to every piece of news like a toddler reacting to the needle stick of an immunization; so unprecedented was this particular pain sensation, so uncertain was the knowledge that it was ever going to end, that it could be met only by screams of terror.

Social media sneaks into our brains, steals half-formed thoughts, and broadcasts those thoughts before they’re anything close to being ready for what used to be called “public consumption” (or, as we used to say, “ready for prime time”). I realize now that much of what I’ve been reacting to these last few years is nothing more than undeveloped versions of already undeveloped thoughts. I think about what this means for young people, especially teenagers, whose thoughts are supposed to be undeveloped, even stupid. I think about all the stupid thoughts I had as a teenager, all the uninformed, half-baked, insensitive, self-serving, grandiose, totally-embarrassing-in-retrospect things I said to my friends and my parents and my teachers. What if someone had handed me a microphone and invited me to say them to the whole world instead? Would I have taken them up on it? Of course. Would the world have been worse for it? Of course.

Seeing my classmates in middle age, though, I felt I did know them. I knew them because I recognized my weary face in their weary faces. I saw the ways in which the passing of time had yanked some of our certainty out from underneath us. I saw how life had grabbed us by the shoulders and shaken us ever so slightly loose from our foundational coolness. Not that we weren’t still cool. We were just human now, too. We were human in that way you have to grow into. We were human in the way you can’t be when you’re twenty or even twenty-five. By which I mean we were in direct dialogue with our failures and limitations. Decades earlier, we’d been bright, shiny nothings. Now we were fully formed somethings in various states of disenchantment and disrepair....Who would have thought it would be like this? How did this all come to pass? How could we have expected it to be any other way?

In the end, I think I’ve come to I realize that the problem with everything isn’t meant to be solved. It’s meant to feed us. It’s meant to pump oxygen through our lungs. It’s meant to give us something to talk about. It’s meant to fuel comedy and inspire great art. It’s meant to keep relationships alive until the last possible hour. It’s meant to invite our smartest selves to join hands with our stupidest selves and see where the other leads us. The problem with everything is meant to keep us believing, despite all evidence to the contrary, in the exquisite lie of our own relevance. What a gift. What a problem to have.