Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Kitty's Corner's avatar

I love your writing about dating and gender. Do you accept requests? I'd love to read more about this from you!

Additionally, I'm happy to learn that you are getting paid to write book reviews! I find your reviews so incisive.

Getting older makes me personally anxious. I often feel unaccomplished and aimless. There's loads I haven't done that I want to do....

Expand full comment
Patrick R's avatar

>>One of the biggest benefits of getting older used to be gaining access to public spheres, which made you more socially relevant. Think about why you used to look so forward to going to a friend’s sleepover, or learning to drive, or going away for college. It was all to elevate yourself from being this cloistered and invisible entity, hidden away in your parents’ home. Getting older meant earning the means to go to places where you’d be seen and heard, where your thoughts and ideas would finally matter.

Also worth remembering is the extent to which the *local* public sphere and participation therein have atrophied. Unless you can see through the illusion (and it's not easy), it looks a whole lot like the only meaningful/impactful modes of social participation are all but exclusive to the internet, where each of us is basically one of several million blips reacting to bloops and endeavoring to appear on as many strangers' screens and get enough upvotes & shares & approving comments & donations &c to ground our self-assurances of being relevant and integral and well-liked.

There are no other options if you're not looking outside the digital box—and even if you are, the pickings are slim and comparatively unglamorous. Social clubs are basically dead (and meetup.com gatherings are no replacement). Unions are anemic compared to what they were 100 years or even 50 years ago. Church groups? Please.

A lot of the Millennial angst of the 2010s and 2020s is a reaction to a new condition of mass-scale social and political irrelevance for which I don't think many of us were prepared, and for which the internet is a palliative at best and an aggravator at worst.

Expand full comment
10 more comments...

No posts