TUCKED AWAY IN AN OLD FOLDER…
Going through old college folders is a bit like time travel. I had accumulated half a dozen folders, with four or more unused, stacked atop a pile of papers– excerpts from a past life of college classes and assignments. My task this week was to siphon through anything worth keeping. Each folder was stuffed with a mystery of syllabi, scattered homework assignments, and graded essays. I dumped most of what I found, including notes that were written in pencil (for some reason).
Until I stumbled upon a folder that was noticeably thicker than all the others. Inside was a dense stack of papers stapled together, perhaps 20-pages long. It was a printout of a blog post by David Wong titled:
“6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person”
I had no memory of ever receiving this handout, or what professor could have gone through the misery of printing out a lengthy article and stapling copies for a classroom of 25+ students. In some ways, it felt like a Hogwarts letter delivered by a worn Five Star folder to my future self. Curious about what it took to be a better person, I eagerly read through the article.
The article was largely about what you would expect: a scare-you-straight advice column on how ruthless real life is, replete with such truth-bombs as: “The world only values you for what you offer” and “Stop blaming others when it is clearly your fault that you don’t get off your ass to contribute to society” and, lastly, “No one is coming to save you.”
Here are the “6 Harsh Truths” in case you’re interested:
- The World Only Cares About What It Can Get From You
- The Hippies Were Wrong
- What You Produce Doesn’t Have to Make Money, But It Does Have to Benefit People
- You Hate Yourself Because You Don’t Do Anything
- What You Are Inside Only Matters Because of What It Makes You Do
- Everything Inside You Will Fight Improvement
The writer of the article is David Wong (whose real name is Jason Pargin—an author widely known for his serial novels, including the horror book John Dies at the End). The article was published for Cracked.com on December 17, 2012, which is prime time to talk about New Year’s Resolutions and what—if anything—we gain from planning marginal gains throughout the coming year. Wong’s article is a “wake up call” for what it truly means to gain a new skill or start contributing to the world in a meaningful way…unlike all those other failed New Year’s resolutions.
However, it’s the tone of the article that I found fascinating. Pargin (let’s use the guy’s real name) is writing for a reluctant reader, one that must not be willing to hear about the harsher truths of life. It’s a familiar tone to take with younger generations, perhaps those who fall into the trap of mundane daily lives and seeking instant gratification like an addict.
I’m not trying to belittle the article—I found most of the advice to be worthwhile reading and surprisingly applicable to 2024. It was refreshing to hear a “life isn’t giving handouts” response to those who are looking for lifehacks and shortcuts (myself included, but who isn’t?).
And yet, I was perplexed by the article for reasons outside of the message. Like I said, this article was handed out to a college class of 18-22 year olds.
So, I pondered this question over the past week: “Who is this advice really for?”
***
MY GUESS: NOT COLLEGE STUDENTS
Supposing the average student in my class at the time was 20-years-old (so, undergrads), the advice of Pargin’s article was aimed at young people by the professor. Clearly, we were all behaving in a certain way to receive such a thick printout. I have no idea which of my former professors might have handed out the article, but I’ve never had a professor younger than their early 40s (besides one adjunct professor who never handed out anything like this article—he loved printing photocopied short stories of obscure Native American writers, mostly).
In short: This handout came from a professor who saw a younger generation lacking the hard-working values of his established peers.
Ok…but so what? It’s a familiar argument, one that has grown tired: “My generation knows the meaning of hard work and yours doesn’t. Muahahaha!”
Yeah yeah yeah: Hard work = better life.
Even if this is true, there’s a subtlety here that’s being passed over: With advice like this, it only makes sense to those who see the contrast.
My old professor saw a classroom full of underperforming and wandering undergrads that didn’t apply themselves like older generations have (or, presumably, the exceptional of that generation have). Except, the only reason this professor knows the difference in work ethic is because of experience.
Experience that my classmates and I lacked at the time.
So, what is the use of advice that doesn’t resonate with those receiving it?
We’ll call this the Time Traveler’s Dilemma.
***
THE TIME TRAVELER’S DILEMMA
Let’s suppose there was a visitor from the future who witnessed the apocalypse. In this scenario, the apocalypse is an unsexy one—no T-1000 androids slaying humanity from AI superiority. This apocalypse is an unimaginative and long-predicted one: Global Warming has finally decimated the planet into an uninhabitable hellscape.
This visitor from the future has taken copious notes about what caused the planet to morph into a cosmic EasyBake Oven, and has miraculously escaped certain death in order to warn the past about what can be done about it.
So, the time traveler emerges in the year 2024 to deliver planet-saving instructions.
The good news: Our visitor has all the answers for how to fix the problem, and everyone in 2024 has luckily heard of global warming.
The bad news: No one really knows what it’s like to die horrible deaths in never-ending heatwaves and, thus, doesn’t really care.
It’s a little like dieting: We all know not to eat so much pizza, but is that really going to stop us when a hot and fresh box is planted on the kitchen table? I think not!
So, the visitor from the future says, “Don’t eat that slice…er, don’t keep churning out waste from smokestacks and driving SUVs with terrible mileage. I’ve come from the future, and it’s like the roast your grandmother used to keep in the oven for far too long: Looks like food, but most definitely isn’t! Stop what you’re doing, or we are all doomed!”
Most would nod in agreement—we all know global warning sounds bad. Others would shrug and say it’s fictitious–like a time traveler arriving in the past to relay a message (the irony). And many would pine to know if there was a future season of The Bachelor that features the last attractive humans on earth vying for the grand prize: the last remaining bottle of facial moisturizer.
“Yes, it was the last show ever to remain on television—but how did you know?” the time traveler would reply.
Frustrated, but also relieved to have eaten pizza for the first time since humanity was deep-fried, the time traveler gets back in his ship and ventures to another time…
***
A DAVE PELZER CALLED ‘IT’
Conveniently, the visitor travels to 2008, my senior year of high school. He walks into a gymnasium assembly with the entire school seated in bleachers. A ratty-looking man in glasses is complaining (for lack of a better word) into a microphone at the center of the basketball court.
“What kills me about your generation,” rants the special guest, “is how much drama there is. There’s drama with everything with you people! Oh, we all get it already! ‘My boyfriend broke up with me and now I can’t study for exams’—boo hoo! You know what I wish I would have known in high school? To just shut up! That’s right—just shut up! Everything that you think is a big deal isn’t. ‘My teacher doesn’t like me’—just shut up!”
“Who is this guy?” asks the time traveler, conveniently seated next to me in the gymnasium bleachers.
“Dave Pelzer,” I tell him. “Author of A Child Called It.”
“Called what? Global warming?” The time traveler catches his mistake. “Oh. What’s the book about?”
“I don’t know,” I tell him. “It’s a memoir about this guy as a child getting abused and everyone calls him ‘It’.”
The time traveler listens to Pelzer some more.
“Your Mom didn’t get you that new shirt you wanted? Shut up! Didn’t make the team because you think the coach doesn’t like you? Shut up! The girl you asked out said you need acne medication? Shut up, and maybe wash your face!”
The gymnasium of high schoolers laughs—except for the time traveler and me.
“Does anyone here find it ironic that the guy who wrote a book about childhood trauma and abuse is literally gaslighting an entire gymnasium full of teenagers?” asks the time traveler.
“Right?” I say, glad that someone else finally agrees. “Good thing no one has a gun in here, jeez.”
“Hey, not cool,” says the time traveler. “Might want to steer away from jokes about guns in schools.”
“Why? No one would really do that here.”
“You don’t get school shootings every week in America yet?” asked the time traveler. “Hmm, I guess it is only 2008.”
“Wait, shootings happen EVERY week??”
“Just about—mental health is a major crisis in the future. Probably not a good idea for this guy to diminish the emotional journeys of students just because they don’t act like an aging author who profited off his trauma, and still projects it onto kids who aren’t cognitively developed enough to defend themselves.”
“Wow, that is ironic. What else happens in the future?”
“Global warming. It kills everyone. Hey, do you want to hear how to fix it?”
“Nah. I’ve seen the Al Gore movie already. I get it.”
The time traveler sighs. “Curse that documentary…Ok, I’m leaving. This Dave Pelzer is a disaster. What’s the best pizza place around here?”
“Fricanos, probably.”
“Thanks, kid,” says the time traveler. There’s a blip, like a catchy text message notification, and the time traveler is gone.
“Wait,” I say out to where he once sat. “What’s gaslighting??”
***
PHILOSOPHY FOR THE T-BALL LEAGUE
If definitive advice mattered, the book would have closed long ago with some of the greatest philosophers of the past. Can I really devise a better plan for living than what Kierkegaard or Nietzsche or Aristotle came up with? Here’s a sampler of some of philosophy’s greatest hits:
“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.” ( Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death)
“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols)
“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” (Albert Camus, The Rebel)
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics)
And on and on and on, philosophers have rebranded and reinvented what it means to live a good life. The irony is that many philosophers disagreed! The fun of philosophy is in building an argument so precise that it becomes the de facto argument in any given category—a sort of academics’ rap battle through history. No one knows absolutely what it means to be a worthwhile human. Simply being alive is a good start, IMO.
Here’s the thing: As much as I agree with the timeless advice and wisdom of philosopher, I also don’t remember much of it. Think about that: a philosopher’s work is the result of years and lifetimes of constant thought and iteration, devising precise arguments for what it means to contribute to society.
And most of us would fail a multiple-choice philosophy test day to name what a SINGLE philosopher uncovered about human existence.
It isn’t about how right advice is, but what it means to those hearing it. That’s how advice works: It makes all the more sense in hindsight. Handing out a printed blog post to a group of college students that outlines the existential crises of their upper 20s and middle 30s doesn’t register. College students, for better or worse, aren’t even fully cognitively developed. At age 20, I thought I was invulnerable to death, my ideas original and best sellers, and I could eat whatever I wanted without consequence. As life changes, so does application of advice. At 35, my position has changed on all three (except eating what I want without consequence; that’s something I continue to prove despite the evidence of the bathroom scale).
Keep in mind when bemoaning the efforts and values of generations removed from your own that it’s mostly futile: You are speaking a different language to them with your criticisms.
It will all make sense to those generations—eventually. That’s the curse of wisdom: It usually arrives too late, and we are now prepared for a battle long past finished. That’s why we know how to better prepare for job interviews, relationships, move towns, or even what it takes to be a professional sports player when we’re no longer capable of moving without pulling something.
But if the fight should ever come back around, you’d bet we’d kick ass today!
Like crushing a T-ball out of the park as an adult.
“Give me that,” we’d say, fully grown, capable of smashing an oversized baseball to pulp. We’d point our bats to the horizon, like Babe Ruth calling the winning home run in the 1932 World Series. And BAM! We crush the ball, to the utter confusion of parents watching, all of them wondering how an adult found a matching team uniform to play with a bunch of 7-year-olds.
The ball sails through the air, with a tail of blistering debris like a comet’s. “Now, that’s how you do it!” You say to the befuddled kids who sort-of cheer as you start to round the bases…
“He was right. Fricano’s is good pizza,” says a guy sitting on the bleachers, unbothered by the adult T-ball player rounding the bases. “Anyone want a slice before we all die from global warming?”
***
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Wishing everyone as well as you can be. You’re not alone out there,
