Get Nothing And Like It
The mail brought a letter last week which was misaddressed. Actually, it was properly addressed, it was just misdelivered: The street number looked close enough to mine that you could see how it wound up in my box instead of the one where it belonged. As someone who has a hard time handling it when things don’t work the way I thought they would you might imagine this to be the sort of thing that would send me into a paroxysm of debilitation, but the cynic in me overrules the depressive in these cases because I am always more surprised that certain problems don’t occur more often than that they occur at all (see also: WiFi outages, screwed-up Starbucks orders, 9/11).
So I took the letter down to the post office, where, of course, there was a line. If you have been to the post office lately you will know exactly what happened, but I assume that those of you who have, for some reason you cannot fully understand, chosen to subscribe to this nonsense are hip, paperless professionals who haven’t been inside a federal facility since we allowed the Internet to start screwing up everything we do instead of having actual people screw things up for us, so I will remind you of what it used to be like (and, it turns out, still is): I waited on the line until I finally got to the front of it where, when I held up the letter and explained that I was helpfully returning it, I was told that I needed to go over to Window 10, which, of course, had a whole other line waiting on it.
Standing there like a shmuck in front of Window 10, something occurred to me with a degree of certainty that it really never had until now: Karma is a lie. There are no rewards for being a good person. The winners in this world are the ones who are out for themselves while the rest of us are stuck standing behind someone who hasn’t showered in several days at whatever metaphorical Window 10 we find ourselves waiting on line at. And if you’re thinking, “Well, gosh, Alex, aren’t you a little old to have finally figured this out?” I would just like to refer to you earlier editions of this newsletter in which I assured you that I am not particularly bright and once again reiterate that point.
Let me give you another example: I have a rare type of blood that is extremely beneficial to babies when transfused, so I used to hand over a pint of it every eight weeks. What did I get out of it? Anemia. Anemia which, because a series of doctors were unable to identify the cause, resulted in my having an extremely unpleasant medical procedure that only after revealing nothing amiss caused them to suggest I might want to be less giving of myself fluid-wise. So, you know, fuck babies. (Just kidding. I love babies. I dropped my donation down to four times a year and my iron seems to be okay now, thanks for asking.) But it does feel like banging your head against a wall, over and over again. (Doing the right thing, I mean, not anemia. Although they both involve a certain degree of dizziness.) Why bother being good (and I want to make it clear here that I am not in any way a good person; I am a failure at being good who every now and then does the right thing by accident or due to some vestigial sense of conscience and hopes it adds a credit to some imaginary ledger) when it only seems to count against you?
As I have mentioned previously, if I want to remain a player in the food-and-shelter game I need to write a book. The only problem I have encountered, apart from the actual writing of it, is coming up with a topic in which I would be interested enough to spend contemplating for however long it would take to toss off my dumbass word-thoughts. The one idea I found most enchanting had the working title On Second Thought We Will Take The Money: What Happened To Generation X. Basically it would be an examination of how a group of people for whom not selling out or participating in a bankrupt system was an epochal rallying cry wound up becoming just as detestable as the sell-outs they swore they would never become. (This was inspired mostly by a series of profiles in various culture sections about Gen X acts who all suddenly discovered that they could get along with the other people they were in bands with the last time they were financially successful; you know who I’m talking about and you surely laughed as I did at the accompanying photos of all those deeply lined faces styled in the flannel of yesteryear. Incidentally, and I don’t want to get too off-topic here so let’s try to remember to find our way back at the end of the parentheses to the larger issue of selling out and karma etc. and what it means to be a sincere person in our capitalist society, although now that I realize that is what this week’s newsletter is about I am very seriously considering scrapping the whole thing altogether, because really, [MAKES EXTENDED REMIX JERKING-OFF MOTION THAT GOES ALL THE WAY FROM WRIST TO SHOULDER]. Anyway, and now we’ve returned to the part that started with “Incidentally,” I was talking about this with a younger friend who assured me that it was a great idea because every time anyone mentions the boomers or millennials on Twitter these days the second or third response is ALWAYS someone from Generation X bitching and moaning about how forgotten they are, so there is an automatic audience of whiny-ass people who are ready to buy a book affirming their demographic identity which they will almost certainly not read, which, as a potential writer of such book, sounds like a situation where everybody wins. Alright, we’re about to exit the parentheses now and when we come out of it we will be back at the part about selling out. I think just to make it easier on all of us we’ll skip to a whole new paragraph and try to start fresh, okay? Okay.)
The more I thought about it the more I realized I was less interested in the nostalgia-trip idea (a false one, in any event; for every one person who idiotically subscribed to whatever bullshit ideals we thought were the defining precepts of “Generation X,” there were nine more who were focused on less lofty goals such as “graduating college” or “paying for it” or “surviving,” etc.) of how a generation learned to love selling out and more interested in learning how one actually goes about selling out in the first place. What are the compromises one makes? How does one convince oneself what they’re doing doesn’t devalue the principles by which they have loudly advertised their lives up until now? Is it the semi-aniline leather interior or the wood-trimmed steering wheel with matching accents that gets you to sign on the line? It would in fact be a how-to manual for sell-outs, written by someone who had a hard time understanding them.
And you can see the problem there: It would be disgustingly self-serving. I am, to be sure, someone so stuck in the mire of rumination and reflection that the phrase “painfully self-aware” was created at the University of California--Berkeley’s Language Lab in 1988 specifically to describe me. My inability to take any action without worrying about how it would contradict the previous stands I trumpeted to everyone has been self-defeating and a disappointment in its own right. Maybe the only reason I haven’t sold out is because I’m too afraid to accept that selling out is part of growing up. Maybe I’ve boxed myself in with these imbecilic ideas about purity and self-respect so that I don’t have to really risk anything. Maybe I’m using “selling out” as a shield to stop myself from having to try.
But of course even engaging with those questions in an honest way seems gross. Like, look at me, I’m so pure and honest I won’t do the disgusting things everyone else does all the time, please help me learn how to be disingenuous like you, etc. And, on the other hand, anyone who is successful at selling out is so good at creating a world in which they are actually somehow speaking truth to power from inside (and somehow forgetting that once you’re on the inside you are power, and whatever you think you’re doing to unsettle it is actually only further entrenching it) that the lessons they have to offer are inaccessible even to themselves, because they’ve repressed them so they can live with the contradictions. There’s no winning, and, as is the case in so many situations, it doesn’t even make a difference at the end. Power perpetuates itself by absorbing its critics and marginalizing those who remain outside its system, and we are all to some extent inside the system, and who wants to spend a whole book being reminded of that? Certainly not someone thinking about writing it!
The problem, I guess, with doing the right thing is that virtue is its own reward and anything that has the phrase “its own reward” in it sucks. It’s the plain yogurt of rewards. We know it’s better for us but fuck if we don’t want the sweet sugar-soaked fruit at the bottom of the other, more sell-outy yogurts. Sitting there with the plain taste of virtue in our mouths gives nothing more than a fleeting feeling of having done something for the right reasons while wondering why we did it in the first place. I don’t even know if the post office redelivered the envelope I brought them. I mean, I hope it did, because it felt like there was an ID in there that someone needed, but who knows? Maybe they just threw it in the trash, and all my time at Window 10 was spent for nothing. I guess Window 10 is carrying a lot of weight here as an analogy, but shmuck that I am I know that I will probably be waiting on line in front of it again and again until I die, watching out the window as the rest of the world breezes by.
Okay, that’s all I got. This is not, by the way, the real newsletter yet. That is going to be a fully consumer-facing high touch digest of learnings that will help you execute on everything that you've decided is a block in your life. Anyway, as ever, I thank you for your attention.