There's only the sun that gives shape to the moon
Either I never shook the cold that began in November or I caught some other opportunistic bug in the process of recovering, but I am definitely sick. I made it to yesterday's rehearsal and then I came home, made dinner with ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch, and fell asleep on the couch. I had just finished reading one of my holiday presents from rushthatspeaks, the Strugatskys' thoroughly delightful Monday Starts on Saturday (1965). Awake later in the evening, I re-read three out of the first four books of Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's Death Gate Cycle (1990–94) and unhappily I think it was weird for my mood. I slept badly. Today I have done nothing except work for a couple of hours and feed the cats. I don't even seem able to think about or watch movies.
I am feeling alienated by, of all things, an extremely well-written article on millennial burnout. Despite thinking that I belonged to the generation just above millennials, I fall within the age limits delineated by the article; I recognize many of the attitudes, expectations, and pressures detailed therein. I don't argue that I am drowning in no time, no money, no security, no respite, and that it makes me feel like a failure on deep existential levels when honestly I don't think even someone with my problems should have to worry so much and so constantly about just not going broke month after month after month. But I looked at the article's generalizations of the key features of millennial life and aside from the crushing economic horror and accompanying self-despair they were all about as familiar to me as an Instagram filter (I didn't go to grad school because it was expected of me in the American cursus honorum, I went to grad school because I loved what I was studying and was shocked to receive grief from my department for not being more business-minded about it; I have no emotional attachment to a cool job or a job that fits my self-image, just to a job that makes enough for me to live on and doesn't make my life miserable; I don't have a close relationship with my phone or with mainstream forms of social media and I am allergic to the concept of all-hours availability; I really don't worry about curating my life) and it left me instantly feeling that this article was not written to include or to aid me; it envisions a different kind of person drowning; I won't be seen. Probably all this means is that I should not have clicked on the article in my current mental state, but here we are. The bit about the cognitive load of being poor was new to me, plausible, and upsetting.
I concluded a couple of years ago that a pulp style was definitely one of the things that ended up in my own writing before I even thought about such things; it was the similes. There is a lovely note in this annotated edition of The Big Sleep (1939) that Rob got me, about the American vernacular "tall talk" that Chandler alternately condensed or elaborated into the colorful comparisons he's known for. I'm still not sure what to do with this example from The Little Sister (1949): "She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looked by moonlight."
spatch, and fell asleep on the couch. I had just finished reading one of my holiday presents from rushthatspeaks, the Strugatskys' thoroughly delightful Monday Starts on Saturday (1965). Awake later in the evening, I re-read three out of the first four books of Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's Death Gate Cycle (1990–94) and unhappily I think it was weird for my mood. I slept badly. Today I have done nothing except work for a couple of hours and feed the cats. I don't even seem able to think about or watch movies.I am feeling alienated by, of all things, an extremely well-written article on millennial burnout. Despite thinking that I belonged to the generation just above millennials, I fall within the age limits delineated by the article; I recognize many of the attitudes, expectations, and pressures detailed therein. I don't argue that I am drowning in no time, no money, no security, no respite, and that it makes me feel like a failure on deep existential levels when honestly I don't think even someone with my problems should have to worry so much and so constantly about just not going broke month after month after month. But I looked at the article's generalizations of the key features of millennial life and aside from the crushing economic horror and accompanying self-despair they were all about as familiar to me as an Instagram filter (I didn't go to grad school because it was expected of me in the American cursus honorum, I went to grad school because I loved what I was studying and was shocked to receive grief from my department for not being more business-minded about it; I have no emotional attachment to a cool job or a job that fits my self-image, just to a job that makes enough for me to live on and doesn't make my life miserable; I don't have a close relationship with my phone or with mainstream forms of social media and I am allergic to the concept of all-hours availability; I really don't worry about curating my life) and it left me instantly feeling that this article was not written to include or to aid me; it envisions a different kind of person drowning; I won't be seen. Probably all this means is that I should not have clicked on the article in my current mental state, but here we are. The bit about the cognitive load of being poor was new to me, plausible, and upsetting.
I concluded a couple of years ago that a pulp style was definitely one of the things that ended up in my own writing before I even thought about such things; it was the similes. There is a lovely note in this annotated edition of The Big Sleep (1939) that Rob got me, about the American vernacular "tall talk" that Chandler alternately condensed or elaborated into the colorful comparisons he's known for. I'm still not sure what to do with this example from The Little Sister (1949): "She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looked by moonlight."
no subject
When we talk about millennial student debt, we’re not just talking about the payments that keep millennials from participating in American “institutions” like home ownership or purchasing diamonds. It’s also about the psychological toll of realizing that something you’d been told, and came to believe yourself, would be “worth it” — worth the loans, worth the labor, worth all that self-optimization — isn’t.
Yeah, see, no one I was close to ever really tried to sell me on that. There are advantages to coming from a family of artists and drop-outs. (An advantage that Kit will have: J is the only one of the three of us who actually finished a college degree, and it took him two tries.) I applied to one (1) university because I was clearly supposed to, and certainly everyone in my high school was very invested in going to (the right) college, but no one was hugely surprised when I quit and got a job and was much happier. Some of my relatives succeeded in following their artsy dreams and some failed, but all were very clear on the best path being the one that was true to yourself, even if it meant you sometimes had rodent roommates or other people thought you were weird.
The gut-punches in that article for me were the recollections of what 2003 and 2008 were like. I think 2008 was the year we only paid rent because UI was extended for people like J who'd been unemployed more than a year, and we still had to go through our state senator to get the state dept. of labor to keep cutting us those vital, vital checks. And I don't have student loan debt, but all the credit card debt we're still paying off has its roots in 2003; when I moved to California in 2001, I had $10k in savings, and when I moved back to New York three and a half years later, I'd cashed out a small bit of inherited stock and was something like $20k in debt. Terrible, uncertain times.
There is no “off the clock” when at all hours you could be documenting your on-brand experiences or tweeting your on-brand observations.
This has been my M.O. since before the phrase "social media" was coined, I was very good at it and it worked out very well for me, and I have spent the past two years extricating myself from it as much as possible, because it's no longer fun or safe. A thing that's missing from this analysis of it is the loss of the kinder, gentler, slower internet that was discussed in the other piece you linked to recently. Being "LiveJournal famous" was extremely different from being viral on Twitter.
no subject
Same. My parents were extremely supportive about all stages of college and grad school, including not. I went to my so-called fallback school and had a wonderful time. I went to grad school and expected to have a wonderful time and I think it might actually be an institutional problem on their part that instead I got chronic illness and PTSD. Which is part of what I found alienating about the article. I'm not feeling betrayed by the American dream. I'm just feeling financially desperate and overworked to the point of insensibility and furious about living in a society where I am expected to be proud that I can take the hits and keep moving like some avatar of the Protestant work ethic in which I don't even believe. I don't feel like a failure because I don't own a house. I feel like a failure because I can't get my head above water and I'm too exhausted to do art and I worry all the time that in the event of a catastrophe I would not be able to protect the people I care for. (And I feel like a failure because my brain is always trying to tell me I don't justify the wear and tear on other people of my continued existence, but I suspect some of that would persist even in a context of economic stability. I'd be happy to test that hypothesis, of course.)
And I don't have student loan debt, but all the credit card debt we're still paying off has its roots in 2003; when I moved to California in 2001, I had $10k in savings, and when I moved back to New York three and a half years later, I'd cashed out a small bit of inherited stock and was something like $20k in debt. Terrible, uncertain times.
That sounds awful.
[Tiny Wittgenstein was here.]
A thing that's missing from this analysis of it is the loss of the kinder, gentler, slower internet that was discussed in the other piece you linked to recently. Being "LiveJournal famous" was extremely different from being viral on Twitter.
Agreed. Perhaps you should write about that.
no subject
I went to grad school and expected to have a wonderful time and I think it might actually be an institutional problem on their part that instead I got chronic illness and PTSD.
I think every grad student should have a personal therapist funded by, but not affiliated with, their institution. Everyone I know who's gotten a graduate degree has felt absolutely brutalized by the process and come out with new or more severe mental illness. It's a dreadful problem.
I used to think I would enjoy grad school too, if I could only get through undergrad. I haven't believed in that fantasy for a very long time. :/
Agreed. Perhaps you should write about that.
What, and risk going viral?
(Kidding and yet... really not kidding.)
no subject
I put him outside. He won't freeze. We have a friendly neighborhood cat.
Everyone I know who's gotten a graduate degree has felt absolutely brutalized by the process and come out with new or more severe mental illness. It's a dreadful problem.
It is astonishing how many people with this story I met after leaving grad school and how many of them I didn't meet before going. My parents thought I should take a gap year and I just wanted to read archaic Greek dialects. There's no way to know.
(My mother did grad school without permanent ill effect, but that was in the 1960's and she still has the story about personally having to assemble her committee in somebody's living room.)
(Kidding and yet... really not kidding.)
I had originally ended my comment with "Not to be Dreamwidth famous, just because I want to read it," and clearly I should have left it in.