Hey bud,
Listen, I know you’re not a real person, but I feel like you were real enough that I need to say what I was going to say to you…
We are at a bar in a restaurant. I’d just walked in and ordered a whiskey sour. In this dream I’m a regular. I know the bartender. I know the other regulars.
You’ve been sitting at this bar, nervously, and you say aloud that you’re nervous because you’re waiting for a date to arrive and you don’t think you look nice enough for her.
I turn and ask you if I can give you a look over. “Elevator eyes” I call it. I ask your permission because I remember the feeling of already being self-conscious and then having an older man I’m not remotely interested in look me over from head to toe and back as though he were assessing a product on the shelf to possess and not gazing upon another child of God.
You give me permission and I take you in: you’re tall and lanky, perhaps a little sallow from not enough time in the sun and too much time in front of a computer screen. You have long ashy blond hair and a somewhat straggly beard. You’re extremely average looking to my eyes, and also simply not the type of man I would be interested in if I were looking, but you’re not an unattractive man. Beyond that, you’ve clearly groomed yourself, even if the beard needs some work, and you’re wearing a surprisingly fashionable suit— burgundy, with a linen shirt unbuttoned enough to have been a choice, but not so much as to be absurd. That tells me you have put in some effort for this dream woman you’re waiting for. That you’ve invested in nice clothes for purposes other than a job interview every three years and the occasional funeral. But none of it feels ostentatious or particularly out of context in the space we’re in. You’re not being flashy.
I assure you that you look fine, and that you don’t have anything to worry about. Maybe you feel like you’re not jacked enough, or that your average features put you at a disadvantage. Maybe you’ve fallen for the arguments of clueless young men who make their living spending all day in the gym, dialing in their nutrition, and taking steroids to look a certain way so they can go on the internet and tell other clueless young men that the source of all their problems is that they don’t look hot enough…but if you buy their program for $69 and subscribe to their discord for $15 a month, they’ll teach you how to look like them and all your problems will go away.
You begin to bemoan how you feel like you’ve fallen behind. How things are impossible, and you don’t know why you’re even here waiting for this dream woman because you aren’t in a position to offer her anything. I ask you how old you are. You tell me you’re 23 years old.
I remember being 23 and feeling like my life was slipping away and that I was amounting to nothing. I remember feeling like all I had before me were dead end jobs that didn’t hardly pay the bills.
I take a sip from my drink and tell you I was 23 once too, having come of age at the onset of the Great Recession. I remember feeling like I had no good choices and how hard it was to get by. I tell you that, in many ways, things are worse now for young people. There was still entry level work. You have to compete against a computer who never gets sick or has an original thought. I only had to compete against people in more desperate circumstances who would or could take a lower wage. And a gallon of gasoline was 48% of the federal minimum wage back then. Now it’s 55%. 7% matters when you’re just starting out.
You get up to go use the restroom, and I wake up before we can finish talking. But I can’t stop thinking about you. About how many young men in the waking world are going through what you’re going through.
We haven’t created a very good world for you to emerge into adulthood in. As a millennial it’s easy for me to say that the burden of that isn’t on me or my generation… we’re only just now starting to gain some political power as we enter our forties. But that doesn’t mean we haven’t had a role to play in all of this.
You’re staring down an economy that, but for the hype loop of AI pumping up the value of a handful of tech stocks, would probably be in freefall right now. And those very same AI dependent companies aren’t necessarily promising you a good deal, even as they promise to revolutionize every aspect of our lives and society. Revolutions don’t go well for everyone involved.
Meanwhile, you’re staring down climate change. You’ve never known a summer that wasn’t hotter than the one before. You know things are only going to get worse in your lifetime because the generations before you have done precious little to turn this thing around, and in recent years have jammed the accelerator and ripped out the brakes.
I’m not even going to get into the politics of it all, but you know, dude. Even if you’re one of those young men who voted for this… you know.
You’re lonely. You want companionship. So you went on the apps (which are worse than they were when I was on them. Sorry, bud.) and managed to convince this young woman to meet you in the real world. And to you it feels like a fool’s errand because you feel like you’re not good enough and none of this matters…but maybe, just maybe, you might be able to spend an evening with a beautiful woman who might offer you comfort and shared joy in a world that is offering you mostly isolation and tension.
That tells me there’s still some small hope for you.
So I’m writing you a letter to tell you what I hope you can hear from me, knowing that you’re not real and that my audience doesn’t really look like you, but maybe, jus maybe, the real person who needs to read this will find it. I am an earnest, cringe millennial, after all.
At 23 years old, you’ve been an adult just long enough for the excitement of self-determination to have worn off, but not long enough to have real perspective. You were a high schooler when COVID hit. You only barely remember the Obama administration, and your whole childhood was shaped by the economic chaos of late stage capitalism. You have Gen X parents, who were cynical enough about the world that they never promised you prosperity if you just followed the success sequence. My generation inherited a world we thought we could make better and in which we could do better, if we just put our shoulders to the wheel. Your generation is inheriting a world where you have no choice but to change things just to be okay, and there’s no promise that even if you put your everything into it that you’ll have anything to show for it.
You’re feeling the weight of the world, and that’s an impossible burden to bear.
And I don’t have any easy answers for you.
But it makes sense that you would be looking for them.
It makes sense that you would want to hear confident pronouncements of how to survive, even thrive. How to make money and gain the security and power it offers. How to transform your body into a more powerful, less vulnerable looking one. How to be confident enough that you don’t have to worry about women rejecting you because you will be irresistible, one way or another. Because the world in hard, you need to find ways to be tough.
I understand that appeal. I was 23 years old once, in a world that was also hard, if not as hard as the one you’re 23 years old in. I was taken in by different easy answers, ones that are also still trending, offering a new generation of struggling young people a lifestyle that makes sense, but doesn’t offer any more real flourishing or liberation than the easy answers that have taken over your algorithm.
There are no easy answers.
The other day I was sitting in a coffee shop (in the real world, not a dream) and saw a gaggle of college-age girls on a summer trip together. I realized that, if any of them were newly 18 years old, legal adults, that I was now twice their age. That I had lived their entire lifetime outside my parents’ household, at least as far as the IRS was concerned. I thought about how much life I had lived, and the things I had learned about the world in that time.
Here’s what I want you to understand: the scale of your life is far longer than you can comprehend in your early twenties. Right now, the weight of your adulthood has set in, but you haven’t learned yet how to carry it.
You feel like you’re behind because you’re comparing yourself to people who were given different equipment than you by fate. If you were running on a track and some yahoo on a bike passed you by, you wouldn’t fault yourself for being slower. Likewise, if you were on that bike and got passed by a guy in a sports car, you wouldn’t attribute your progress to a failure to pedal fast enough.
But here’s the thing about that sports car: at best, you can maybe fit one other person in it, and it’s not a very comfortable ride. It’s isolating, even if it seems to offer you a better way forward.
The advantages that you may be jealous of offer an easier race for the body, but a more lonely, more isolated one. And holding your own, tender body to the standards of those machines is pointless. Making peace with your own two legs and running the race you’ve been given to run will open you up to a far better experience.
Because, you see, the thing about running on your own two legs is that there’s nothing keeping you from running the race with others. If you chill out and keep pace alongside them rather than trying to get ahead of them, you’ll find companionship and mutual support you couldn’t have imagined. You might even find true friendship and fidelity along the way.
And what I can tell you from having run this race a little longer is that that is the real dream. That is the only thing that will make this world softer, is if we learn to run together.
I hope the date went well.
Cheers,
Beck