B.S. 1000

It is universally acknowledged that in addition to a major, all undergraduates major in bullshit. It does not have to be this way. Every student has imagined aversion of herself that never misses a house party or a reading assignment. Thankfully, every technological advance of the past 20 years has, in some way, made it easier to imitate preparedness for class on a half hours' notice. 

This is not to say that the old referents we have of university life—I picture, here, young men in school-colored sweaters carrying a stack of thick books for young women in hoop skirts seated in silent, venerable, library rooms—is entirely outdated. Why, to "live in the library" has become a somewhat trendy badge of honor. The day a security guard got fired for locking a girl in after closing, may very well been the proudest day of the lucky sophomore's life. To become such a fixture to the site of serious learning that your personhood is disavowed, that you are forgotten entirely, that you become part of the architecture, can be worth the strangest of cool points within snobby, young, literate social circles

I would say, however, that all our age of instant access to knowledge encourages a new standard for the kind of skills it should take to merit a degree. Bullshitting is, I say with no squeamishness, is one of the fundamental life skills of the liberal arts major. If by your last semester, you can't orate competently for half the morning about a book you've never read, you would not pass my class. Period. If you cannot piggyback off of a classmate's comment, derail your Lit course with a 30-minutes discussion of social-psychology and make your teacher thank you for it, you aren't ready for a degree. Period.

Because, let me warn you, young professionals have bullshit down to a science.

Tunes today:

SOMETHING HAPPENED--IT WAS HORRIBLE AND OVER MUCH TOO QUICKLY

When blogging these days, it is advisable to always do your best. Give your post a clear theme, for instance. Maybe offer a thesis statement humbly masquerading as a Seinfeldian observation of modern culture. Open up a favorite book and steal a few lines you like. Don't attribute the quotes. Don't say: this is important, my thesis, so read it with care! That way, if it sucks, no one will know how much you mind. Most of the time, it will suck.

Take lately: I haven't written a new post in three weeks, but thanks to a few kind "Stumblers," and that I comment often on the many blogs run by friends, acquaintances, and writers I both hate and admire, my readership has undergone a steady but unprecedented bump. I am a little uncomfortable with this. With very few exceptions, I do not write for a general audience; I write for the narrowest selection of my friends. My last post, for instance, WHAT MORE HAVE I TO SEE THAT I'VE SEEN ALREADY?, had all the cultural relevance of a tweet (Twitter circa 2006, pre-social activism, when every life-detail could be proclaimed as a controversial, post-privacy, evolutionary statement). And because it was the newest post, people viewed it. A lot.

Suddenly, I feel the pressure of needing something to say.

-----

I've read a lot of blogs lately by people sort of like me—we are mid-twenties, educated, and uncertain—that have attempted to reflect on what being like me means. There is always a market for article cobblers who tap into some sort of zeitgeist (he word itself has become unspeakably lame). Blog factories are addicted to it. Thought Catalog, as much as I enjoy it, is guilty of indulging geist-riders to an unsavory extent. In its own way, it is perhaps an art from to sum up what [mid-twenties, educated and uncertain] are thinking. Like a lazy standup comedian, blogs like TC thrive by corroborating what we already believe about the mid-twenties reality. At best, readers leave with a little insight into what they believe, how they believe, and why. More often, I fear they leave with something new to take for granted, or go apeshit in the comments section. 

I have gone apeshit in the comments section. I've gotten more likes for it than anything I have ever shared on Facebook. The market is there and its need is big and hungry.

Fueling the market is an underlying agreement that we, the people like me, are at least in it together. But what are we in together? If I am to draw an axiom, through induction, about people like me from the way we talk about our lives on the internet, it would be this: we are defined by small regrets. We regret our liberal arts degrees, the amount of time we spent online, the records we bought because our friend suggested them, the global issues that became memes that we once worried over, the coeds who wrote shitty fiction and heard what they wanted to hear when we said they "might have potential," the nights we made a pact to "say YES to anything." Most of all, we regret 70-90% of the people we've gone home with and 100% of the people we've loved. Romantically, sexually, spiritually we must only be capable of bad moves.

I don't deny that this is an awkward age; we all expected to be stronger, slicker, and less longsuffering by now. I don't deny that there is even something beautiful about our awkwardness, how clumsily we move through the world, how frankly we love and how we bruise when disappointed. But I am dismayed, truly, by how ready we are to put it all into perspective.

 I encounter too often people like me who try to sum it all up and close the books on an age they consider to have been the thrashing of their lives. I have seen too many once interesting people make up their minds to take themselves seriously.

Here I am at twenty-something, looking back on the last bunch of years. I made a lot of mistakes. I have been arrogant, reckless, and cowardly, and naïve and I have burned bridges, squandered opportunities, woken up I jail cells and hospital rooms, and humiliated myself, my kind, and my loved ones. Other days, things were not so bad. And if I could reach back and erase only little bits, I would try not to do so. Somewhere, in an alternate universe, there is a me who did not do those things, but I do not know him. He is not the me that I have slowly come to really root for and like. If I could, would always let myself be scared and hurt. If I could, I would only erase the times when I was cruel.

If I have a comment to add to the dialogue on our geist, it is this: I think that one of the biggest traps of your mid-twenties is thinking that you have yourself more-or-less figured out. I know that it seems mature to know yourself, but it just isn't. Keep trying. Keep fucking up. Keep letting it hurt.

Even if you know yourself, just ignore it. It's not good to always know the truth about yourself. It's better to lie to yourself just a little, I think. It's brave to try to surprise yourself. In fact, you should do your best. You should tell yourself that you can still do anything. It's always a lie, but it's usually a good one.