“The biggest thing separating people from their artistic ambitions is not a lack of talent. It’s the lack of a deadline. Give someone an enormous task, a supportive community, and a friendly-yet-firm due date, and miracles will happen.”
Things are far worse for those graduating from college this spring. On top of the vanished rite of passage, these graduates will face a non-existent job market, with the overwhelming majority of them left to languish for months or even years trapped in an antechamber separating their educations from their careers. The economic peril is serious, but so is the psychological torment.
The average Times reader sneering at those desert lawns from the Upper West Side might want to think about the canned tomatoes, avocados, and almonds in his or her kitchen before denouncing the irresponsible lifestyles of the California emigres. Because the truth is California doesn’t have a water problem. We all do.
There was the time I was in a Barnes and Noble in Portland and a man buying some manga books seemed to be a couple dollars short. I fished some money out of my pocket and paid the difference. He started to cry. “I’ve just recovered from cancer,” he told me. “I was buying these books tonight to restart my normal life. I’m supposed to begin looking for a job tomorrow.” It was an experience far more gratifying to me than the first time I saw my own name up on a bookstore marquee for a signing.
My Uber ride gave me a glimpse. A glimpse of peace. A glimpse of love. A glimpse of understanding. A glimpse of beautiful diversity.
Today, it’s nearly impossible to build anything in San Francisco. Infrastructure projects balloon indefinitely. In 2001, the city proposed a new bus lane on Van Ness, one of the main arteries. Nearly 20 years later, the new lane’s opening is slated for 2021; Van Ness remains a mess of potholes, equipment, and detours. It wasn’t always this way. In the 1930s, the Golden Gate Bridge was built in three and a half years. To commemorate its completion, as an encore, the city created an artificial island in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Treasure Island took under three years to finish.
Well, if you’re anything like me, you’ve tried a lot of things because you had some kind of result you wanted to achieve. And, if you’re anything like me, that was always why you stopped.
Don’t let guilt get in the way of understanding and being a part of humanity. As I so distinctly experienced and shared, I felt stunted and numbed to the point where I, as a writer, couldn’t write about any of the disasters of this pandemic. I started every conversation with, “I’m so lucky in the grand scheme of things…” and “There are so many that are worse off than I am.” But that guilt prevented me from putting myself in the shoes of others. There are going to be drawdowns, low points, periods of depression and anxiety. We are all being impacted differently, which means that we are all going to need to handle this differently. That is OK, and that is necessary, even.
But what really takes my breath away is how out-of-touch the daily debates on the internet were — “the discourse,” as some of us were taught to call it in college. Among the things the pandemic has clarified for me is the decadence, as my colleague Ross Douthat has described it, of our old culture war. Many of the battles of the past decade now seem self-indulgent and stagnant; others a waste of time.
Unless you’re watching a panel discussion, it’s usually impossible to look at everyone in a group during in-person interactions. Typically, your gaze rests on the one main speaker and then everyone else is in the periphery or even behind you. But thanks to the glories (and more concerning attributes) of Zoom, you can see everyone all at once, along with one person you never usually observe—yourself.This creates visual overload because when we look at a screen, whether it’s a computer or a TV screen, our minds are accustomed to processing what is in front of us as a unified whole. But a Zoom meeting in gallery view isn’t one unified whole. It’s the equivalent of trying to watch 5, 10, 20, or more different TV shows, side-by-side, meanwhile checking a mirror to see how you look. This is incredibly exhausting.