The thing at stake in the “why not buck up and innovate” question⁰¹ is a class issue that’s much harder to quantify because it doesn’t tie directly to income or race or religion or birth order or immigrant status (though it may relate a bit more directly to the education of your parents and their parents.) In fact, although it relates to all those visible things; it’s ultimately something internal, something personal and characteristic made of you plus the way all these things define your circumstances. The suggestion to become an entrepreneur if you can’t get a job out of college is as meaningless to many people as it would be to suggest a career as a pharaoh or a lobbyist.

Entrepreneurship with a capital E requires a certain complex sense of entitlement that only comes from privilege. At its best, it is the entitlement to think for yourself, to be critical enough of the world around you, to want to fix it somehow. Uglier, is the entitlement it takes to inconvenience or potentially harm others in pursuit of your single-minded vision.

Critical thinking is the whopper though. Because of that, dismissing college is a huge mistake, especially dismissing liberal arts education. College is the first moment a lot of people experience the explicit permission they need to think critically for the first time. (Once you get the hang of it, of course, you can’t stop.) It’s vital to make it there, but ironically, to make it there you have to spend years practicing the antithesis of critical thought. You put your head down and become as obedient, compliant, and unquestioning as possible to make the right grades and tell admissions what they want to hear. If your family was very religious or very strict, you are probably already well versed in unquestioning obedience as a moral imperative, especially if you were a girl. Corporal punishment combined with a certain kind of religious belief (i.e. Repeated explanations of the falseness of your own perception combined with an elaborate vision of a contradictory, always-present invisible world knowable only by faith.) effectively makes critical thought feel like madness. If you belong to a minority culture, finding fault with your immediate world can be interpreted as disloyalty or shame. It’s risky bordering on crazy.

If you’re poor especially, you probably went to a school obsessed with standards, and so got a fine education in superficial thought and conformity. To get the scholarship you need, you absolutely cannot risk failure, so become an accomplished little pleaser. If you’re lucky once you get to college, you stumble into the class of a teacher who will provoke you and demand you think for yourself for the first time in order to get the good grades you are used to getting by studying day and night. You will make your first C but everything will suddenly be different. Different and not always good. If your parents are religious, your new capacity for analysis will reaffirm their belief that a secular education, or really any education at all, is dangerous to the health of your soul. And so it is.⁰²

The people you grew up with may begin to be wary of you and your ability to find fault with the world they say is just fine—good enough for them—but don’t really give much thought to. (Your mother will pray for you.) At the same time, you’re still you. The person who did what it took to get where you are now. Ta-Nehisi Coates writes well about how the skills that get you to grownuphood might be the same ones that get you kicked out:

And then there’s the fear of that other world, that sense that if you discard those practices, you have discarded some of yourself, and done it in pursuit of a world that you may not master.

It takes a long time to adjust to your new self, a self you don’t necessarily like very much. You feel compromised and sad most of the time. You have to put your head down and trudge through a no man’s land for a long time, maybe years, getting used to your new self. You can’t go home, but you still smell of home, so you can’t pass unnoticed in the vivid world you’ve aspired to your whole life. During these years, the best thing you can do is work quietly and well alongside the kind of contented people who aim to hold a tolerable day and go home to their families at a decent hour. You repay your parents, and pay down your student loans, and at some point the registration of your soul shifts, finally aligning, and you realize you are the adult you are pretending to be. You are capable, not only of criticism and curiosity, but, for the first time, it occurs to you to make the world you live in more like the place you always imagined.

And all of that can take a long time, during which it is still important to eat.

Even I begin to feel transparent and ghostly after working alone for too many days. Throw in a migraine and a 3am conviction I should have gone to art school (nope) and I start to feel lost. The comparatively small internet of ten years ago was of immediate comfort in those moments, a place for introverts to connect in our own weird ways. The New Big Internet is more complicated. While I like the anonymity and enjoy many of the technologies for contact with other humans, the rigid architecture of the social structures can be grueling. I watch with admiration the way some people effortlessly navigate the relentless online social architecture. I think to myself, self, I could never do that (sober), and that these new worlds increasingly reflect the external worlds of parties and conferences and networking events and book tours in which the same people are, and always have been, equally adept. They are able to collect and cherish connections, to leave agreeable traces of themselves everywhere. They are charming and lovable. I usually admire without envy. I wish I knew the secret language of those public unions, but I don’t and if I did, I’d to be someone else.

When we set about naming our impending baby though, we wondered why it felt so important to choose a name not shared with many others and, like every other parent we know, couldn’t really come up with an answer. But I am starting to think it has something to do with an ill-articulated awareness of the growth of culture around a certain kind of person, an evolution of The Lonely Crowd‘s “other directed” human. (Also it has do with me being a Heather from the seventies.) A new kind of person whose existence, even consciousness, depends on their situation within and ability to influence their social setting. I think we are foggily aware there is a new exigency in recognition and the ability to build an unambiguously unique history. Naming your kid something genuinely nuts might be visionary.⁰¹

Don’t giggle. I think this might be more urgent than it sounds. There’s plenty to indicate that our literal worth might one day depend on our ability to scramble for social status by obsequious do-gooding in the direction of the right people (the depressing economic rendition of ingenious, lovable charm). Wealth already depends, in a more tangled way, on making oneself appealing to influential people and learning how to guess who might one day be influential in order to make small favors go farther,⁰² but there’s a lot of well-intentioned effort to make sure that the connection is even more direct and quantifiable. As horrifying as projects like The Whuffie Bank are to me,⁰³ I am a nice middle class parent whose ideals turn out to be not so stiff in the face of the oncoming inevitable as I thought they were. A lot of them are already lying flat in the street, covered with tread marks. Like most parents, I want my child to succeed where I didn’t. Projects like that confirm my suspicion that something in me is being selected against. If this is what the future looks like, perhaps Aureliano was giving up too easily. Maybe I should have considered Astrolabe a bit more seriously.

~

I just cannot stop thinking about Elif Batuman’s essay in the London Review of Books.

I got off the train in Soho and walked down West Broadway past Canal Street with a crowd of others, all of us clutching our cell phones. In my memory I hit redial a hundred times before I got through to Victor, who was in a client’s conference room uptown, watching television. He told me about the flights to Washington. At some arbitrary point, the movement of the crowd slowed and we stood still in the street. The man beside me moved closer and said, It’s Osama bin Ladin. Massoud is dead. The black painted metal sidewalk where we were standing deflected slightly as someone shifted their weight. We all stood looking up into the air, south, down West Broadway. The top of the first tower tilted suddenly at an angle I never saw afterward in any photograph, and I said into the phone, It’s going to fall. I heard Victor say, She says it’s falling and someone else say No, that’s impossible, it will be okay. And then it fell and I think he heard the screams and said, We can’t see it yet, it’s still okay on TV.

I don’t remember anything else until I was much further north, at Houston. Crowds of us, streaming north, weeping, turned to watch the other tower fall, too far away now to see anything human in it. A heavily pregnant woman trudged past me and I felt more sorry for her than anyone else. She is going to bring a child into this hell, I thought. She will have to live with herself for that terrible act, and I thought of the stories of slave women killing their children.

Later, so many emails and phone calls from far away friends, desperate to situate the events within a broken or evil US foreign policy, greedy for the symmetry and symbolism; while when I closed my eyes, I could still see the far away specks of real, not symbolic, human bodies falling. And every perfect September in New York, the sick panic would catch me by surprise; surprisingly sudden, surprisingly the same.

Until one day it didn’t. For three years now, the yellow September light and the hard blue dome of sky awaken a sharp recollection of impending labour, the wild high and pure happiness of late pregnancy. I’d started my maternity leave, but there was no baby yet. The city was mine for those last weeks. I walked and walked and all of New York was as excited as I was. Elderly ladies stopped to wish me luck, younger women to ask how I was feeling. Everyone wanted to congratulate me and everyone wanted to tell me I was carrying a boy—a big boy, look at that belly, all out front! Look at that, they said, A boy for sure. A three hour last hurrah of a lunch at Eleven Madison, eavesdropping on rich kids, their table littered with half filled wine bottles. The baby, still a stranger, pressing his improbably large feet outward, stretching the thin skin around my bellybutton, visible through my shirt, wholly protected. Afterward, eating ice cream and walking up Lexington to Kalustyan’s to buy spices and pickled lemons.

And I so want to remember that perfect anticipation and limpid happiness forever. But already, I can’t summon a clear recollection of the end of pregnancy, though this weather and the smell of Central Park in September send me flashes of it. I picture myself running away now to arrest the last of those memories before they are lost to me through the insistent present. The longer I walk through the Conservatory in pursuit of them, the deeper they are buried beneath the touch of Aure’s wet sleeve and cold hand, the crunch of crabapples under my shoes, a kernel of visceral maternal anxiety, and the misweighted heft of a stroller full of crackers and water bottles.