Postcard from New Haven

I am writing this from New Haven, Connecticut, a place I have some happy memories attached to. I also love a gritty port town, especially one with excellent pizza and used bookstores. This time I am here with a group of students from my high school competing in a model congress competition at Yale. While I have enjoyed walking around the campus, eating at Frank Pepe's and other fine dining establishments, browsing the Grey Matter bookstore, and drinking Common Grounds' coffee, I am feeling pangs of dread and a certain kind of spiritual suffocation. 

Some of this comes from students in the model congress seeing the whole thing as some kind of joke. During the presidential election at the start a student gave a lazy, tossed-off speech threatening to invade Canada. Evidently he thought this was funny. It was telling that the three girls in the running constructed serious speeches full of ideas, while two of the four boys recited MAGA rhetoric without proposing anything concrete. It seemed to encapsulate the rising tide of misogyny in this country that reacts to girls being better at a lot of things because they actually work hard by trying to subjugate them instead of demanding more from young men. 

Other dread comes from the stark contrasts one sees walking around New Haven. Our hotel is near the Green, where one often sees homeless people and poor and working-class residents catching the bus just two blocks from a university with a $41 billion endowment. I have seen starker contrasts of wealth and poverty in Manhattan, but the fact that the contrast comes from a "non-profit" educational institution just seems to make it worse. The whole scene lays this country's failures bare.

Even worse, today is the dreaded "Santa Con," when America's stupidest and loudest suburban frat and sorority types converge on city centers to get drunk and act even more brain dead than they do on an average day. Walking the streets around my hotel feels suffocating, and not just because of the clouds of cheap weed smoke. Perhaps it's fitting that Trump has returned to the White House, since he reflects the trashy, decadent nature of the nation he is about to rule over. 

It probably hasn't helped my mood that my big used book store score was a copy of Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia. I have felt it to be quite bracing, and I maybe am absorbing his deep critique of American life at a particularly bad time. Since the election I have been embracing a fundamental pessimism about certain aspects of American life. At base, I think it's obvious that most people have a completely nihilistic attitude about public life and what they owe to others. Much as Adorno worried, the processes of more modern capitalism have shredded individuality and reduced it into nothing more than consumer desire. Life will go on, there will still be good books, pizza, and coffee in the world, but I don't expect much of anything to get better soon. As the last few days have made clear, the younger generation is most definitely not going to save us. There are plenty of exceptional young people, but they are being eaten up by the ever-growing adherents to nihilism. That's my sad report from New Haven. 

Time is a River (Hot Stoic Summer)

Awhile back I promised you all this would be Hot Stoic Summer and today decided it was time to drop some knowledge nuggets. I have been reading and tremendously enjoying Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. There might be more wisdom per page of that book than anything else that I have ever read.

It's a comforting read because Aurelius time and again reminds me that it's essential to prioritize what matters and that I should stop worrying so much about what I can't control. One of my favorite themes is his idea that time is a river. By this he means that time is constantly moving and changing and it can't be stopped. For that reason trying to oppose it will only lead to frustration and suffering. Change is constant, and we must accustom ourselves to it if we are going to have a good life. Either learn to swim with the current, or drown.

I feel that this is an especially important message for people in middle age. At this stage in life people tend to get set in their ways, and to fear and resent change. I see this behavior around me all of the time. People who love music but dismiss anything current. People who see the younger generation doing things differently then getting angry and defensive. It is important to internalize the reality that change is going to come whether you like it or not, and trying to stop it is just going to make you miserable. 

In my mind I have been stretching the metaphor a bit to think of life as a river journey. Growing up my family would take trips up to Valentine, Nebraska, and canoe, kayak, or tube down the Niobrara River. I have returned twice since (including last year) and still enjoy it tremendously. You get on the river in one place, float down for awhile, then get off somewhere down the line. Sometimes it's a long journey, sometimes it's short. Either way, it ends, but the river keeps flowing. The river pays no mind, it will roll on forever. What are a few rafters to this mighty, eternal thing? 

Likewise we have our journey through life, but we make little impact on our surroundings. When we are gone, things will go on as before, as if we were never even here. That might sound depressing, but to me it is liberating. Live in the present, since that's all that we've got. 

Hot Stoic Summer

My school year is almost done. The students have graduated, my reports are almost finished, and now I just need to hunker down for some meetings. Every summer I get major whiplash from having no time at all to having all the time in the world. This usually sends me into a spiral of anxiety and depression. 

This spiral has been more acute in the last six years because I end up spending a lot of time reading the news and on Twitter. With the state of the world being what it is, my depression just ends up snowballing to the point where I get paralyzed with fear and anxiety. This year I have resolved to break this cycle.

Some of that is going to involve restrictions on my online time, some of it is going to involve a bunch of cleaning and home improvement projects, and I have decided some of it is going to involve better reading habits. Instead of descending into the swamps of online discourse every day, I want to explore Stoic philosophers. 

For the last Christmas in the Beforetimes a dear friend and reader sent me a book about Stoicism. I didn't read it right away, but dug in during the start of the pandemic. I found much consolation in it, which started me back down a path of reading philosophy again. That experience has really helped me ward off the demons of despair. It has allowed me to be clear-eyed about how I am going to approach living the rest of my life in a broken world that will likely be a much worse place than the already bad one I was born into. 

I don't go all in on Stoicism, but there's wisdom there to be mined in these awful times. Stoicism is ultimately about dealing with the fact that the world is a place rife with disappointment and suffering. Happiness is ephemeral, our inner sense of self is not. When faced with tragedy we need to steel ourselves. I don't embrace the Stoic denial of emotions, but if I can't get control of them I won't be able to function when a lot of people are relying on me.

So first up is going to be Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, which I will be reading with a former student. Not sure where I will go after that, but I'm hoping for a summer of wisdom and reflection.

The Consolations of Philosophy

In April of 2020, in the midst of the pandemic's shutdown phase, a student at my school asked if I would read some Nietzsche with him, since he heard I had some philosophy background. (It was my co-major as an undergrad.) In those days, with personal interactions so curtailed, I went for it even though I was drowning in work at the time. (This is the conundrum every teacher faces. The only way to do your job well is to work well past your contracted hours. But if you work well past those hours it gets draining and makes it easier for your employer to exploit you.)

It was a great experience, and out of that he started a student philosophy club that I oversaw. The club got very high attendance, despite the fact that it had to survive the ravages of the pandemic and hybrid meetings. I asked the students if I should offer a philosophy class, they said yes and I obliged. (Again, I am a sucker for my students.)

After co-majoring in philosophy as an undergrad I had mostly left it behind in the ensuing years. In a little bit of kismet I started getting back into it right before that student asked to read some philosophy with him. A friend gave me a book about Stoicism for Christmas in 2019, detecting the slide in my mood at the time. When the pandemic hit I decided to read the dang thing and started to realize what I had been missing for so long. 

It was the exact right time for philosophy to come back into my life. When quarantine began and the dangers of the disease were unknown, and as it absolutely ravaged my state of New Jersey, I took an inventory of my life, and asked myself if I was prepared to die. At its most fundamental, this is the question philosophy forces us to answer. I had been spending so many years on the hamster wheel of work as a teacher and parenting that this important question had been forgotten.

Since dipping back into philosophy I have gained a needed sense of perspective about what matters, and what doesn't. As much as I can I have been cutting myself off from the bullshit that stands in the way of a meaningful life. I am not so concerned any more about my status, for example. I have distanced myself from things that drain me, like the drama on local Facebook groups and political disagreements with friends and family. When group texts devolve into endless kvetching I just mute them or turn off my phone. I don't finish watching a TV series on streaming just to finish it. If it's mediocre or just drops in quality I let it go. Listening to music while I read a good book usually gives me far more pleasure. 

I still work beyond my contracted hours, but with more limits. For instance last week my school had its back to school night for parents, meaning I worked from before dawn to past 8PM. On the evening the next day I sat down to get a head start on some grading of papers my students just handed in, and I stopped myself. It could wait another day and still be done in a timely fashion. I sat down and watched Barry Lyndon again instead, a film that reveals more and more with each viewing. When it was over I felt happy and content and energized. 

And when I do my work, I do it with a greater sense of purpose. I know that as a teacher what I do matters, and that I should center that in my practice. That deeper meaning of my work is something I no longer take for granted; most people in modern capitalism can't really say their job does anything of much lasting value. I don't think I have had a single day in the classroom this year when I felt like I was just going through the motions. My re-immersion in philosophy has meant a revival of my sense of intentionality. My main goal in life right now is not to lose it to the ravages of middle-aged despair and cynicism.