The Reset Button

The big reset is upon us. Everybody's ready to go back 'into the wild' and do everything right that they got wrong or took for granted before 'the thing...'

It probably won't be much of a reset, we all enter social situations thinking we can control how we socialize, only for the socialization to control us. If you really control the way you interact with people, something's wrong, interaction's a two way street - sometimes a 30way juncture, and you're not just controlling yourself but controlling others.

Socialization's a big adjustment though, and it's how much more depressing when we really don't want to resocialize? Some of us don't want to go back to our old lives. Truth be told, the plurality of my social interactions depressed the crap out of me since fall 2015, and the thought of going back makes me a little nauseous. Even so, I know my newly sober self will want to party like it's 2019... it'll be colossally hard to resist: parties, bars, shows,... and when you don't drink, oh my god every moment socializing is a puddle of anxiety.

It's not my choice of company that's tough, so many of them are better than me; it's the choices the company makes. I don't like their choices, they don't like mine, and for years we've tried not to yell at each other and cooperated as people with two different sets of values do when squished into a small circle of people who run into each other on a regular basis.

The problem's pretty simple, and I'm sure I'm far from the only person who feels this way: what do you do when you value different things from virtually everybody you know? Whether they're conservatives or progressives/socialists, if they either get up in the morning to preserve the 'the way things were', or the revolutionary possibilities of social justice, how do you interact with them knowing that you'll always be mistrusted for not committing to their program 100%? When so many of them say, over and over, that disagreements are worth breaking friendships over, do they not mean what they say? Often, they're breaking their rules by remaining friends with me. If any of us really spoke to each other and got into what we really thought, there'd be so many differences and so many points which they'd find me unforgivable that they might wash their hands of me forever.

So if social death is coming: what the hell have they been waiting for? Is it worth keeping friendships going when you know in your bones that, for whatever reason, your dash on the rocks is inevitable?

I'm only 39, but so far I've watched my whole life as all the ideas and institutions I ever believed in came apart: American liberalism and secular Judaism, arts & humanities free from the corporate meddling, inquiry without surveillance or censure, scholarship for its own sake and not a wing of activism, awareness of historical patterns and dangers, reform over revolution, political lobbying rather than street volatility, and more trivially,... classical music...

The statistics all say the same thing: so much worse is yet to come. What can one person's life matter compared to all that loss? Any lone voice is powerless an army of screamers. So few people seem to care about what I care about, but I try to operate under the principle that you shouldn't judge individuals morally by what they're passionate about, something so many of them would never do. Most of them think I'm judging them anyway.... Maybe a little, but only enough to forgive them the difference in a way that I suspect they would never forgive me. I might rant my judgements all the time, but long as you accept that we have to disagree, I'm always there for more. But I never cease my amazement that you're still there for more, dear friend, and always worry you won't be much longer.

We all have deep regrets, if you don't you're lying or in denial. My biggest regrets are in the distant past. We all have mistakes, some of them might be terrible, but I know I've tried damn hard to do well by others. If others aren't satisfied, and over the years they've communicated their dissatisfaction by volume, we all eventually learn that 75% is their problem, not yours. Work on the other 25% is your entry point to being a decent person, but only 25% is you, the rest is a combination: 25% the people around you you can change, 25% the people around you you can't change, and 25% luck. You do the best you can to be what other people need, but sometimes you're going to fail, and your failures will be uncomfortably huge. People will either forgive or they'll hold grudges, but if they hold grudges, that says more about them than you. I have bigger concerns and much bigger regrets than anything I've thought aloud, said with premeditation, or done in recent years. If I failed to act well, I know it's not for lack of effort, but regardless of that, I've had the sense for well over five years that 'social doom' is coming. I could have acted like a saint to others my entire life, and eventually this graphomania of mine would write out something people decide is unforgivable, and whether cancellation is a thing for people who aren't the least bit eminent, I could lose dozens of friendships and career opportunities

The solution should be simple: either stop writing or stop self-publishing. That ain't gonna happen.... I'm more than 2000 pages into writing 'what I think'. Most of it is online forever and the whole point was to put it online. If anybody wants to find something objectionable I wrote, it's all there, you're free to read any time. Fortunately, I'm saved so far by you finding me too boring to read more than my first paragraph. Many thanks to you for your clemency.

So enough about me, what about you, dear friends? And many of you are dear friends even if most friendships are fleeting. The reset button on all our lives is about to be pressed. We're all going back 'into the wild', and even if we think we're going to be germaphobic or agoraphobic on our way out, the ungovernable instinct will not be to party, it'll be to bacchanal and say yes to life in a thousand ways we wouldn't last year. When all this is over, everybody will discover friends in unbreakable marriages filing for divorce, everybody will discover friends opening their marriages when the only open space used to be for Jesus. Everybody will have people they see a lot more than they did, and people they see a lot less.

For most of 2022-23, 90% will drink more, do more drugs, have more hookups, spend more money, quit secure jobs, let kids do stupid shit, travel to unsafe places, join destructive political movements, and not be there properly for people we love. We're all college freshmen again. Whether we plan it or not, we're all gonna do all the things we said we'd regret not doing, and we're gonna regret all of it.

The drama of all this will be past anything we've ever experienced. The least dramatic people will have existential fights online. People who keep their tempers in check will do things to get slapped and punched. Saints will be sinners, angels will be demons, and just as each of us became something we never thought we'd be during all this, there will be a still different self which grows out of whatever's next. Some shitshow clusterfuck version of you is your future, it's my future, it's the future of everybody who can't help but crave the social instinct, hasn't had any of it in 18 months, and never realized how much we missed it.

Whichever of us are still friends in 2024, we will get through it to the other side. The people we hang out with will be unrecognizable from whom we do now, and even if they're not, we'll all be unrecognizable when we next see each other. We're almost done, the worst is self-evidently to come, and y'know what? It's fine...

As my father always sang:

"make new friends,

keep the old,

one is silver

and the other is crap."