sincerely,

do you guys know how to do this?????

when i was bored in class a couple of months ago i read this substack post on the death of the public intellectual. it was interesting enough but quickly faded to the back of my mind until recently, as i’ve spent more time seriously contemplating what to do with my life since graduating and rotting on my parents’ couch. i’m going to go on a tangent but i promise i’ll circle back.

i’ve always had a strong sense of vision of adult self, accompanied by some steps on how to get wherever i want to be. after reading van gogh’s biography in the “who was?” series, i decided i wanted to be an artist and that i would go to laguardia, then parsons, then live in paris (i conceived of this plan at age 7). i took art classes, learned french, got into laguardia, then changed my mind when it came time to decide between going there or staying at packer. i didn’t want it anymore, and that was ok, but there was something satisfying about knowing i could do it. or perhaps it was how empowering it felt to be so consciously in pursuit of my own desires, taking my dreams seriously, even if those dreams were subject to change.

me when i knew how to yearn

in an era where nonchalance is king, the inclination to plan gets a bad rep. georgia and i were recently lamenting about how we would prefer if our sneaky links stopped sending “wyd?” texts at 1am and instead sent “hey, will you be free at 1am on saturday?” texts at 2pm on thursday, but unfortunately this very practical preference for a plan is often misconstrued as emotional obsessiveness. god forbid a girl has a vision of her evening! and really, let’s think about what is required to maintain the appropriate level of chillness, to be able to change the date, move the time, or pick a different place: copious amounts of free time and no real obligations to anyone or anything. we make no plans so we plan for nothingness in the off chance that something to do presents itself. social media, personalized ads, and ai generated playlists are such that we are constantly passively consuming content, products, and ideas. we’ve now moved to passively consuming each other’s company, but let’s just call it impromptu.

but apparently sincerity is back in vogue (didn’t you hear that timothée is going to be one of the greats?), which i’m more than happy about, except that no one is really doing it anymore because it’s so fusdfhdfudjnggg hard to be sincerely sincere. because instagram, the aestheticization of the self, etc., but mainly because the world doesn’t operate with a logic anymore. saying you want to do or be anything is like saying “the two of us need to catch up soon” to the flakiest friend at the function. it’s sincere, i’d really like it if we caught up soon, but who knows if it’ll ever happen, and i’ll just loathe the both of us when we forget to pick a date, or a place, and my head hurts, and the trains aren’t running.

so back to the public intellectual thing. among our generation, there’s an itch, i think, for someone to explain to us what is happening, why, where we fit into it all, and where we go from here. public intellectuals used to consider these questions in the genuine pursuit of truth, and there existed an audience humble enough to let two smart people speak without getting their egos bruised or foaming at the mouth in anticipation of someone getting OWNED. but the landscape of academia and our cultural attitudes towards intellectualism no longer cultivate a suitable environment for the public intellectual.

i could point to book bans and federal funding cuts to universities, but really american academia has been in a slow descent for decades. at least at oxford, debates and lectures were frequently-held and well-attended (i could go on a tangent about the oxford union now but i’ll just pretend they didn’t invite ben shapiro to speak there). in the states, we prefer seminars to lecture halls, opting for unstructured discourse and roundtable discussions, preferably popcorn-style. the outcome? collective classroom cottonmouth. we have so many opportunities to speak that there’s nothing left to say. what we don’t know doesn’t motivate us, it makes us feel ashamed. we are afraid of changing our minds because it implies moral inconsistency, making us vulnerable to attack when we start to feel strongly about issues we hadn’t yet heard of when we were 16 years old.¹

some people, many of them liberal arts graduates, thrive in this setting. but if we look at gen z at a national scale, the overwhelming sense is that our generation is suffering from imagination fatigue; we are nihilistic or apathetic and trending towards conservatism. the rising conservatism is interesting to me, because i think it speaks to who has captivated our attention most effectively in the absence of the true public intellectual. to be clear, i’m using conservatism in the maga-loving ben shapiro way, but mostly in the nara smith tradwife, or even the call her daddy juvaderm-filled girlboss way (yes i am aware that she had mamala on the pod). these influencers and their politics are defined by a denial of our global reality and a desire to return to a time when you could rely on things (a man, your beauty) to achieve a full life, an illusion that is bolstered by the short-term gratification of fun nights out, trips to mallorca, and a closet of vintage dior.

i don’t mean to roast this person. sometimes i am this person. we have all been this person because this is all we’re able to sincerely yearn for and successfully attain in this day and age. you want to have kids, and for your kids to have kids? risky in this climate. art moves you and you want to create it? useless and lowkey cringe. you wish for a world where people see a mutilated child under rubble and know, innately and absolutely, that it is wrong? well that’s not the world we live in. denial through conspicuous consumption and nihilism are two sides of the same coin. its the political equivalent of taking your dog to mcdonald’s before you put it down.

so i guess this is a call for the return of the public intellectual. voice of our generation, WHERE ARE YOU??!!! because i can’t sustainably pretend i don’t care, and when i try to be open about the fact that i do, it feels like i’m not allowed to. if anyone would like to come out of the shadows and teach young people how to dream again, now would be the time to do so.

1. the left often get’s blamed for this phenomenon… internal fractures caused by tone policing, you’ve heard it before. there are issues in our political discourse on the left but i think there’s perhaps a little too much neoliberal fingerpointing going on. but i see it as a different flavor of the same thing which drives young people to create linkedin accounts when they’re 14, or start using retinol before they’ve been bat mitzvahed. you’re just supposed to “get it” at a younger age. developing a foundational political ideology (which may require reading a book or two) is less important than having the culturally correct take. chastising other people for not having the correct take makes us feel a sense of achievement and belonging. i’d argue that these inclinations towards conformity and competition are more linked to capitalism than they are intrinsic to the left.