The Social Animal (29 page)

He and his friends knew what the cruelest and funniest YouTube videos were before anyone else. They debated Coen brothers movies and the cultural significance of the
American Pie
series. They were briefly enthralled by the open-source software movement as a new mode of social organization. They wondered what is the optimal level of fame—Brad Pitt or Sebastian Junger? They favored the kind of music that is more fun to talk about than to listen to—intellectual neo-House music and self-consciously retro electro-funk. They cultivated the sort of weird obsessions that can come only through months of nonschoolwork-related Internet surfing. They shared an interest in the radical Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman.

In other generations, the campus avant-garde debated Pauline Kael and the meaning of Ingmar Bergman films, but Harold and his friends assumed that technology would produce bigger social changes than art or cultural products. They moved first from iPod to iPhone to iPad, and if Steve Jobs had come out with an iWife they would have been married on launch day. They were not only early adopters; they were early discarders, ditching each fad just as it hit the mainstream. They had finished their titanium-necklace phases by eighth grade, and by college they were sick of whimsical furniture. They scoffed at kids who had gumball machines in their rooms, though Harold found it witty when a friend used an airplane-service cart as an at-home liquor cabinet.

Harold was pretty good at these sensibility contests, but overall he was overshadowed by his roommate. In the initial housing application, he’d asked to be paired with a student who had low grades but high
SAT
scores. When he walked into his dorm room for the first time, there was Mark, dripping in sweat and wearing one of those sleeveless undershirts like Marlon Brando wore in
A Streetcar Named Desire
.

Mark was from L.A. He was about six two with hard, muscled shoulders and a dark handsome face. He wore a scruffy three-day growth of beard on his face, and his hair was perpetually shaggy, like one of those sensitive stud novelists at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He’d already put a sliding board in the room, for impromptu late-night exercise, and had brought his own bed frame to college—believing that bachelors should always invest in a good bed frame.

Mark was willing to risk humiliation in order to have fun and organized his life as a series of picaresque adventures, designed to produce adrenaline bursts. For example, during his freshman year, he decided, on a lark, to enter the Golden Gloves boxing tournament, billing himself the Kosher Killer. He decided he wouldn’t train for his bouts, just blog about boxing. He was escorted by a posse of ring girls dressed as morticians, carrying a coffin as he walked in for the fight. He was knocked out by a real boxer in eighty-nine seconds, but not before his story was covered by every TV news show in the city.

One month, Mark tried to get on
American Idol
. The next, he took up kitesurfing and ended up hanging out with the owner of an
NBA
basketball team. He had four thousand Facebook friends and on nights out Mark would spend half the night texting, juggling different social and hook-up options. He lived in what he called “Intense World,” a constant search for adrenaline and fond memories.

Harold was never quite sure how seriously to take his roommate. Mark would leave little sarcastic Post-it notes around the room—”Go Ahead! Be a Manwhore!”—designed for his own amusement. He made lists of everything: women he’d slept with, women he’d seen naked, people who’d hit him, people who would do community service even if they didn’t have to. One day Harold picked up an issue of
Men’s Health
, which Mark had left around the apartment, and he found some seemingly earnest marginalia next to an article on exfoliation: “So True! ... Exactly!”

Once a leader, Harold was now a follower. Mark was Gatsby and Harold, who had once been so assertive, was Nick Carraway, the narrator. He spent the stray hours of his youth marveling at Mark’s manic energy and trailing along to share in the fun.

The writer Andrea Donderi argues that the world is divided between Askers and Guessers. Askers feel no shame when making requests and are willing to be told no without being hurt. They’ll invite themselves over as a guest for a week. They’ll ask for money, to borrow the car, a boat, or a girlfriend. They have no compunction about asking and do not take offense when they are refused.

Guessers hate asking for favors and feel guilty when saying no to other people’s requests. In Guess culture, Donderi writes, you avoid putting a request into words unless you’re sure the answer will be yes. In Guess culture you never say no to someone else directly. You make excuses. Every request, made or received, is fraught with emotional and social peril.

Mark lived in Ask culture, and Harold lived in Guess culture. This occasionally caused problems between them. Sometimes Harold even thought of buying some self-help books—an entire genre designed to teach Guessers how to be Askers. But it never actually came to that. Besides, to a nineteen-year-old kid, Mark was irresistible. He was always happy, always moving, and always fun. He was like the poster boy of youthful vitality. After graduating from college he set off on a grand world tour, blithely unconcerned with how he would organize the rest of his life. He had assumed since early adolescence that he was destined to be the Omnivore Guardian of Taste. He would take charge of some field—movies, TV, music, design, fashion, or something else, and impose his delightful sensibility on a grateful world.

“Hey, High Thinking!” He called out one day just before graduation. High Thinking was his nickname for Harold. “Do you want to share an apartment while I travel the globe?” So Harold spent the next few years sharing an apartment with a man who wasn’t there. Mark’s bedroom would sit idle for months, and then occasionally he would breeze into town, bringing a wake of European heiresses and adventure stories.

Harold went on to earn a degree in global economics and foreign relations. He also figured out how to ace job interviews. Instead of being polite, deferential, and demure at these interviews, he was his late-night irreverent self. The bored interviewers inevitably loved it, or at least those at any place he actually wanted to work did.

After college he went through a pseudo-Peace Corps phase of do-good think tankery. He worked at the Social Change Initiative, the Foundation for Global Awareness, and Common Concerns before serving as a senior fellow at Share, a clean-water distribution
NGO
founded by an aging rock star. Tiring of private-jet philanthropy, he then went through his editorial-associate phase. He applied for jobs at
The Public Interest, The National Interest, The American Interest, The American Prospect, Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs
, and
National Affairs
. While working as an associate editor, he edited essays advocating the full range of oxymoronic grand strategies: practical idealism, moral realism, cooperative unilateralism, focused multilateralism, unipolar defensive hegemony, and so on and so on. These essays were commissioned by executive editors who had been driven insane by attending too many Davos conferences.

The jobs sounded exciting on the outside, but they often involved doing a lot of unnecessary research. Harold had spent the years before college graduation in upper-level seminars discussing Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and the problem of evil. He spent the years after graduation operating a Canon copying machine.

It became obvious to him, as he stood there trying not to be hypnotized by the cruising green light of the machine, that he had become information-age Canon fodder. The organizations and journals he worked for were run by paunchy middle-aged adults who had job security and a place in society. People in his cohort, on the other hand, were transient young things who seemed to be there mostly to provide fact-checking and sexual tension.

His parents were growing increasingly anxious, because their son, a few years out of college now, seemed adrift. Harold’s own mental state was more complicated. On the one hand, he didn’t feel any particular pressure to settle into a groove and become an adult yet. None of his friends were doing it. They were living in an even more slapdash manner than he was—spending their twenties doing a little teaching, a little temping, a little bartending. They seemed to move from city to city with amazing promiscuity. Cities have become the career dressing rooms for young adults. They have become the place where people go in their twenties to try on different identities. Then, once they know who they are, they leave. Thirty-eight percent of young Americans say they would like to live in Los Angeles, but only 8 percent of older Americans would. Harold’s friends would show up in San Francisco one year and then Washington, D.C., the next. Everything changed except their e-mail addresses.

On the other hand, Harold desperately wanted to know what he was supposed to do with his life. He dreamed of finding some calling that would end all uncertainty and would give his life meaning. He longed for some theme that would connect one event in his life to another and replace the jarring sensation he had that each of his moments was unconnected to what came before and after. He dreamed that someday some all-knowing mentor would sit him down and not only tell him how to live but why he was here. But his Moses never came. Of course he could never come, because you can only discover your vocation by doing it, and seeing if it feels right. There’s no substitute for the process of trying on different lives, and waiting to find one that fits.

In the meantime, Harold found himself evolving in ways he didn’t particularly like. He had developed a personality based on sensibility snobbery. He hadn’t accomplished much of anything yet, but at least he could feel good about his superior sensibility. He watched those comedy shows that exploit young people’s status anxiety by ridiculing famous people who are professionally accomplished but personally inferior.

At the same time, he could be a shameless suck-up. He found himself dashing across cocktail receptions to make a nice impression before a superior. He discovered that the higher people rise in the world, the larger the dose of daily flattery they need in order to maintain their psychic equilibrium. He became very good at delivering it.

Harold also discovered that it’s socially acceptable to flatter your bosses by day so long as you are blasphemously derisive about them while drinking with your buddies at night. He marveled at the college losers who’d spent the four years at school in friendless isolation watching sitcoms, and who were now promising young producers and Hollywood’s flavors of the month. The adult world seemed mysterious and perverse.

Harold was part of a generation that inaugurated a new life phase, the odyssey years. There used to be four life phases—childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age. Now there are at least six—childhood, adolescence, odyssey, adulthood, active retirement, and old age. Odyssey is the decade of wandering that occurs between adolescence and adulthood.

Adulthood can be defined by four accomplishments: moving away from home, getting married, starting a family, and becoming financially independent. In 1960, 70 percent of American thirty-year olds had accomplished these things. By 2000, fewer than 40 percent had done the same. In Western Europe, which has been leading this trend, the numbers are even lower.

The existence of this new stage can be seen in a range of numbers, which have been gathered by scholars such as Jeffrey Jensen Arnett in his book
Emerging Adulthood
, Robert Wuthnow in his book
After the Baby Boomers
, Joseph and Claudia Allen in their book
Escaping Endless Adolescence
, and by William Galston of the Brookings Institution.

People around the world are shacking up more and postponing marriage. In the early 1970s, 28 percent of Americans had lived with a partner before marriage. By the 1990s, 65 percent of Americans had. Between 1980 and 2000 the median age of first marriage had increased by between five and six years in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, an astonishing shift in lifestyles in such a short time. In 1970 a fifth of Americans at age twenty-five had never been married. By 2005, 60 percent had never been married.

As Wuthnow demonstrates, people around the developed world are spending more years in school and taking more time to finish their education. The average college graduate in 2000 took 20 percent longer to earn a degree than the average student in 1970.

The changes have been caused by several interrelated phenomena. People are living longer, and so have more time to settle on a life course. The economy has become more complicated, with a broader array of career possibilities, so it takes awhile for people to find the right one. Society has become more segmented, so it takes longer for people to find the right psychological niche. Women are better educated than before and more likely to be working full-time. In 1970 only 26 percent of women were working out of the home fifty weeks a year in the United States. By 2000, 45 percent were. Many of these women want to, or feel compelled to, postpone marriage and family until they are professionally established.

Finally, young people are ambivalent about adulthood. As Arnett argues, they want the security and stability adulthood brings, but they don’t want to settle into a daily grind. They don’t want to limit their spontaneity or put limits on their dreams.

These changes had profound effects on the way Harold and his cohort imagined their life courses. For example, earlier generations assumed that a young person should get married and then together as a couple go out and get established in the world. But people in Harold’s social class generally took a different view. First you got established. Then when you were secure and could afford a wedding, you got married.