No One Remembers Being Twenty and Smart at the Same Time
"No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable". — James Baldwin
"Youth is wasted on the young."
I laughed at the cliché. "Truth. If I knew then what I know now, I'd have been far less stupid when I was twenty."
"Yeah, I was pretty dumb when I was in my early twenties, too."
"Isn't everybody?"
Is that true? Is everybody basically stupid in their twenties?
I asked around. Sure enough, everyone I spoke to said effectively the same thing—from people in their sixties to folks in their thirties—they all felt that they were complete idiots in the early twenties.
If that's the case (and it certainly seems to be) it's likely that all of these kids driving the social media revolution will feel the same way (except they'll have a digital reminder of how stupid they were for their kids to throw up as receipt that they once were morons so they must still be).
So why are we bothering paying attention to them?
Imagine you’re at a dinner party. (And for those less inclined to go to anything as bougie as a dinner party, imagine a house party or a party that includes people drinking and eating and talking—you know, a fucking party…)
An amalgam of humans, all gathered to share time, drink drinks, eat some food, and hang out with each other. Talk about the things that interest one another, gossip, hook up (or at least stare at your acquaintance's date and wonder “If only…” (or storing up mental pictures for your spank bank...).
Over in the far corner to your right is the faux economist, the guy who, because he reads a lot of online articles about the economy and flat rate taxes and pension funds, tends to hold court in every conversation through that lens. He’s talking to the third-wave feminist (I know, apparently there’s a fifth wave but I still can’t figure out what the fourth wave was so we’ll assume for this thought experiment that she’s of the third wave stripe). She tends to bring every conversation back to the belief that men are wholly unnecessary and goes on and on about how under represented women are in Hollywood and politics.
They’re talking about the filmic dog turd that is the latest Transformers movie and how to wipe it off your shoe.
By the kitchen are the actors. She’s in a sketch comedy show that has been seen by a total of 12 people in the last six weeks and tries to impress the other party-goers with her insistence on talking about her period and her "meaty vag lips." He has once understudied at the Goodman, is an Equity member and due to that, hasn’t actually been in a play since college.
They’re having a debate about whether brussel sprouts make you gassy or not.
And then there is Johnny. Johnny is twenty-two years old.
Johnny is a good looking guy, stays fit, bathes regularly. You know, basically non-offensive. No one wants to talk to Johnny, however, because Johnny can’t seem to talk about anything but his cause.
His cause is so important to him that he can’t even fathom why anyone could possibly have anything else on their mind. He wears a t-shirt proclaiming his fealty to his cause. He carries a few handbills at all times that announce public meetings for his cause which seem to spring from a never-ending stream of dates and times in coffee shops and the back rooms of storefront galleries.
When one tries to engage Johnny about something that may have nothing to do with his cause, say, the new iOS 15.2 public beta or how good the Beatles documentary is, he always brings it back to his cause. It is the only thing important to him.
Johnny reminds everyone of Sarah from a few years earlier. Sarah was an ardent anti-abortionist. She felt she was a feminist (maybe second and two-thirds wave?) but couldn’t see past the killing of babies to grasp a larger picture of things. Every conversation was about the horrors of abortion. The hosts eventually stopped inviting Sarah because she started bringing Abortion Jell-O Pops that turned everyone off the food.
As Johnny senses that people have stopped listening to him, instead of finding different ways to communicate to the rest of the party why his cause is essential, he just gets mad. He raises his voice, yelling over everyone else’s conversation. He commandeers the bar and refuses anyone unwilling to engage on his cause any alcohol. He has decided that, if these fucking party-goers won’t focus their attention on HIS goddamn cause, then he will ruin the party for all.
Eventually, however, Johnny will be disinvited. He will only be invited to parties populated with people already invested in his cause. And they will spend their whole parties complaining about not being invited to the other parties.
It isn't because Johnny is permanently and fundamentally stupid. I mean, he might be. The law of averages tells us at least half of us are 'below average' which means there most definitely are some who are simply baseline dipshits unable to process basic logic or work a bottle of Avocado Mayonnaise. On the other hand, it may be that Johnny needs some seasoning. Some time. Some life experience.
I was listening to an NPR podcast about the fact that at the height of the George Floyd protests, most young white Americans were wildly in favor of Black Lives Matter and their push toward police reform but a year later that support has reversed itself. Now less young white Americans are supportive of BLM than they were before the protests.
The hosts and their guests had a number of factors to explain this drop off but it mostly came down to, you guessed it, racism. These white kids who leapt into the fray the summer of 2020 were pent up from lockdowns, had no jobs, no social lives, and decided to go out and get some activist street cred (along with some hot Utopian hook ups) but the racism slowly crept back like a rash as soon as COVID became a way of life.
At no point did these well meaning twenty-five year old podcast hosts think to question how they may have squandered the moment. How they may have become Johnny-at-the-Party and beat that angry drum so much in one direction that eventually people got bored and disinvited them to the party.
Imagine you get invited to Greta Thunberg's birthday party. Yeah, I'll bet that would be a gas being lectured for hours about the climate when maybe you would be more inclined to listen if she offered you a guilt-free beer and some pork rinds.
Or what if you were invited to a mixer with the Young Republicans of Vermont? Be sure to bring an old fashioned straight razor so you can cut your wrists after the third hour of vaguely worded white nationalist rhetoric and influencers trying to rope you into their latest MLM scheme.
The angriest guy I ever knew was a genuinely stupid guy who thought he was smart. His motives were pure; his assumptions were grounded in 'lived experience.' He was doing all he could to be on the right side of history without realizing in order to be on any side of history one needs to have researched and fundamentally understood history.
The certainty of the ignorant weighs less than the opinion of the intelligent. Age and wisdom don't always go hand in hand but it sure doesn't hurt to live a bit, learn a bit, and avoid being a bore at the party.
