All the Miserable Young Liberals

PLUS: For paying subscribers, I weigh in on The National’s excellent new single

Illustration by YoGinta (iStock / Getty Images Plus)

Just an hour or so after I finished up this post, word came down that Donald Trump had been indicted. Rather than pull this and write something fresh on the news, I’ve decided to publish it, even though it’s bound to be ignored in Friday’s online scrum. I’ll take the weekend to figure out what I have to contribute to making sense of the Trump mess.

As with last Friday’s “Above the Fray” post, I’ve placed the Great Song Suggestion behind the paywall, allowing the rest of the post to read by everyone, paying and non-paying alike. Have a nice weekend.

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Some weeks as a writer focused on current events feel like taking part in a scripted play. This was one of them.

From a pair of New York Times stories (one an article, the other a focus group), to a powerful Freddie deBoer Substack post, to an illuminating Musa al-Gharbi essay in American Affairs, to a Noah Smith tweet, to Wall Street Journal polling results, to a Ross Douthat column and Bonnie Kristian Substack post summing it all up, the week has seemed eerily focused on a single topic: the distinctive unhappiness of “how we live now”—with “we” applying above all to very online young liberals and progressives.  

Jonathan Haidt has been writing about this topic longest and with the greatest methodological and empirical rigor, so if you want to plunge into it more deeply than all the essays and tweets I link to above, I suggest subscribing to his excellent Substack, After Babel. (Here is one of several recent posts that contains a feast of rich food for thought on the subject.)

Locked Inside Our Own Heads

In this post I merely want to offer one added perspective on this problem—and it’s not one original to me. It comes from one of the best books I’ve read over the past decade. I reviewed it in my column for The Week, and unlike most of the contemporary books I’ve read in recent years, this one’s arguments and evidence have stayed with me. I’m talking about Matthew Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (2015).  

Crawford’s argument, made relatively early in the phone-based social-media era that began in earnest between 2011 and 2013, is that human beings need to be immersed in and actively interacting with a material, physical world in order to thrive. Yet the material, physical world limits our freedom, forcing us to operate within constraints—and this offends our prideful longing for liberation from all such limitations. The ideal of radical autonomy we have inherited from the Kantian Enlightenment therefore creates a culture that oscillates erratically between, on the one hand, engaging in full-frontal attacks on given and inherited limits, and, on the other, receding into virtual digital worlds in which the human will can operate entirely without constraint.

But instead of facilitating the achievement of personal happiness, these cultural tendencies produce the opposite—a world suffused with constant distraction, agitation, anxiety, loneliness, addiction, low-grade psychic misery, and sometimes deep depression in the midst of material plenty. That’s because, Crawford insists, a life spent pursuing autonomy is contrary to our natures.

We need real friends, not virtual ones who can be muted or ghosted the moment they try our patience.

We need real, imperfect lovers who offer intimacy with another living, breathing human being, not imaginatively intense but emotionally barren pornographic simulacra.

We need to wrestle with a recalcitrant material world, not devote our entire lives to manipulating symbols on a screen.

We need to accept the givenness of our bodies and not treat them as an object to be manipulated and refashioned at will.

We need to love our own—this person, this family, this neighborhood, this community of faith, this country—without being haunted by the suspicion that all particular attachments are morally suspect, or by the thought that something better, more perfect, or more intense is out there waiting for us around every corner.   

We need, above all, to learn how to live in the world and not in our heads.

Reality and Happiness

It feels safe in our heads—and freer than real life. Our imaginations are unbounded, and we’ve developed technology that interacts directly with and feeds our limitless fantasies.

But a fantasy, by definition, isn’t real. We don’t just want to imagine we have friends and lovers, or imagine our faces look the way they appear with a filter on Instagram or TikTok, or imagine the carefully edited and curated version of our lives we share online is true to reality. We actually want to live in reality, be in touch with the way the world truly is, not flee into a fictional world our minds conjure in collaboration with algorithms, language models, and half-hidden role-playing strangers on the other side of a digital interface.

No matter how alluring that imaginary version of reality may be, it will always lack weight, leaving us feeling empty and alone when we re-enter the world as it truly is. Yet depending on how much time we’ve spent immersed in the technologically mediated ersatz reality, returning to the obligations and frustrations of the actual world can nonetheless feel like a let down. That’s perhaps especially so when the person undergoing reentry is a teenager whose reality has been meticulously shaped by her parents to be at once free from risk and relentlessly oriented toward academic achievement (as a prelude to career advancement).

A risk-free life is no more real than one lived in fantasy, just as a life singularly focused on meritocratic striving can be a gauntlet-running exercise without end that makes withdrawal into imagination seem like a godsend.

It isn’t good, and it isn’t healthy—though the answer isn’t to medicalize the misery with new-fangled diagnoses and medicate it away with pharmaceuticals. The answer is to recognize the cause and make it play a less prominent role in our lives and the lives of our children. That probably means a mixture of letting go and cracking down: Allowing our kids to take their foot off the gas and roam a little more freely in the physical world, to learn a little more on their own, through experience, while also restricting their freedom to withdraw into their own heads with technological helpmates. Encouraging them to make and spend time in the real world with real-life friends wouldn’t be a bad idea either.

Happiness—the true fulfillment of the soul’s true desires—is never guaranteed. But its achievement is bounds to recede from our grasp when we become alienated from reality itself and the truths that are only disclosed within it.

Great Song Suggestion