Awkwardness in Contemporary Life: A Few Notes

The idea that contemporary life is somehow notably awkward seems to have been popular these past few decades. (Adam Kotsko, in fact, devoted a whole book to it.)

There seems reason for that--and not just the postmodernist tendency to shy away from the large social questions and instead obsess over the "little things in life." We really do seem to be living in a society where the gap between the received rules, and our ability to follow them because of the actual terms on which we are compelled to live our lives, seems to be widening to a degree of which a critical mass of people is all too aware and about which they are sufficiently discomfited to call attention to the fact, all as there seems to be no progress whatsoever toward consensus about a newer set of rules that would make more sense in the new circumstances.

Consider, for instance, the conventional idea about how an "adult" is supposed to live in North American society. You are "all grown up" when you have progressed sufficiently in a career to enjoy a "stable" job that has enabled you to start and maintain a family at a middle class standard of comfort and security--expectations that, if they were more an aspiration for most then than a reality even at the height of the post-war boom, have become less and less plausible since. Yet the expectations remain, with the young often protesting, and their elders responding only with scorn, sure that rather than victims of the neoliberal societal model, and the way it has turned college into a quasi-financial bubble loading the game's losers with debt, a lousy job market for even the holders of so-called "useful" college degrees in times when the business community's courtiers sniff about "labor shortages," the exorbitantly priced housing inevitably following from an economy where housing is an "investment" rather than shelter and housing policy expected to enrich real estate speculators rather than provide human beings with places to live, etc., their elders insist that the young have no one to blame but themselves for their problems, dismissing what they say on their own behalf as the whining of "Betas," and not letting facts or logic get in the way of their gleefully punching down at them.

As the situation implies the lack of any new consensus reflects a sharpness of political division--a reactionary politics of backlash and cultural war, and a bitter "status politics" on both sides of the divide escalating higher and higher into ugly forms of bigotry, with a good deal of class snobbery in the mix (with those who fall short of upper middle class norms fair game for abuse)--all in a situation of increasingly frayed nerves amid growing societal dysfunction and declining prospects and the ever more brutal educational and career demands the complacent call "competitiveness," and of course, an unhinged cult of self-assertion in its meanest and stupidest forms that makes of culture heroes the asshole, the bitch, the bully. Thus is everyone, rather than attempting to display what urbanity and tolerance may be reconcilable with the demands of decency and dignity, instead sure that they have the right and even duty to impose their prejudices on the world at large, and ever on the lookout for offense as they accord themselves the right to police everyone else's behavior in a way that would be called "police harassment" if a police officer did it--and everyone, the more in as this is an age of ubiquitous, The Circle-like surveillance, being watched and judged and condemned for failure all the time according to multiple and completely inconsistent sets of rules, always seemingly doing "the wrong thing."

Some, much more than others, get the worst of it. Those who don't have power, those who find themselves outsiders in a particular grouping, those who perhaps even at a neurological level less easily fit in --the attention to neurodiversity these days seeming to me a reflection of, at least as much as anything else, the ever-rising penalty on imperfection in conformity that has been so bound up with the pathologization of behaviors that might once upon a time have been taken in stride. Still, few indeed wholly escape the awkwardness of the times, and the penalties exacted for it.