"Me" culture

There's a section on "adultolescents" -- and they're also called "twixters" now, I think -- the people who drift around deep into their 20s, the people who want to keep their options open at all costs. But the decision to grow up is also an artificial one in the mediated world; it becomes a decision just to be "busy, busy" and to naturalize our little performances. So again, no way out of this dilemma?

Well, you decide. That's your demographic. But of course "deciding" is the problem itself! Pretty soon, you'll come to a point and say, "I can't take this any more," living like a piece of flotsam, floating around in a sea of options, and you'll get married, or make some other commitment. Even though it feels arbitrary, you'll get scared enough to do it. Because you'll realize that nothing's going to happen to do it for you or to you. No puberty, no ritual moment when all the elders of the tribe gather around you and slice your penis up the middle or something like that to convince you that you've grown up. You just have to do it yourself. Grow up, I mean.

I like your new definition of commitment: throwing your whole self into it and hoping it works out, rather than until death do us part, richer for poorer.

When women say, "You can't commit," they're not complaining that you can't commit in -- what do they call that new kind of marriage down South? -- a covenant marriage. No sane, fully mediated, urban blue-state person would expect anybody to commit to the life, death, no matter what, anymore. Women aren't complaining about that. They're complaining that you're not completely there for them, that there's some little part of you that you're keeping off the board. Now commitment is a matter of the intensity of your engagement.

But because of the arbitrariness of it all, even a commitment feels like just another one of the billions of options we have.

The second really original idea in this book is that when chance and necessity are all that's left to you of reality -- and there's not much of it -- then the opposite of real is no longer phony or artificial, which is what it has been since the romantics. The opposite of real now is optional. The slight feeling of unreality that attends all the commitments you actually make attends them because they're made against this horizon of choices. So this plays into the idea that reality is accident and necessity. To the degree that your life is literally furnished with people, things, activities, places that you've chosen, there's a slight feeling of surface-ness about it all. Because on the horizon there is always "Oh, I could have done this other thing, or been this other way, and maybe I still will." That haunts the way you are. And that's why real things in your life have this slight feeling of simulacra-ness.

But situations where you're not mediated, where you haven't made a choice, are painful ones, in some way. It's not something you'd want to seek out.

Yes, that is often true, not always, but often. But notice how we actually do make efforts to achieve the pain that makes something real, as long as that pain is part of the choice we made. In our efforts to recover nature, for example, we get more and more extreme: boats across the Atlantic, cliff climbing for three days and nights, sleeping in nylon hangers, Outward Bound-type stuff, vision quest, naked on the mountain overnight. We seek raw experience precisely because it gives the feeling of the real. But the ironies are apparent. You're choosing to go out there and starve on a mountaintop. Not because your tribe will expel you if you don't or because you don't know what else to do, but because you want to feel real. So you take a reality trip, as it were...

I'm trying to think -- not of solutions! -- but of things that could emerge to fill this hole in real experience. National service?

Sure, that might emerge. And it would certainly be a good thing, because it would have practical results. But on the issue of filling this hole in general, I'd be more inclined to say: What's the problem? To me, compared with the millions of people in the world, living in misery, left out of mediation entirely -- this isn't a problem! We're so fucking lucky it's ridiculous. The only way this is a problem is because we've got so much ... [makes hand gestures suggesting an overwhelming torrent of options and stimulation forcing its way into the brain].

[In depressed-teenager voice.] "I don't know what to do with all my options. I've got angst and depression because I'm not significant enough." Please!

My art isn't important enough!

Exactly! Everyone's an artist, or a DJ, or something. Wonderful, isn't it? And who's to say what's better art? I like this, you like that, whatever. Isn't this mostly a good thing?

If not provide a solution to the problem, what do you hope the book can do?

I'm hoping I'm going to cause intellectual pain. I hope people will be stimulated by that pain to find ways to come to some kind of new plateau of authentic existence, perhaps, but there's something more important than that. This was really a revelation to me, the way it came up in the conversation. And that is: What's the problem? I don't care about us. What really matters is all those people out there dying while we're playing video games and our culture is ignoring them, usually. There's a feeling that mediation is perpetuating the grave injustices in the world. I don't think that has to be the case at all. In principle, I see no reason why it couldn't become enormously fashionable for a whole generation of Western Europeans and Americans to suddenly do something about world poverty. You don't have to do that much to make a serious dent in it. That seems to me to be a conceivable thing to happen, even without finding some authentic way to exist first. You can continue to struggle with the authenticity of your options and performances and still be of concrete assistance.

To me, that's a bit like accepting the artificiality of a role and doing it anyway.

That might well be a good way to go. I'm a phony and I love it!

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