"After uttering something unprintable, he said: 'I did that [stuff] so you wouldn’t have to.'"
I'm dying of squamous cell carcinoma, although that dying has been arrested slightly and temporarily by a clinical trial drug: https://jakeseliger.com/2023/11/20/finally-some-good-tumor-news-but-also-is-that-blood-i-just-spit-up/, and a lot of well-meaning people have said or implied that medical suffering builds character or makes me stronger or grants me wisdom or something. Maybe they're right, but I doubt it, and the word "cope" comes to mind.
I'd have preferred to have had effective drugs that prevented the recurrence and metastases to this kind of adversity. It's made me weaker, not stronger.
And although I'm doing the clinical trial primarily because I don't want my wife to be lonely after I'm gone, I'm also doing it in the hopes that the data I help generate will mean that fewer people have to go through hell I've been through. In other words, I'm doing some of it so others won't have to.
This reminds me of conversations friends would have around bullying. They would typically say that bullying is good as it builds character. I don’t have any stats on this whatever but I would bargain that the overwhelming majority of bullying is developmentally detrimental. It doesn’t allow mean people to soften their guilt and doesn’t fit in with the “hard times, hard men” paradigm.
Most people only really romantasize the suffering of others. It's mostly a version of selfishness (no I don't want to die of AIDS but I'm glad you did so I could enjoy this art).
Or, when they themselves know they will suffer and can't avoid it, it's a way of making the unavailable suffering feel somehow worthwhile (I gained wisdom).
I get that they don't intend it this way, but I think that's what it usually amounts to.
William James' seminal speech "The Moral Equivalent of War" (https://www.projectchangemaryland.org/where-did-national-service-come-from/), which was the original call for national service, was about challenging young people to develop the same qualities of service, sacrifice, excellence, and fellowship, that we associate with war, but without the violence and death.
While I agree with all of this, it also seems like we're desperately struggling to find the route to meaning in a world where all our basic needs have been met and aren't at risk. Social media and polarization are cul-de-sac where many have gotten themselves stuck but it's a dead end.
This gets at something that has always bugged me about the (wonderful) movie WALL-E. Humanity has created a perma-cruise where everybody seems pretty happy. This is made out to be a dystopian outcome rather than an awesome triumph of technology.
The implication is that the humans are wasting their lives by living pleasant lives of leisure. It relies pretty heavily on fat-phobia. If the human characters were all super fit it would come across very differently.
Every time I read about people like your grandfather, who risked so much to save democracy, it fills me with rage that their children, when faced with so much easier tasks, did less than nothing to protect the same.
Fantastic post as usual---I think there is a very negative tendency to associate mundane as the great evil of our time, when in fact worrying about mundanity is one of the greatest achievements of mankind and your post reminds me of that. Struggling for struggling's sake is not a virtue---working to create a better world for ourselves, our loved ones, and our descendants is.
A funny thing about the world - my entire generation (I was born in 1980) was terrified of HIV/AIDS. It was The Great Pandemic.
And... they cured it.
And nobody really cared. Magic Johnson announced his HIV+ status 32 years ago - longer than Keith Haring lived in total. Ryan White died less than 6 years after contracting HIV.
One of the best pieces I've read of yours Noah and I read just about every post you put out each week
Captured a lot of what was going on in my head especially around how older generations think of the younger generations as being "soft" and the advice they give.
As the upper-middle-class son of a working-class man, this essay, and your grandfather's words in particular, resonate with me. I worked with my father on construction sites when I was young, to make some extra spending money. Little things, sweeping and light hauling, but enough to appreciate the job. Between that and his stories, I learned: middle-class ennui and boredom are privileges, and they beat the hell out of aching muscles and the stress of not knowing if you'll be able to pay the bills next month.
So here's to the sacrifices he made so I could be here, sitting in a comfortable home office in a suburb. I won't demean them by fetishizing the world he left behind.
Soft Millennial here 👋 This is a beautiful, sensitive post. I played scientist Robert Wilson in a play about Oppenheimer here in the UK in 2015. In researching the man, I came across his testimony to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy when justifying the next tranche of funding for the Fermilab. Rather than jump through the usual hoops of saying it would eventually lead to better weapons for the USA, he instead said: ‘It only has to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture... It has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things that we really venerate and honor in our country and are patriotic about. In that sense, this new knowledge has all to do with honor and country but it has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending.‘ He got the funding.
"After uttering something unprintable, he said: 'I did that [stuff] so you wouldn’t have to.'"
I'm dying of squamous cell carcinoma, although that dying has been arrested slightly and temporarily by a clinical trial drug: https://jakeseliger.com/2023/11/20/finally-some-good-tumor-news-but-also-is-that-blood-i-just-spit-up/, and a lot of well-meaning people have said or implied that medical suffering builds character or makes me stronger or grants me wisdom or something. Maybe they're right, but I doubt it, and the word "cope" comes to mind.
I'd have preferred to have had effective drugs that prevented the recurrence and metastases to this kind of adversity. It's made me weaker, not stronger.
And although I'm doing the clinical trial primarily because I don't want my wife to be lonely after I'm gone, I'm also doing it in the hopes that the data I help generate will mean that fewer people have to go through hell I've been through. In other words, I'm doing some of it so others won't have to.
This reminds me of conversations friends would have around bullying. They would typically say that bullying is good as it builds character. I don’t have any stats on this whatever but I would bargain that the overwhelming majority of bullying is developmentally detrimental. It doesn’t allow mean people to soften their guilt and doesn’t fit in with the “hard times, hard men” paradigm.
Most people only really romantasize the suffering of others. It's mostly a version of selfishness (no I don't want to die of AIDS but I'm glad you did so I could enjoy this art).
Or, when they themselves know they will suffer and can't avoid it, it's a way of making the unavailable suffering feel somehow worthwhile (I gained wisdom).
I get that they don't intend it this way, but I think that's what it usually amounts to.
William James' seminal speech "The Moral Equivalent of War" (https://www.projectchangemaryland.org/where-did-national-service-come-from/), which was the original call for national service, was about challenging young people to develop the same qualities of service, sacrifice, excellence, and fellowship, that we associate with war, but without the violence and death.
While I agree with all of this, it also seems like we're desperately struggling to find the route to meaning in a world where all our basic needs have been met and aren't at risk. Social media and polarization are cul-de-sac where many have gotten themselves stuck but it's a dead end.
Founding Father John Adams was just one generation off: his great grandson Henry Adams became a leading historian, memoirist, novelist, and poet.
It wasn’t just antibiotics that brought the deaths down. It was also women organizing to complain of the high death rates and to get targeted action.
This gets at something that has always bugged me about the (wonderful) movie WALL-E. Humanity has created a perma-cruise where everybody seems pretty happy. This is made out to be a dystopian outcome rather than an awesome triumph of technology.
The implication is that the humans are wasting their lives by living pleasant lives of leisure. It relies pretty heavily on fat-phobia. If the human characters were all super fit it would come across very differently.
Love this piece Noah.
Every time I read about people like your grandfather, who risked so much to save democracy, it fills me with rage that their children, when faced with so much easier tasks, did less than nothing to protect the same.
Fantastic post as usual---I think there is a very negative tendency to associate mundane as the great evil of our time, when in fact worrying about mundanity is one of the greatest achievements of mankind and your post reminds me of that. Struggling for struggling's sake is not a virtue---working to create a better world for ourselves, our loved ones, and our descendants is.
A funny thing about the world - my entire generation (I was born in 1980) was terrified of HIV/AIDS. It was The Great Pandemic.
And... they cured it.
And nobody really cared. Magic Johnson announced his HIV+ status 32 years ago - longer than Keith Haring lived in total. Ryan White died less than 6 years after contracting HIV.
One of the best pieces I've read of yours Noah and I read just about every post you put out each week
Captured a lot of what was going on in my head especially around how older generations think of the younger generations as being "soft" and the advice they give.
You've given me much to think on.
As the upper-middle-class son of a working-class man, this essay, and your grandfather's words in particular, resonate with me. I worked with my father on construction sites when I was young, to make some extra spending money. Little things, sweeping and light hauling, but enough to appreciate the job. Between that and his stories, I learned: middle-class ennui and boredom are privileges, and they beat the hell out of aching muscles and the stress of not knowing if you'll be able to pay the bills next month.
So here's to the sacrifices he made so I could be here, sitting in a comfortable home office in a suburb. I won't demean them by fetishizing the world he left behind.
Bret Devereaux did a great set of posts on how real history treats the "hard times make strong men" claim. In these days of Cold War 2, you might enjoy checking it out: https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/
Beautiful and wise. Thank you. 🙏🏽
Soft Millennial here 👋 This is a beautiful, sensitive post. I played scientist Robert Wilson in a play about Oppenheimer here in the UK in 2015. In researching the man, I came across his testimony to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy when justifying the next tranche of funding for the Fermilab. Rather than jump through the usual hoops of saying it would eventually lead to better weapons for the USA, he instead said: ‘It only has to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture... It has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things that we really venerate and honor in our country and are patriotic about. In that sense, this new knowledge has all to do with honor and country but it has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending.‘ He got the funding.