New People

I started a new book and it set my mind adrift.

Actually, I finished one about Nazis, brief but overrated. But it's funny how my generation has a fascination with Nazis. I don't think younger people do. World War II was close by in our rearview mirror growing up. We couldn't quite understand how it happened. Then again, this was when America was a clear number one. Isn't it funny that all the progress is initiated by the EU these days? The USB-C connection on your new iPhone...credit the EU, trying to reduce waste, never mind enable convenience. When it comes to stopping bad corporate behavior, it's the EU that takes the lead, the EU that is supporting Ukraine, as America slowly loses its perch as the keeper of the world's peace. It's like the country is Freddie Prinze, and I'm not talking about Junior. Remember, "Eez not my job!" Actually, it seems not to be America's job to do so much these days, not only outside the country but inside. You're on your own, it's not my responsibility. Actually, there's a great story in today's "Wall Street Journal":

"Money floods into shares based on memes, is shifted around by algorithms based on past patterns, or goes into vast passive index trackers sold on the basis of being virtually free. None have an incentive to devote resources to keeping the corporate bureaucracy in check, since day traders and hedge funds will be gone before the next CEO meeting, while passive funds can't sell even if the CEO is thrown in prison."

"Why We Risk a Cartoon Version of Capitalism - Private-sector investors are so ineffective at overseeing companies that state-run funds feel the need to step in": https://shorturl.at/TWZ27 (That's a free link.)

I'd like to tell you there are stories this interesting in music, but despite being the canary in the coal mine for digital disruption in the aughts, music is now adrift. Now it's all AI and politics, with a mix of business stories thrown in.

Anyway, I'm addicted to the news. And not the analysis from biased sites on the right and left, but the derided mainstream news, which is flawed but far superior to the outlets cited by the cranks who can't accept that we all live in society together and if you don't come together... Well, you risk the end of democracy. Never forget, fascists promise the trains will run on time, that there will be order, and then you wake up one day and you realize you're the one who has sacrificed.

But I don't read much nonfiction. Because at best it's informational, it doesn't set your mind free like fiction.

Write what you know is an aphorism we hear constantly. And the truth is this is what most people do, which is why we have so many books set in college, college towns, because the writers have gotten their graduate degrees there. And in this book, three girls (we can call college students girls, can't we?) are being interviewed about marriage, which then devolves into a conversation about money, and along the way we find out why they're all ensconced in the same dorm building.

And this reminded me of going to college. You remember, being thrown in with a bunch of kids you'd never met before. Your family and friends from back home irrelevant. And it was just your personality, trappings were irrelevant. And everybody had the same status, everybody earned their right to be there, you were forced to interact, to make friends, to find your own people.

Same deal at summer camp.

But that does not happen when you're an adult. Sure, you can go to a conference and you might not know anybody, but there are already cliques, and status is important and evident.

You can go to work in a new office but there's a definite hierarchy, and the others have experience, you're the odd person out.

This experience of being thrown into a new situation, raw, with only your wits, I miss. Growing up there were resets on a regular basis. But then they stop. People move up the economic ladder, they gain assets, there's a striation of society. Except maybe when you go into the old folks home, after they strip you of your possessions and everybody is similar, then again they're all not healthy, they all don't have their wits about them, and family visits. Your family didn't come rescue you at college, not even kindergarten or high school. You were on your own. And it was anxiety-provoking and thrilling. An adventure.

Now maybe if you've lived in the same town all your life you're not quite sure what I'm talking about. Maybe this is another case of the hoi polloi versus the elite. Maybe it's another way the elite are advantaged, by being forced into these new situations and gaining life skills. Maybe this is a way private college students are advantaged, at state schools you probably already know people and so many go home on the weekends. At a private college, an elite college, you're stuck there with all new people.

Then again, today you've got your parents on speed dial. You may meet new people, but the old ones haunt you forever. You never lose touch with anyone. You can look them up online. If they're not on Facebook, they're on LinkedIn. The past haunts you in a way it did not in the pre-internet era. Then again, statistically fewer people move these days, it's too expensive, but when the boomers grew up you picked up and plopped down in a new town on a regular basis. And you got in your car and went exploring, maybe drove cross-country. Our experience was visceral and real as opposed to virtual. Not that I want to put down the virtual world, the internet, in many ways it saved my life.

But that experience of entering new worlds raw, that's gone. And if you boasted that you owned this or that, or had been here or there, you were an object of ridicule in college. Who you were was what it was all about. Be a joker, be a good conversationalist, be someone who can be trusted...that was what was valued. We were all sifting these new societies for friends. Even stranger, who we started out being friends with oftentimes was not who we ended up being friends with.

But get older and everybody clings to their résumé. They don't want to let us forget their job, their house, their cars, their trips... Hell, social media is mostly about bragging.

But we're all just people underneath. We can relate to most everybody in truth, despite the polarization in society.

Furthermore, it's a personal responsibility to keep growing, to push the envelope, and too many are tired, just playing out their years. And you don't need money to have these new experiences, you can go volunteer in your own damn neighborhood. But that would mean you've got to meet new people, feel uncomfortable, question your suppositions.

Talk to anybody who's got children. They go to college and they come home different. They shed the indoctrination of their parents, they have their own ideas. They call this growing up.

But too many people stop growing.

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