They Don't Give You Any Choice 'Cause They Think That It's Treason

Aspiration has its own merits I suppose, but it's hard to say from personal experience. We used to talk about "type A," the strivers, the go-getters, the get-things-done-rs, the feed-my-family-to-a-pack-of-raccoons-if-it-means-a-promotion-to-junior-executive types with wonder and awe. Mostly because they were strung out on cortisol, Mylanta and Bartles & Jaymes, so if you had one in your family, if you spoke in anything more startling than a hushed whisper, you were risking either a chair being thrown at your head or watching someone you notionally loved pop a head gasket and stroke out. They had their moment of ascendency, typified in slick-'80s shitbird style in the movie Wall Street, a cultural artifact so dated, it existed back when people regarded Charlie Sheen as a serious actor. Like most things from the '80s (skinny ties, hair metal, poodle bangs, the War on Drugs, Bill Cosby, MTV, crack, the exact same level of racism as the '60s but thinly papered over with euphemisms, etc.), it hasn't aged well. At some point we all woke up and realized none of us could take anything seriously that had Martin Sheen playing low-status.

Within a year we had began to claw our way out up from the absolute nadir* of Boomer hypocrisy, when the generation of counter-culture actively and frantically sold every bit of their souls as quickly as possible for pennies on the coke-dusted rolled-up dollar for the right to crash their leased BMW into a school bus while trying to outrun the panic of having turned 30. Because, you know, it had never happened to any generation before that. How could they have seen it coming?! Imagine all at once being faced with the non-negotiable existential truths of both mortality and sequential whole numbers. I'm surprised they held it together as well as they did.

In 1988, we got Working Girl, a movie about a woman striving in business with a title that refers to hookers. That movie began to ask the hard questions about the toll achievement took as the scrappy, lower-middle-class underdog with a heart of gold used the old fashioned American values of grit, determination and a long con to undermine and defeat the shallow, merciless, business-ghoul boss lady with nothing but her moxie, a dash of gumption, the influence and insider expertise of another business-ghoul (Harrison Ford! So charming!) and an absolutely brazen string of lies, calculated misrepresentations and outright identity theft. Prescient! The moral of course was that if you're faced with the unfeeling hand of Cold War capitalism squeezing your throat closed, you fight back with exactly the tools it used to immiserate you and all the members of your family down the generations, pushing back against the dehumanizing forces of money and the associated power it brings in a manner that rewards you with money and the associated power it brings. But it never said "Greed is good!"

Then of course three years later, Harrison Ford was back in Regarding Henry in 1991, a movie that tells us if you're a type-A striver, you can learn humility, but only if a random stranger shoots you in the head at the liquor store and gives you brain damage. In the end, we learn the very important lesson that post-capitalist success decoupled from achievement is both a worthy and possible goal, but probably only if you're feeble minded. This is progress.

I've never been a striver, but I want to make it clear that I do not think it makes me better than anyone else. I arrived at it completely by accident, some odd alchemy of upbringing and temperament that developed me into the wordsy beta cuck typing out these words in my secret, secret blog. I had goals, but it's just that none of them were material outside of the security of a place to keep the rain off my head.** I couldn't even really have articulated them until my kids started moving out a few years ago and none of them seemed to be obvious, toxic assholes (at least to me) and I went: oh! This is what I was after!

There were clues. Like staying in a job without a lot of growth potential but that I could leave every day at whatever time I needed to make the basketball game or whatever at the high school. Oh and the time I stayed home for 8-9 years just raising kids from age zero. I guess that's a tipoff of where my focus might have been.

Socially we're a lot better about the striving, to degrees. There's a lot more talk about stress and stress management. Workplaces are starting to recognize that with more leave, more on-site help, re-examining their milestone and goal-setting. It's in the art, too. Succession and its parade of broken humans and the parasites latched on to them not only addresses the zero sum cost of all-out achievement vs. family, it exalts it as operatic drama. The old man is fucked up, the kids are all fucked up and the tension comes out of that, the object of which is... control of a multinational media corporation and all the money and associated power... wait a second...

Eh. I know I'm not ever going to understand it. I try with the empathy, but I have to accept that I have some conceptual blindspots. My problem is: if your goal really was family, and you've raised all your kids the full extent to which they need to be actively raised, what do you do then? Right now, the answer is: I dunno. I guess travel and stuff? But COVID showed up and then I had to spend like $12k on a new central air conditioner, so that's out. I guess I could start over and make more kids, keep right on achieving? All kinds of dudes my age do it. But alas, Alexander wept for there were no worlds left to conquer. Because he had a vasectomy when he was 29.

Hookers and blow ahoy, I guess? What else is there?

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*Or maybe I mean the zenith? I'm not sure. It's when it was the fucking worst, anyway.

**I live in Southern California, so this is only really an issue six to 10 days out of the year. Very achievable.