It’s always been impossible to grow up

Odysseus, maturity, and the void

The Sorrow of Telemachus by Angelica Kauffmann, via Wikimedia Commons

There’s a long-running conversation about the “crisis of masculinity” I’ve thought many times about wading into but always held off. Put briefly, young men are falling off the map: college attendance is plummeting, employment rates are plummeting¹, now they’re voting for Republicans. Growing up I was a scrawny guy who didn’t play sports so I’ve had, on the one hand, a somewhat fraught relationship with my masculinity, and, on the other, not much concern with it because I always intuitively found it to be tedious peacocking nonsense that had little in common with the category I was interested in: maturity.

Recently I’ve come to think that the crisis of masculinity is just the most acute symptom of a more generalized crisis of maturity, which is itself just one point in the constellation of symptoms of our crisis of meaning-making under late capitalism and environmental collapse. A number of my compatriots here in the newsletter mines have taken on this question from different angles in recent days so I want to pull some threads together here and then hopefully expand on them myself.

The first is a wide-ranging conversation

Max Read

and

John Ganz

recorded back on December 20th. Starting from their mutual fascination with Big Tech’s reactionary turn, John ends up invoking Hegel’s theory of society and social reproduction and the fact that life is inevitably mediated by institutions of one kind or another, be that the state or the nuclear family, where one’s role exists in the context of everyone else’s. But as our institutions fail to reproduce themselves and their legitimacy crumbles, people’s relationship to mediating forces and authenticity have become increasingly perverse; a denial of the necessity of mediation has given rise to new forms of individualism, like the “amoral familialism” represented by Trump and a prolonged fratty libertinism that Max memorably termed the “Zynternet.”

Max remarks that his cranky reaction to so much of this stuff is just to tell these people to grow up:

Max: There’s so much growing up that people have to do to recognize—this is all very personalized and it’s not a political program or anything—but, like, you need to grow up and recognize that your fetish for authenticity, for straight talk, your belief that there’s some horrible interloping layer of mediation that’s preventing you from accessing “realness—”

John: It is an adolescent worldview, isn’t it? It’s like the parents are keeping the real enjoyable stuff locked away… a lot of the attitudes are adolescence forever, right? The Zynternet mentality is that frat life can live forever, right? A lot of things are an extension of high school by other means… my reaction to Elon Musk was that he feels like kids I knew in eighth grade. He feels like a very stunted kind of guy, whose sense of humor is really adolescent, whose desire for recognition is really adolescent. And his queen, Grimes, was also kind of like, I was like, ‘Yeah, you seem like a teenager, dude. And you have the charming things of a teenager where you have the imagination and creativity, but no maturity whatsoever or no desire to cultivate maturity.’

Max then tells a story about seeing Jordan Peterson give a talk at the height of his fame. He was struck by how indistinguishable it was from a lecture you might encounter in any entry level humanities class in college about “the history of humanity and finding meaning in the universe”:

Anybody who's been to college probably had one or two professors freshman or sophomore year that they had this kind of life-changing or quasi-life-changing relationship to—being treated as an intelligent person who is thinking thoughts about the whole world. That's something a lot of people don't get, A) if you don't go to college at all, you're never going to get something like that unless you have an unbelievably good high school teacher and B) if you go to college and you don't pay that much attention or you don't you don't have a humanities requirement, if you're taking more vo/tech type classes.

Part of the dynamic that's interesting here is that the continuing assault on liberal arts education, the assault on non-instrumental education, is exactly what's creating the demand for Jordan Peterson figures. And frankly, Andrew Tate figures, because nobody is being taught how to find meaning and value in their lives. So instead—this is a part of the whole “grow up” thing—nobody is being given the tools to learn how to grow up. And the tools they are being given are these impossibly stunted—this awful sub-Jungian Canadian Kermit guy is giving them these terrible, terrible ideas.

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Elsewhere, it was announced that Christopher Nolan’s next film will by an adaptation of The Odyssey.² This led to a breathtaking phenomenon

Lyta Gold

covered in her newsletter: full-on adults learning about the existence of The Odyssey for the first time and posting about it. One such poster was a 23-year-old TikTok guy named Matt Ramos, who has over 300,000 followers and got clowned on hard for his ignorance. This led inevitably—in Lyta’s telling, I’m blessedly too offline for this stuff these days—to a backlash that went, ‘it’s actually fine and normal to not know what The Odyssey is and you’re the jerk for thinking you’re better just because you do.’ This isn’t particularly novel—mentioning you “read” “books” online is one of the most surefire ways to get called an elitist—but something did feel different. Lyta writes:

What’s new in these weird giggling void-days after Trump’s second victory is the absolute happy ignorance, and the ignorance of ignorance. I don’t think shame is an ideal motivator, especially when it comes to education: but it’s weird that there’s no shame here. In fact, the shame is getting directed the other way: aren’t you the asshole for bringing it up? Aren’t you just making normal (a.k.a. stupid but it’s rude to say it) people feel bad?

To begin putting some pieces together, let’s square the craving for some sort of grounding that’s evident in Jordan Peterson’s following with this sort of happy ignorance. Here’s my contention: basically everyone under, let’s say, 30 is a black-pilled nihilist; the only question is whether that cashes out as Nothing matters :( or Nothing matters :).³ Peterson’s acolytes feel a lack in themselves and are filling it with the spiritual equivalent of Cheez Whiz. On the other side are the Zynternet types who, whether from just being literally dumber or just possessed of a more hedonistic personality, feel nothing of the sort and take the total breakdown of meaning as an excuse to keep the party rolling.

Peterson’s fans might be inclined to pick up The Odyssey but I question how that would go. Whatever the books in the canon have to offer—and they offer a lot—that something is not ready-at-hand and easily instrumentalized. Going into Homer with an attitude of “Yield up your wisdom for me to use” is sure to be a dead end. Let’s quote Lyta again:

It’s genuinely difficult right now to explain why it’s important to be familiar with the Odyssey, to recognize basic constellations, to know who Oppenheimer was, and to actually watch movies like Blade Runner with your eyes and not just junk it for promotional parts. To be clear, I believe that these things are extremely important, just that the discursive space in which to make these explanations has been completely subjugated by grindset bullshit. To a Gen-Z influencer type, it’s perfectly appropriate for Christopher Nolan, a wealthy and successful director, to have read the Odyssey and an Oppenheimer biography—these are things he can use to make himself wealthier and more successful; they are grist for the mill of himself. I don’t think that’s remotely why Nolan does it; I think he wants to make movies. But a desire to make art for the sake of art has become a foreign concept. Obviously in 2024 and beyond, the point of making things is solely to be rich and famous; and the point of being rich and famous is to be richer and more famous. This country has a fatal case of winner psychosis. It has no idea it’s even sick.

This is the key point that unites despairing Petersonians and hooting Zynternetters⁴. The “total victory of money,” as Lyta described our current stage of late capitalism in her book, has completely destroyed any evaluative framework that might privilege beauty or enjoyment rather than the potential for profit. As

Phil Christman

wrote about the reading crisis after talking to his students, “One thing that my seemingly most privileged students are telling me is that they are learning, at 13 and 14, that they need to turn every last minute to account. That they do not have time for woolgathering, for daydreaming, for fictionalizing. For activities that don’t help them to ‘advance’ in some way, by some definition of ‘advance.’ It’s the kind of joyless work-obsession that people call ‘Calvinist’ even though Calvin would probably have called it a form of industrious idleness, which a lot of it is.” Grindset mindset influencers already seem anachronistic because the grind has so definitively won. The Petersonians might have a thirst for knowledge but they can’t conceive of it outside these terms. The Zynternetters, meanwhile, are doing scams.

Anyway, back to Lyta:

There were lots more people making fun of the posters who had never heard of the Odyssey before than there were original posters themselves. But while mockery—and cynical despair—is an understandable response, I think it misses that this is fundamentally sad. These kids have been robbed. Maybe they’re complicit in their own robbery; maybe they didn’t pay attention in their literature classes, or have always mentally skimmed over any allusions to “sirens” or “cyclops” that they didn’t understand and never wondered about it. (If you’re literate, and have read even a few novels, it’s genuinely hard to have never run into a reference to the Odyssey.) But this is bad, not because the Odyssey could be useful for these kids’ careers or in social situations, but because everybody in the world has a right to know that story. World literature belongs to everyone! Anyone who says otherwise is selling something (usually racism).

I think people who care about literature need to make this argument, relentlessly: that everybody deserves to have access to these stories, that they’re cool and good and fun, that not everything in the world needs to help advance you up the ladder, that there’s more to being alive than work and posting and gaining influence, that winning isn’t in fact everything. But I appreciate that this is a tough sell when the dead cultural tide is flowing in the other direction; and the places where everybody gets their information are algorithmically designed to tell them to win and advance at all costs.

It’s almost too perfect that these various fears about the younger generation and their failure to become what we recognize as adults have coalesced around The Odyssey because The Odyssey is in large part about exactly these questions⁵. Every able bodied young father in Greece took off on an unjustifiable ten-year war of plunder, leaving a generation of children with no fathers for a decade. In Ithaca, where Odysseus’ return has been delayed an additional decade, the situation is grim. Every young man from Ithaca and its neighboring islands has taken up residence in Odysseus’ palace, ostensibly as suitors to his wife Penelope.

But read those scenes again: while they do occasionally harass Penelope that she can’t put off remarriage forever, the suitors are much more interested in partying with each other. Every night is boy’s night on Ithaca. It’s raucous and wasteful but more than anything it’s deeply juvenile. The suitors, mixing their kraters of wine, truly read like frat bros cooking up another bin of jungle juice.

Telemachus stands apart. If the suitors are Zynternetters, Odysseus’ son is a Jordan Peterson type. He knows he’s incomplete. He knows that he’s been deprived of something that would have made him more than what he is. The suitors may behave like boys but they’re sure they’re men—after all, they’re in their 20s, what else is required for maturity except the passage of time? This confidence is enough to bully Telemachus, who reads far younger than his 20 years because he wears his immaturity and incompleteness for all to see.

His search for his father takes him to Pylos and Argos to consult with Nestor and Menelaus but these would-be father figures have nothing to offer him. Nestor is old, too old. Whatever wisdom he might hold can’t be transmitted. The chain has been broken; they might as well be speaking foreign languages Nestor’s values have so little currency with Telemachus. Menelaus turns out to be just as stunted as the suitors. He seems to have no worries about the untold lives his quest to rekidnap his wife cost. He and Helen are chilling. His big adventure returning home was his wrestling match with shapeshifting Proteus, whom he overpowered and pinned down into a single form—ambiguity and complexity conquered.

Can a generation this far gone be saved? In The Odyssey, the answer is clear: No. When Odysseus returns home to Ithaca, he gives the suitors ample opportunity to prove there’s something redemptive in their character. He’s willing to overlook the way they’ve eaten up his fortune for 20 years. But no, they are irredeemable and he slaughters them all.

The suitors are abhorrent little pests but I’ve only ever felt revulsion at their extermination. They are boors in a way the heroes of the Trojan War were not but there isn’t as much difference as Odysseus might like to believe. The Iliad is filled with indulgent feasting and the taking of women. It’s a “heroic” culture, with all the nastiness that entails. What holds it in check are τιμή (honor) and ἀρετή (virtue). These are complex values that need constantly to be instilled in the younger generations if their culture is to have any chance of not descending into chaos and barbarism. With the older generation off on the far side of the Mediterranean fighting a pointless war, this crucial work of social reproduction has been left undone. The suitors have absorbed only the shallowest version of warrior culture, strength transformed into domination and the privileges of beneficent kingship flipped into conspicuous consumption. By the narrow definitions of their impoverished cultural inheritance, this is what winning looks like.

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The Zoomers have come in for a for a lot of abuse in this post so far but we sad aging Millennials aren’t doing much better. After 20 years of our elders endlessly haranguing us as lazy and entitled even as we entered the workforce with depressed wages and no chance of buying a house, we now find ourselves adrift on the windless seas of our 30s and early 40s, still broke, awaiting an even worse future. There’s a gulf widening between those of us who have chosen to grow up and those who are still clinging to the shadow of our 20s—on the one side are my friends who, like me, are married and have young children; on the other are my friends from college who are still going to raves and fucking around with polyamory.

I don’t know, hey, live your life however you want. If you want to be poly then go for it as long as I don’t have to hear about it. But these lifestyles seem predicated on the steadfast denial of the passage of time. When I see them and hear about them doing things I think we should have long outgrown I want to grab them and ask, “Don’t you realize you’re running out of time?” I don’t even mean with regard to having kids, although that is certainly part of it. I mean what Tom Scocca wrote six years ago in an essay I still think about constantly, “Your real biological clock is you’re going to die.”

It did not occur to me, in any real way, that as we did this, we were spending down a limited resource. In our social world, in our cultural class, at our point in history, people are brought up to take the opposite view, to structure their lives as if time were something a person accumulated. One is wary of getting married too soon, of having children too young. Adulthood is a condition to enter cautiously and gradually.

But this idea of certainty is a sham, a distraction, something to turn your attention away from the only truly certain thing, which is that your time will run out. If you intend to have children, but you don’t intend to have them just yet, you are not banking extra years as a person who is still too young to have children. You are subtracting years from the time you will share the world with your children.

I was a strange little kid in that from a very young age all I wanted was to be a grown-up. I knew I wanted to be married and have children of my own. Certainly I had a child’s understanding of all that would entail but regardless, I was in a hurry to grow up. But as my teen years neared their end I felt more and more a lack, that extra element that could make me more than who I was.

This leads us back around to Max’s point at the top of this article, that Kids These Days aren’t being given the tools to grow up. What might those tools be? As he says, it’s a liberal arts education and the accompanying sense that you exist in wider, deeper context, that you are subject to an inheritance that releases you, ever so slightly, from the iron grip of linear time.

My experience at Great Book school was the thing that allowed me to grow up. Up above Lyta said she can’t put into words why it’s important to know who Odysseus is. In her own essay on the subject, friend of the newsletter

BDM

wrote that any justification is bound to be circular: “The answer for why schools should teach the Odyssey is that… people should know what the Odyssey is. It’s circular! But it’s true. You should know this, because you should know it. There are lots and lots of great works of art in the world, and if you leave your high school experience familiar with the canon, you will be better equipped to appreciate all of those things. If schools produce graduates out of touch with their cultural heritage, those schools are failing those graduates.”

To this I add: the one instrumental justification of the canon—of art and culture generally—is its power to help us cultivate maturity. This isn’t even about what the books contain, really, although the consolation of philosophy has been decisive for me in navigating the dispiriting years of chronic underemployment and social atomization that followed graduation. I’m not more mature for knowing that Odysseus spent one year with Circe and seven with Calypso. But I am more mature for having done the work. The Odyssey is a pleasure to read but reading it represents a conscious break with the present, with the received values of now. Reading the Odyssey is to make a choice to be more.

To carry on with other challenging and less enjoyable parts of the canon takes that choice and tests it. Here’s a small story: it was freshman year of college and the work was piling up. I had two books of Plato’s Republic to read, I had math props to learn, Greek vocabulary to memorize, and an essay to write if memory serves. It was too much. I was spent from the day’s classes and didn’t feel like I had the brainpower to power through all the work. But I had a moment of self-conscious reflection where I dispassionately reminded myself that if I wanted to stay there, which I did, then that was the work I had to do right then. I sat back down and did the work. I found new reserves of attention and intellect and chose the harder path. Multiply that by four years—the experience cannot but change you profoundly.

It was hard work. The Great Books are hard. The relentless pace of the Program was hard. Caring about Tacitus was hard. But life is hard. Growing up is hard. The implacable pace of bills and groceries and all the other necessary inconveniences of adult life are hard. Caring about any of it is hard. My liberal arts education was, indirectly, a chance to practice a sort of maturity that I could then apply to other parts of my life. Everyone deserves that chance.

1. I am unemployed

2. How many translations of The Odyssey are do you currently own? For me it’s three

3. Further reading on the distinction between “proud hedonists” and “declinist ascetics” from Max here

4. This happy/sad dichotomy maps neatly onto William James’ distinction between “healthy minded” religiosity and “sick souls” in The Varieties of Religious Experience. James admits his sympathies lie with the sick souls; I similarly have a certain sympathy for the Petersonians.

5. I could also cite both Plato’s Meno and Laches here but I’ll spare you.