Before I begin, a reminder: I have a book out called The End of Burnout. It’s good. Amazon named it one of the best business and leadership books of 2022 so far. If you haven’t bought a copy yet, you still can.
Classes begin next week. I’ll be teaching two: a first-year writing course at a private university and a creative nonfiction workshop at a public one. The first-year course will be comprised entirely of first-semester college students. I hope they will see college as a chance to make a fresh start in their education, after the chaos of their high school years. But I’m apprehensive. The habits that got them into college were sufficient to get them through the degraded conditions of pandemic school. I and their other instructors will have to show them that education can be better than that.
Students in the creative writing course all have a couple years of college behind them. Most will have at least a glimmering recollection of the prepandemic university. But they, too, will need to rebuild their habits and appreciate the value of an in-person learning community.
I’ll be honest: I don’t know if I am up to the task of rebuilding them. I think my students will benefit if they aren’t always looking at their laptops in class. I plan to give them photocopied readings as much as possible and mandate that laptops be closed and away for most of our time together. But the fact is, I am weak-willed. I’m not much of a disciplinarian. And there are so many other things to pay attention to in a classroom that I will surely forget about the laptops entirely.
I also want to build community in class, especially for the first-years. They’re going to do experiential things like walk a labyrinth and memorize poetry — and then connect that experience to things they’re reading and writing — in the hope that doing something weird together will bond them. But it might not work. They might just resent it all. Still, I have to try something. I have to get them to care, if not about learning, then about each other.
One criticism of my May New York Times opinion essay about the college learning breakdown has stuck with me for the past few months — not because it’s an especially good criticism, mind you. And it’s not even that common. But it is one of the loudest. When people write it out, it goes something like, “THE WORLD IS LITERALLY ON FIRE AND YOU’RE WORRIED ABOUT STUDENTS TURNING HOMEWORK IN ON TIME???”
There was a hint of this critique in Molly from Chicago’s response to my essay; I replied to Molly that she should keep studying because we were going to need people with her talent and commitment to confront the very crises that she says make it hard to study. Still, I found Molly to be a sympathetic critic. I have less sympathy for people screaming on Twitter.
A broader version of the “we are in hell, why do anything” outlook was the subject of an excellent, bracing essay called “Failure to Cope ‘Under Capitalism’” by Clare Coffey in Gawker last week. Coffey looks at complaints about how, because of “capitalism,” an otherwise-capable person can’t perform ordinary tasks like make dinner, go shopping, show up at work, brush their teeth, or get out of bed. This complaint raises any individual failing to the level of global politcs and thereby absolves it. Here’s Coffey:
Capitalism, in this rhetorical strain, is not so much the object of analysis or a concrete historical phenomenon as an all-purpose gesture. “Capitalism” is useful everywhere: as the punchline of self-deprecating jokes about the way we live now, as a perennial-but-distant bogeyman that explains chronic frustrations without ever causing enough pain to force serious disruption. Most importantly, its invocation immediately establishes a phenomenon in the realm of the political, without any further work required.
In other words, “capitalism” lets you off the hook for pretty much anything. Another form this outlook sometimes takes is the notion that there is “no ethical consumption under capitalism,” which is meant to excuse the constrained and compromised consumer choices poor people have to make but can end up giving license to not-poor people to incrementally perpetuate labor exploitation and environmental degradation through their consumer choices. (Fast fashion, food delivery, giant vehicles, things of that nature.) I’m pretty sure there was a Calvinist heresy along these lines: Your fate is predestined anyway, so you may as well sin wildly.
In place of this moral laziness, Coffey issues an existentialist call to responsibility:
It may be the case that many personal infirmities can only be fully repaired in a repaired world, but this does not obviate the need to pull ourselves together as best we can in this broken one. Any serious attempt to topple capitalism would require more discipline, more courage, more endurance, more capability, not less.
(Coffey’s essay is pretty critical of friend-of-the-newsletter Anne Helen Petersen, but I think its central point stands regardless of what you think of Petersen’s work.)
Coffey isn’t the only one thinking along these lines. Other great, similar essays include Kristin Dombek’s advice column, “Bank-Robbin’ in Brooklyn,” Apoorva Tadepalli’s “Treat Yourself,” and Willy Staley’s essay on the millennial-generation mind and “The Sopranos.” Oh, and if you’re drawn to the idea that not everything is political, I commend to you Justin E.H. Smith’s Substack post, “Is Everything Political?” What he says there is just what I believe now.
But Coffey’s essay is so good, so unashamed to make a nakedly moral argument, all I want to do is rewrite it, reiterate its points in almost the exact same terms, like a kid who loves a dinosaur and therefore draws a picture of it over and over.
So I want to say, to you, to my students, above all to to myself: If you wait to live your life until the global temperature cools, until the wildfires are quenched, until Covid is gone, until democracy is unthreatened, until there is neither rich nor poor, until the lion lies down with the lamb, then you will never live. And if you wait to study until after all the crises have passed, then you may very well prolong them, because you won’t have strengthened your mind to help resolve them.
I don’t feel ready for my classes. But even with an extra week, month, year, I still wouldn’t. It’s time to begin.