Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 168

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "What Made Maddy Run: The Secret Struggles and Tragic Death of an All-American Teen," by Kate Fagan:

When Maddy was in middle school, she would walk to school in the mornings with kids in the neighborhood. As the year went on, she started timing how long the walk took. Once she had that specific number, she needed the next day to be faster, and the day after that, faster still. By the end of the year, she was speed-walking, occasionally breaking into a jog, to beat the previous day’s time. There was something satisfying, calming almost, about controlling time and output in this way. She had created these little tests for herself, ones that she was fairly certain she could pass. That felt good, reassuring: no, nothing was out of her control. 

Maddy was addicted to progress, to the idea that her life would move in one vector—always forward, always improving—as opposed to the hills and valleys, the sideways and backward and upside down, that adults eventually learn to accept as more closely resembling reality. Maddy was not unique in feeling this way. Much of young adulthood is presented as a ladder, each rung closer to success, or whatever our society has defined as success. Perhaps climbing the ladder is tiring, but it is not confusing. You are never left wondering if you’ve made the wrong choice, or expended energy in the wrong direction, because there is only the one rung above you. Get good grades. Get better at your sport. Take the SAT. Do volunteer work. Apply to colleges. Choose a college. But then you get to college, and suddenly you’re out of rungs and that ladder has turned into a massive tree with hundreds of sprawling limbs, and progress is no longer a thing you can easily measure, because there are now thousands of paths to millions of destinations. And none are linear.

I am sick and tired of hearing the facile, tired response that my generation is “soft” and has been ill equipped by coddling “helicopter parents.” My parents, and those of my peers do not fit this straw man caricature and my peers are extremely hard-working, intelligent, and ambitious. I went to weekly group therapy provided by my school’s Counseling Center last year. What I learned about myself and about my peers was that our main source of stress was that we were simply not allowed to be human. My generation is not suffering because we didn’t learn how to lose a game of flag football. We’re suffering because everything we do is filtered through a lens of consumerism. We see ourselves as “products” to be “branded” and “marketed” in all venues of our lives: social, romantic, and professional. This has been a mindset inculcated into us from an early age. 

Everything we do is seen as instrumental towards marketing ourselves for the college admission boards, or for the job market, or to help us rush a fraternity or sorority, or to help us win friends, or to help us be a more attractive potential partner. You see the capitalist worldview has infiltrated our psychology, and our sense of self-worth. And it is toxic. It results in fear of being ourselves and following what we really want to do. It results in micro-managing every aspect of our lives to best effect so that it looks good for Facebook or LinkedIn or Tinder. It results in constant comparisons with our peers (which causes depression) and catastrophizing of any potential dent to our marketability (which results in anxiety). Essentially, it results in a dehumanized mindset.

I do not live with daily, steady anxiety and depression; therefore I cannot know what life feels like if you do. But I know this: Madison walked a path. And at first, the path she walked is familiar to me: the sun is high; the grass is matted; the underbrush is tame. I’ve walked that path, or something similar. Then, at some point, the conditions start to change; they become more ominous, denser, less traveled. Then, farther ahead, the path appears to shape-shift—it’s not subject to the same laws of physics, of life. I can peer ahead into the distance and see the outline of where Maddy walked, but I cannot report back from the inside. For most of us, understanding how much of this path we’ve traveled is impossible: it’s a road of unknown length.