The New Yorker Radio Hour - Millennial Writers Reflect on a Generation’s Despair

Episode Date: December 14, 2021

The eldest millennials turned forty this year, and the producer Ngofeen Mputubwele comments on a sense of despair he finds in his generation, having to do with the state of the planet, the nation, the Internet, intolerance, and more. He set out to explore why millennials feel hopeless and how they can live with that feeling, in conversations with five writers: Kaveh Akbar, the author of “Pilgrim Bell”; Carlos Maza, the creator of the video essay “How to Be Hopeless”; Shauna McGarry, a writer on “BoJack Horseman”; Patrick Nathan, the author of “Image Control: Art, Facism, and the Right to Resist”; and the climate activist Daniel Sherrell, whose recent memoir is “Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The birth of the generation we call millennial spans from 1981 to 1996, according to the Pew Research Center. So the eldest of them turned 40 this year, and the youngest are in their mid-20s. The radio hours go fan and puttubuele sits close in the middle of that generation. And lately, he's been looking into what seems to be a tide of despair among millennials. And it has something to do with the state of the planet, the state of the nation, and the state of the internet. Pretty much everything.

Here's Gophane. In the biblical story of the flood, Noah pulls the animals and his family onto the ark. And when the waters come, they come from two places. They fall from above, from the heavens gaping open. but also they gush forth from below, from the great deeps. It conjures an image in my mind of water inching up from below the ground, like a great swamp, slowly engulfing the people. I've grown up in the church.

I'm confirmed Catholic, spent years in a black Baptist church, but then from middle school on, have spent a lot of time in the white evangelical church. And when I say spent, I don't mean I've visited or am familiar with. I mean, there is no part of evangelical life I don't know. Bible study and community group and D-time and VBS and mission strips. Lately I've been working on a memoir about the one little wrinkle in my story. My being gay. It's a text about queerness and race and God.

The first attempt of my life, outside this essay, to talk publicly about my sexuality. A plea not to be disowned or excommunicated. Just heard. Gay folks in the church must forfeit romance and go at their lives alone if they don't marry a woman. And after 17 years of celibacy, I write about how the weight of the ask is gravely misunderstood. And the waters rise. Hey, Kave. Hey, friend.

A few months ago, I met a friend. my queer poet friend Kave Akbar to work through what I've been writing. And we were in Indiana, so we went to IHOP, and we ordered buttermilk pancakes and breakfast sausage and over-easy eggs and hot chocolate, like you do at IHop. And midway through the meal, the man in the booth next to us stood up, scowled, and left. Later, our waitress comes over, and she's like, I don't know if you heard any comments the man made,

but I just wanted to apologize. And Kave asks, like, what was this deal? Uh, well, she clasped her hands together. Your sexuality. My first thought still doing this, like, Jesus. I was flabbergasted. I literally thought, I'm wearing jeans, a hoodie, and a Steelers hat. Yeah, I remember the Steelers hat really well.

You were, like, deeply, deeply incognito. He felt very uncomfortable, she continued, and he paid for the table next to you. for having to endure our conversation. And then he left. And the waters rise. See, I know my people, and I know that in that Indiana town where we dined and where, incidentally, I was born, that man believed he was being holy by not eating with sinners. Us, a table away.

I imagine him, boarding the ark, leaving Kave and I behind with the other unfortunate ones, gasping for air as still the waters rise. Why did you tell me you should write this down? Well, I mean, you know, you only have those like, this is what I am feeling right now, feeling in that moment, right? And if you don't write them down in that moment, then you lose them, right? As a species, we're really bad at remember. And so back to Brooklyn, where not so long ago a man hurled spit at me.

and then in another instance, venomous words because of my sexuality. That's an ordinary part of life for my friends in this progressive city. But in the circles that I move in, in media, especially, the narrative is that things are getting better. They might be bad, but they're getting better. But I still can't go to an I-hop and eat in peace without repulsing others. And I'm constantly in meetings where people talk about diversity in the industry and how it's improving.

And once again, I'm the only black person in the room. And despite that, I'm always hearing about getting outside our bubble, which I get, but also I've been outside the bubble my whole life. Growing up, black, queer, son of immigrants, singing opera, dancing to ballet, in white churches in Tennessee and Indiana, has constantly put me around people unlike me, has made me regulate the pitch of my voice, the look of my body, the gestures my hands make, so someone else is at ease. And when people keep telling you you're not thinking enough about people different than you,

or that things are getting better when they feel really bad, you start to despair. You start to feel like you're being, as my millennial cohort might say, gaslit, and the waters rise. And so I'm lying in bed on the internet, and I'm up. to my neck in the waters. And as I lie back, I go onto YouTube for a bit of release and relief and watch a video essay like I do. And it's a new one called How to Be Hopeless. And I watch it. And for once on a screen, I finally see the world I'm inhabiting reflected back to me. And I'm like, that's it. I know what the waters are. I know what I'm feeling. Hopeless.

And then I realize, oh my gosh, I am not alone. All around me, I see people of my generation, millennials, people born from 1981 to 1996, writing about this feeling, in memoirs, on television, in essays, all grappling with this feeling of hopelessness. So I decided to talk to us, to ask, why do we feel hopeless? and what do we do with that feeling? 1. Carlos Maza, 1988. To answer my questions, I started with the guy who made that video essay,

How to Be Hopeless. To me, he's basically a scholar of hopelessness. All right, so easy stuff first. Two, tell me who you are, and what do you do? My name is Carlos Maza. I'm a video producer slash writer who used to work in a newsroom. Carlos worked for Media Matters and then Vox. And now produce independently on YouTube, making videos about politics, media, ethics,

generally trying to be a human and what feels like the end of the world. Carlos grounds the essay in his experience of living through COVID. So picture Carlos in March of 2020 sitting in a park in New York City, cold, masked up, reading Albert Camus, The Plague. Go back in your mind's eye a bit. What did it look like outside? It's almost like the rapture, you know? You have all the dressings of a city, but everyone else is gone.

And yeah, I would just read and listen to the wind. I was holding these two realities, which is like, one, this is such an awful thing that's happening for no reason. Thank God we're all in this together. And then seeing more broadly this other reality of like, this is fake. I'm not going to wear my goddamn mask. This is all China's fault. Just like go after the people who are coming here from China. The fake news just doesn't get it, dude.

So much of, I feel like, of the work that I've read since Trump got elected, especially, like the progressive writing, has been about hope and overcoming the odds and rallying together, especially when it comes to stuff like climate change. And in the video I talk about, I show a CNN reporter sobbing while covering COVID deaths. To get through this, this is the 10th hospital that I have been in. It's really hard to take. An activist during the George Floyd protests saying, you know, why does this keep happening? I don't understand why this keeps happening. And I'm a little bit more honest about my own grief.

It's just not okay. It's not okay what we're doing to each other. The like desire to go numb in the face of the world and just like either like commit suicide and say I'm not doing this anymore or like just mentally check out and commit like a kind of spiritual suicide by saying I'm just going to watch Netflix and grow plants in my apartment and do my thing and not worry about the rest of the world anymore. And I wanted to let the audience know that I struggle with that so that if they felt that, they would know that they were not alone. The refrain of American culture for the last several years has been that Americans are so divided that the situation seems worse than ever.

And it's not just the youngs who say it. You hear the olds say it too. they can't remember another time like this. But I just fundamentally disagree with that idea. The notion that things right now are unprecedented ignores so many people for so long. Name, but tell me what exactly how do you feel about all of this? I feel that the great travesty of justice.

Take the 80s and early 90s when I was just a kid. People cried out in despair, whether because of police violence. the jury gave the okay to continue to abuse and oppress and suppress black people in this country. We just want to come out and show our support for Rodney King, his family. Or, as Carlos points out in his video, I say, because of a lethal virus. Do you think you've really accomplished a great deal? What else can we do? We're dying. The city is dying. Plague!

40 million infected people is a fucking plague. We are in the worst shape we have ever, ever, ever been in. What is it that you feel when you talk about the AIDS example? It's just this tremendous feeling of heartbreak and care. Obviously, I wasn't around for the heyday of it, but I do live in a generation that very profoundly feels the aftermath of not having elders, having the generation before subliterated, and feel every day the outside.

the absence of gay men that we can look up to and kind of like define culture and serve as like kind of like shamans for the rest of the community that void. In 1994, AIDS or gay cancer, as it was called for so long, was the leading cause of death for people 25 to 44. You know, on one hand, the story, I think, of the AIDS crisis in America is that the activists won, right? Like, look in the long run, they secured all this funding for AIDS research and now. Now HIV infection rates are way down in the United States,

and now we have this pill called PrEP that protects us from it. And in the long view, it's a victory, right? They fought, but their sacrifices were worth it because look at this big thing. But those people who died... Died. Died. Like, the story ended for them. They died to a stupid plague for no fucking reason, while the world around them did nothing.

I just wanted to challenge that idea that things would always turn out okay, because we lost a whole generation of people. who fought their fucking asses off and died. And I don't accept the ego's story about that, which is like the sacrifice was worth it. No, it wasn't. The first question I set out with was, why all the millennial hopelessness?

For a lot of us millennials, we walk around and see pain, and it feels like we're being told to stuff down our grief. Carlos and others I've been talking to are saying, no, we need to sit with a broken, 2. Shawna McGarry, 1983. I am realizing that this is a terrible time to do a podcast because I'm nine months pregnant and I burp every other word. I'm so sorry. It's totally fine.

A lot of millennial writers are starting to create a vocabulary for facing the enormity of the pain. Shauna wrote on the Netflix series BoJack Horseman, which I think, one person's opinion, is the archetypal millennial show. When were you born for the sake of this since I'm talking to millennial? In the early 80s, yeah. So I'm like right in between that. I think they're calling us geriatric millennials right now.

I would come home and watch almost every day when I was about 11 or 12, like Northern Exposure, I think. And we used to watch like what ABC Family Friday. What was it called? T.J.F, of course. Yeah, T-G-I-F. Shows like Full House and Family Matters. You know, I think you're just watching a world where young people and their parents are getting along and they're making jokes together.

Did I do that? And it's like a similar language. But Shana helped me see how these shows deal with conflict, which is to say, neatly. A character with a drug addiction doesn't suffer any lasting effects beyond that episode. No need for rehab. Um, yeah, I'm Bojack and, uh, oh God, it feels so dumb. And I'm an alcoholic. Hi, Bojack.

Bojack Horseman is a comedy at its core. But in this world, problems do not have easy answers. The writers have this fierce commitment to not resolving issues neatly. After Bojack's ottoman catches on fire, it's burnt for the rest of the season until he buys a new one. God damn it. If he has a party in one episode, the house stays messy until someone cleans it, plants that go unwatered die in a cartoon, and when a character breaks their wrist, they wear a cast for several episodes. Every action has an effect. Shana took the same tack in the episode she wrote about depression. It's like, I'm a person, I am depressed. It doesn't make me feel

better to see people on TV, never even talk about taking antidepressants. In her episode, one of the main characters has been diagnosed as clinically depressed. You're making this a bigger thing than it is. I'll be fine. One of the things I'm most proud of in that episode is the Diane story. She goes back on antidepressants. And so we had a lot of conversations in the room about how to best portray that. The episode touches on Diane's fear of gaining weight and the antidepressants work.

The writers then change her character in the show to reflect that. From that point on, not just that episode, she's drawn. bigger after gaining weight. But in this world, if you've hurt someone, that hurt lasts too. You had sexed with Emily? Well, what did you think? I don't know, not that. I just knew something sketchy happened.

Todd, I'm sorry. All right, I screwed up. I know I screwed up. I don't know why. Oh, great. Of course. Here it comes. You can't keep doing this.

You can't keep doing shitty things and then feel bad about yourself. Like, that makes it okay. You need to be better. I know, and I'm sorry, okay? I was drunk, and there was all this pressure with the Oscar campaign. But now, now that it's over, I... No, no. Bojack, just stop.

You are all the things that are wrong with you. It's not the alcohol or the drugs or any of the shitty things that happened to you in your career or when you were a kid. It's you. All right? It's you. Do you think that 90s TV set us up to be sad?

Sad? I don't know. You can completely, I'm not fishing for an answer. I was curious. No, I mean, it is funny. Like, I think, I think being sad as like a bigger part of my life and a bigger, that it's okay to be sad. And that there's that balance between sad and happy all the time was. something that 90s TV did not tell us. And it felt like in TV there was this also

realization of that and that we really let the pendulum swing the other way with shows like Breaking Bad and the Sopranos that we were like, no, no, everything's shit. You know, like these men that you idolized, they're bad men, bad. And I think BoJack was also satirizing that a little bit and that that is also not true, that the world is not so black and white. We were coming out of the Reagan era in the 90s. I think there was a lot of terrible social programming. A lot of people were in bad financial situations. There was this idea of, like, can there be a middle class that's, like, happy?

And every week you start over. And I think we've progressed past that as a mature audience of television. Like, we don't have patience for that anymore. You know, obviously like Harvey Weinstein, that artifice that Hollywood was able to maintain, it's both behind and in front of the camera. It just doesn't exist anymore. So why pretend that it does? Like, it's sort of like you have to actually see reality.

This is Daniel Shirel, a climate organizer in Washington, D.C. Part of what the climate movement, I think, is set out to do, much like the Black Lives Matter movement, is to, like, force the politics. to actually live in reality and see the full picture and see the full humanity of everybody and see the full tangibility of all ecosystems and it's sort of like reorientation. That's climate reiner Daniel Sherell,

whose recent book, Warmth, is about coming of age in the era of climate change. Our story continues in just a moment, so stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We'll continue now with a story

from our producer Gophane and Putabweile. Gophon has been talking to millennials about a state of despair that he sees in his generation. And he asked them, why do we feel hopeless? And what should we do with that feeling? 3. Patrick Nathan, 1984. My name is Patrick Nathan.

I wrote image control, art, fascism, and the right to resist. There's another element to millennial despair. And it's a big one. The influence of social media. One way millennials differ from, previous generations is that we grew up presenting ourselves online. What was your screen name back in the days of screen names?

Hey, ha ha ha. Great purple cow. Would you like to explain this? Uh, no. Yeah. Like Patrick and I, millennials were kids or young adults when we were introduced to the internet. You went there to find a community that you did not have, and you presented yourself as a kind of person that you wanted to be, and people

literally refer to you by your screen name. Then with the socials, MySpace and Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, came the change. That online avatar and your real life self are no longer two distinct identities and start to blend together quite a lot. Ooh! Online screen name you and real life. you merge. And suddenly we're all brands with platforms. Everybody is suddenly responsible for their own PR as if they were some sort of celebrity. This does a few things. Your life is lived in

public and so your failures are public. You live in a semi-constant state of anxiety about saying the wrong thing in public. And since you're fundamentally a public person with a platform, there's this pressure to comment on events because silence can sometimes feel as though it's unethical. And I do think there is a distinction between the millennials and Gen Z because we are still old enough to have been raised in a completely different reality. And I think it makes us an especially fragile generation. 4. How to Be Hopeless. I started out with two questions. One, why do we feel hopeless?

Two, what do we do with that hopelessness? So let's go back to Carlos Maza, who posted that video, How to Be Hopeless. The how is real. He takes it seriously. It's not we should be hopeless. Let's give up and sit in the content stream. He's saying, this is our reality. How can we live with it?

So I picked up Camus the Plague in March, March 2020. Camus, the author, wrote it while Trave. and Nazi occupied France. And the book is actually an allegory for the plague of fascism. Like the experience of being stuck in a country that is losing its mind and engaging in mass violence and senseless destruction. At the time that I was reading it, it just really felt like it gave me language for a feeling that I didn't know what to do with.

What's an example of something that you read in the plague that when you read it, it articulated something that you were feeling? there's this ongoing debate between the doctor who's fighting the plague, this journalist who wants to get the hell out of dodge and escape the plague, and this volunteer who's kind of stuck in the city by accident and chooses to just fight it cheerily about what the purpose of life is and why a person should respond to a plague by fighting against it. And one of the characters says,

all I know is that in life there are plagues and there are victims, and one would try as hard as they can, never decide with the plagues and always decide with the victims. It's such a brutally simple way of describing the experience of being one human stuck on the planet, which is like,

I don't know if any of my efforts will be worth it, but I do know that something bad is happening and that the victims need help. And so wouldn't you like to die knowing that you made this easier for people, that you made life better for people, that you brought joy or alleviated suffering. And even saying it out loud now,

like, it's so, it's not enough. It does not fix grief. But it is a way of making sense of it, like to just say, okay, I'm not going to like abandon the other volunteers who are stuck here too just because I'm frustrated and sad, and had a hurt.

Walking that tightrope between those two poles of despair and optimism is to me like part of my life's work, staying on that tightrope that I would call reality. 5. Dan Shirell, 1990. When Carlos talks about this need to keep fighting that he borrowed from a 70-year-old book, it's very much like what Dan Shirel, the climate organizer, told me. Dan has just written a memoir called warmth

that is all about this complicated reality needing to inspire people without lying to them. I often describe it this way to people is that like climate has never been one of my things whenever it's come up I've just been like I guess it's too late like I don't even have basic vocabulary

I don't have subject and verb and like you know my dear friend Emily and I who's featured in the book We've been talking recently about, especially in the wake of the Glasgow cop, about the Horcrocks model of climate change for all that. Just to flip us back to middle school for a second. Bear with me, bear with me. And, you know, there is a huge swath of outcomes between 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming and 3 degrees Celsius of warming, which is what we're currently on track for. And when I was growing up in the 90s, when nobody gave a shit about the climate crisis,

we were on track for four or five degrees of warming. That's basically like Mad Max. You know, it would have led to mass human die-off. And we still might be headed in that direction, but we have bent the curve of emissions down somewhat. And so there's this vast array of outcomes, and between 1.5 and 3, and for every tick of the thermometer between those two poles, you are saving or consigning millions of people to life and death. And so Emily and I are like, okay, there are 15 tenths of a degree between 1.5 and 3 degrees Celsius.

And much like the whore cruxes, each one of those things is going to take an incredible amount. It is going to involve an almost impossible seeming political mission. And that the rest of our lives is going to be spent on, you know, probably all of my work for the rest of my life will maybe be some small part of shaving off one of those 15 tents. But when I imagine myself behind a veil of ignorance, like not having been born yet, and somebody were to tell me you would be born in the year the first popular book on global warming would be released,

you'll see it as you come of age. It'll transition from a niche research topic to an ongoing global catastrophe. Obviously, I would have felt grief about that, and I do feel grief about that. But also, if somebody had, you know, likewise told me that you're going to spend the rest of your life, coming together with people who share your values,

to try to create a polity and economy that actually traits everybody with dignity. I kind of can't think of a more meaningful way to spend a human life. In Christian theology, there's this idea called the already not yet. Scripture teaches that one day, not yet, Jesus will usher in a new heavens and new earth, but also in his earthly ministry he proclaimed that the kingdom of heaven is here already. If you fixate on the not yet, the new heavens and new earth to come, you can become an escapist. But if you fixate on the already, the kingdom of heaven that's already here, you can despair because justice is slow and coming, and things don't look great.

You're meant to hold the two ideas' intention. Live in the present new kingdom that Jesus ushered in through his life, and, look to the future new heavens and new earth. In queer theory, there's a similar idea of futurity, that while we live right now and right now it's flawed, we look ahead to a queer future that we can't see yet and only imagine and begin to live that way in the present. Both of these frameworks reach for a better way to live,

a way to grieve the failed present, and let a better imagined future shape our lives now. In my case, that means grieving that my words, even the words of this essay, may cost some of the relationships I've held most year. It's something I can't change. And while I mourn that loss, I can at the same time imagine a new family. Perhaps one forged of blood. Perhaps not. That will embrace me in a bright, glorious future.

The New Yorker Radio Hour's Gofan and Putabwele. And we heard from the writers Kave Akbar, Carlos Maza, Shauna McGarry, Patrick Nathan, and Daniel Sherell. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program. I want to thank you for joining us. See you soon. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. This episode was produced by AlexiCodd.

Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon Corby, Calilea, David Krasnow, Gophane and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.