Dear Venerable Elder,
Okay, so, this is really interesting. In 2001, when I was 10, John Mayer scored his breakout hit with the album Room for Squares. The song of that summer was “No Such Thing,” and its refrain was “I wanna run through the halls of my high school. / I wanna scream at the top of my lungs. / I just found out there’s no such thing as the real world, / Just a lie you got to rise above.” As you graciously pointed out at the time, it sounded like just the kind of preternaturally shallow claptrap that would appeal to a preteen idiot.
Maybe if you’re a one-in-a-million guitar talent like Mayer, you can snort at the drab conventions of schoolteacher morality and let your managers pick up the pieces. But a middle-class B+ student who tries to live his life like a Bohemian vision quest will find out in short order that there is, in fact, such a thing as the real world.
Unless of course you belong to the rare generation whose elders—present addressee excepted—raised them on a steady diet of spectacularly bad advice. I remember just the moment when, in college, it suddenly dawned on me that every inspiring bromide I’d been fed in school was garbage. “You can be anything you want to be!” my homeroom teachers said. Turns out, you can’t: you actually have to pick a few disciplines suited to your aptitudes and stick with them. “The most important thing is that you’re proud of who you are.” Wrong again: the most important thing is to do rightly and love mercy.
I could go on. But the point is that kids my age and younger were put in the unique position of discovering as they grew up that stopped clocks like John Mayer were right at exactly that moment. The “real world”—or the world that our venerable advisors passed off as real—genuinely was a lie. It was constructed to protect the already-radical, already-failed revolutionary ethics that our teachers had given themselves over to in the ’60s and ’70s.
Those of us who realized this did return to the old books in search of deeper and more time-tested verities. But we did it almost as an act of rebellion, with all the volatile energy inherent in a youth movement. You’re starting to see the fruits of that now, both good and bad.
Young people are recovering old ways of building families and community, but also falling for ancient racial allegiances and hatreds. They’re recoiling from the pornographic excesses of the sexual revolution, but also from the natural contours of their own bodies. Walk into an H&M these days and you’ll see the walls draped with formless, baggy sweats and hoodies—an improvement over the grotesqueries of Peak Thong, but still a sign of deep ambivalence and discomfort with the human form itself.
We know the old ways are wrong, but we’re not entirely sure what’s right. In this delicate moment, we’re faced with a question: what happens when tradition isn’t traditional? And the best answer I can give is, we better hope that when we rise above the lies of the present, there’s an eternal truth waiting for us on the other side.
Love,
Spencer
I was raised by parents with peak boomer mindset. By the time I got to high school, I realized that my entire life (very much following the advice of my parents) was a fruitless disaster. My teenager rebellion was that I turned to God, adopted religious rituals, and got my life in order. And, somehow, it has left my parents completely dismayed. I acknowledge it must be difficult to see your children turn away from your values…but by the fruits ye shall know…and it’s quite obvious I have been richly blessed. It’s an unfortunate reality that as the younger generation fumbles its way to the true and the beautiful that they will likely be met with indignation from their elders. This younger generation is in uniquely uncharted territory. Yes, may we pray that somehow it works out in our favor. Efforts like this Substack give me hope that at least someone has their eyes set on a higher and holier way than those of the past.
Our customs and traditions were halted so dramatically during the covid hysteria of 2020, that it revealed self-preservation was of the upmost importance in the lives of many adults. The entire worlds of children were dismantled under the same guilt-freeing line used in divorce, 'children are resilient'.
Luckily my children had me. All the noise from outside forces; the ones that seem to pull our offspring from anything true and good were knocked down to a whisper for a while. We got to actually raise our children again.
Kids got a chance to see that there is no such thing as the real world as explained in school and media. Parents got the chance to pay attention to their children and instill their beliefs in them.
Your dad had a satirical monologue one day during the beginning of lockdowns lamenting all the time we'd have to spend with our kids instead of watching porn and so on. This really changed my perspective and made me grateful to have that precious year alone with them.
I think this is related to your letter but lost the how. Anyway, it was the greatest year of my life.