Letter #87: The Boomer Backlash

Life advice from John Mayer.

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