On stress and progress
the planet is hurting and so are our kids
I’ve been thinking a lot about progress lately, what it really means, about how we treat the planet we live on, how we spend our time constantly scrolling on our devices, how we ultimately treat each other.
It’s Saturday evening and I’m sitting on one end of the living room couch, my youngest son is sitting on the other. We have our feet up, both under a shared wool blanket. We’re watching The Bear on Hulu. I suggested it, even though I binged the whole short series a few weeks earlier. But I thought the frenetic camera cuts, and the expert use of sound and music, and even the mix of intense and humorous character performances, would serve as the perfect escapist TV even if the content was sobering. I take a look over at my son every so often and I see him smirking a bit, maybe even letting out a laugh here and there.
My spouse Janyce is in the kitchen, finishing prepping the coffee for the morning and I hear her call out,
“Well, I’m going to bed.”
“I’ll be there soon,” I say.
Earlier in the day the three of us filled both cars with tools and supplies and the yard sale headboard I scored over the summer and drove to my older son’s new apartment an hour out into Central Mass. I was grateful that this day was planned already and it meant there would be a full house of people cleaning the bathroom and kitchen, working together with music playing in the background. Plenty of menial labor to keep the mind occupied.
“Dad’s here,” I said to my oldest son as I passed by him in the kitchen. “He just texted me.”
“Tell him he can come up, the front door is open,” he said.
I looked over to where my youngest son was standing on the the couch in the living room and drilling a hole for the curtain bracket. He hadn’t said much all afternoon.
The previous Thursday, he called me in some emotional distress. “I need some relief from all this. I don’t know how much more I can take, he said. Words no mother likes to hear coming from her son many states away. We talked for a while on the phone and I asked him to be more explicit, giving him a scale of 1-10 and asking him where he’d place his depression. At the end of the call I simply said, “Get on a plane tonight and come home. I’ll pay for it. Do it right now.”
He arrived home the next morning while I was still working, taking the silver line from Logan to the commuter rail in South Station and finally ending up at the end of the line, our stop, in the middle of the day. When he got off the train and walked toward my car, I noticed his bloodshot, puffy eyes from crying right away, but I said nothing about it. I started to talk instead about a project he could do that I left for him in the garage.
“This will be good,” he said, sitting on the concrete floor with all the boxes open and the instruction sheets unfolded, matching up all the individual panels with the corresponding plastic-wrapped nuts and bolts. “I need something to focus on.”
The next day, when we were all at his brother’s apartment, my oldest son took me aside in the kitchen and said, “He doesn’t look good, mom, I want him to stay with me tonight.” I didn’t answer him. Instead I changed the subject and talked about the restaurant reservations at some place in a neighboring town with a lakeside view and a seafood menu. My youngest son had eaten exactly two bites of an omelette and no toast at breakfast. It was late afternoon and the early October sun had flooded the whole apartment. “At least the apartment has good light,” I thought.
“I’m not coming tonight,” said their dad, newly back from his grocery store errand, holding an armful of toilet paper rolls and setting down two cans of Monster energy drinks on the counter. “I’ve got to get home to de-stress,” he said.
“What is this crap?” I said.
“You don’t know Monster?” he said.
My oldest son walked in and grabbed a can. “Mom, I’ve got this rash,” he said, pulling up his shirt to show me the red welts that covered his entire midsection. I made a wincing sound and reached out my hand to touch his arm. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I already went to urgent care. They told me it was just stress.”
“And no doubt it’s also your diet,” I said.
Later, when no-one was looking, I dumped both of the half-full cans of Monster out in the sink.
I’ve been thinking a lot about progress lately, what it really means, about how we treat the planet we live on, how we spend our time constantly scrolling on our devices, how we ultimately treat each other. I talked my youngest son into taking an internship in Nashville during his last year in college, even though all four of those years were up and down for him emotionally, with alternating bouts of anxiety and crushing depression. He ended up staying in Tennessee to be close to the many freelance gigs in the music industry, all so that he could make progress on his career aspirations. But now he’s far away from a family support network. Is that progress?
My older son this year insisted on moving into his own apartment, without roommates, even though he couldn’t really afford it, certainly not on his own with barely a starting teacher salary and still only midway through an online graduate degree. But he was approaching age thirty and he felt like he was supposed to be making more progress.
I’m lucky to be doing as well progress-wise as my parent’s generation. But my kids are not. Not even close. At least not by the same standards. And I wonder if maybe it’s making them anxious and depressed. The other day I listened to Douglas Rushkoff on a late-night radio program, with my earbuds in my ears, lying in the dark of our bedroom. He was telling a story that was the impetus for his new book, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. Basically, he was asked by some of the richest people on the planet to travel to the desert to give them a private talk on the digital future. But get this, not so they could gain some wisdom for how best to use their money to help make the world a better place. No. But instead to get very clear on how to plan for the coming, inevitable apocalypse so that they— and they alone—could survive it. And they were serious.
It’s been a full day of cleaning and shopping and moving furniture and a whole evening of talking and eating (and some levity, thank god) watching the sun setting on the lake surface just outside the restaurant’s wall of windows.
Now it’s late and we’re tired. Janyce has already been in bed for over an hour. I nudge my son with my foot when I see him scrolling on his phone.
“You don’t want to miss this part,” I say.
We’re at the part of the final episode of the The Bear when Carmy performs his Shakespearean-like soliloquy. It’s got to be my favorite part of the whole series and I’m hoping it will hit a chord inside my son and let him know that he isn’t the only one who struggles. And I’m hoping as well for it to be the perfect preamble to our next day discussion about talk therapy and adjusting his meds with a doctor, and coming back home to be with the family this Thanksgiving. Like Rushkoff says, “We can become the individual consumers and profiles that our devices and platforms want us to be, or we can remember that the truly evolved human doesn’t go it alone.”