Distant Conversations

My friends from college seem happier, now. Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising coming out of MIT. Undergrad was crushingly intense, and everyone was more or less in constant crisis. With graduation came a breath of fresh air, and then another, and another: we graduated into normal jobs and long-term relationships and normalcy. Everything got easier. Or at least, that’s how we talk. When we get on the phone or sit down for coffee and ask each other how it’s going, or what is new or striking, there are really no answers at all. It’s all just, things are good, things are really good.

I am glad that my friends are content, and also I don’t buy that this is all there is to say. For a time, maybe it was true that people’s mental real estate was occupied by learning the basics of how to live with a longer time horizon – the mundane work of figuring out how to fit cooking and exercising and having hobbies into the rhythms of a full-time job. But we are now almost three years since graduation. It’s enough time to develop a new set of uncertainties. How do I hold my own ambition while still taking joy in the present? How do I orient around my religious commitments in the context of my interfaith relationship? How much of my life am I willing to give up to doing work I don’t care about, under the guise that I am learning skills from it and becoming more ready to do something else? How do I become more comfortable and strong in believing what I believe and desiring what I desire? There are plenty of rich and pressing questions that I am exploring, and that, honestly, I would like to discuss. My friends are thoughtful people. What are their open questions? And why has it gotten so much harder to talk through these things that matter to us?

It has gotten harder. My own questions and anxieties used to be right at the surface, easy fodder for conversation – and so, it seemed, were everyone else’s. In undergrad, it didn’t take much to get people to go deep. I could ask a few questions, and soon friends or acquaintances were talking to me about things that mattered to them. So much was going on, constantly, that many people were grateful for the opportunity to talk through what they were thinking and feeling. But the environment has changed, and I have changed, and I no longer so regularly elicit reflection from people.

I ask my friends how their weeks are going. And whereas in college, there was always something new or notable going on, that would serve as a starting point for further conversation, now people say, nothing much is going on. I don’t think it’s quite that nothing is happening. But in taking up this longer time horizon, we are focused on sustainability – routines, small pleasures, slow change – instead of the dramatic extremes of college trouble. The activity is less salient and certainly less pressing. So those questions, those immediate how-are-you, what’s-going-on questions, no longer reliably work to bring conversations to depth.

I’ve taken to asking people about the future, asking what they are thinking about changing in their lives. But this is an even worse question, and almost adversarial: it says, sure you’re happy now, but will you be happy doing things this way for a year? five years? twenty? When I ask this question, I feel desperate, like I am searching for cracks in the contentedness. It explicitly seeks points of failure in the project of life sustainability. And it gets awfully repetitive. It’s stupid to ask people about their long-term-future plans on a weekly or even a monthly basis. Like, do I want the answer to change? Am I waiting for people to tell me that they’ve discovered some deep discontent with the lives they are living?

I think sometimes that that is what I’m waiting for: I want to hear about my friends’ dissatisfaction. I want to hear that they want more out of life. I was wondering for a while if I resent my friends who are happy, but I don’t think that’s quite it. I have a handful of friends who are just thriving, and I love talking to them, and I am so happy that they are happy. I feel the desperation of wanting to hear something different instead when I am talking to friends who claim that they are happy, when they do not actually seem that fulfilled. To be clear, I often fall into this category, too: I catch myself telling friends when they ask only that my life is good, really good. While it is true that my life is quite good, these broad, detached statements do not reflect the more complicated undercurrents. I smooth my perspective over in this way even with people I trust and would like to talk to more openly. It is frustrating, but I have had trouble stopping.

The subtle pressure to put on an appearance that things are okay is new to me. I’m starting to think that it’s because happiness is status-charged, now, in a way that it wasn’t before. In college, it was cool to have a lot on your mind; now it is cool to be a happy and functional adult. When I share with people the ways that I feel lost, I am worried that they pity me. When other people express to me the ways they are unhealthy and struggling, I feel a strange-brief twinge, a feeling of being higher-up. Speaking explicitly about differentials of salary has been less charged than discussing differentials in confident-happy-functional-adulthood. It’s insidious, and I think it has been messing with my head.

In the end, I get nothing out of signaling happiness to people I love and trust – or honestly most people – when what I want is to be digging into things, getting at the root of things, hearing about what matters most. It’s time to come to grips with whatever psychological or social phenomenon is going on here. Can I get more comfortable with that whole range of happiness, and can I get more comfortable being anywhere on that scale? What happens if I practice more metta meditation and get in the habit of imagining abundant happiness? Can I be vulnerable first, in conversation, and lay out some of my open questions for other people – not only to model the behavior, but also because I would really like to hear what they have to say? And what happens if I am more deliberate about asking people what is good in their lives, and trying to find what is resonating from that more positive side? These are some experiments to try. I will have to iterate and explore, till I find how to create space that is comfortable and safe for thinking-things-through. Because I don’t think it is a given that we have to stop having these conversations with heart. We are not boring, in adulthood: things have changed, and we have changed, but it is worth caring enough to attend to what matters in this change.

Direct me, so that I seek conversation not for my own gain, but for the sake of connection with others. Cleanse me of the rattling insecurity that bubbles into harshness. Show me how to accept my own self, that I might accept others.

Grant me patience, and let me sense and respect others’ boundaries. Make my tongue gentle. Infuse my heart with curiosity; arrange my whole body into a posture of curiosity. Let me seek what is dear only with a sense of the sacred, and let me see the unfolding of the sacred in all conversations.