Dear James: Must the Haters Hate?
Is anything ailing, torturing, or nagging at you? Are you beset by existential worries? Every Tuesday, James Parker tackles readers' questions. Tell him about your lifelong or in-the-moment problems at dearjames@theatlantic.com.
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Dear James,
The world has so many haters. How do we deal with this as a collective?
Dear Reader,
Are we a collective? I suppose we are. Doesn't feel like it right now—which of course is the point of your question.
Hate, for me, comes in two main varieties.
There's elemental hate—dead-eyed, steady, implacable hate—which I tend to think has a demonic origin, because it runs counter to creation. It's infernally reductive, stripping the life out of everything: the hater and the hated, equally dehumanized. Thankfully this kind of hate is fairly rare. When you meet it, run.
Then there's spazzy, jazzy, freewheeling, comes-in-ragged-blasts hate—the kind that most of us are familiar with. Day-to-day hate, petty hate. It shakes our brains, shakes our systems, is almost frivolous in the randomness of its objects: this driver, that YouTuber, those people in line at the pharmacy. This kind of hate is becoming more prevalent, because it has everything to do with our current state of psychic atomization and distance from one another. It's love going backward, badly disrupted connective energy looking for a home.
What do we do about it? God knows. Name it. Recognize it when it rises up—and detach. Throw our smartphones away. Unplug our egos. Get off Amazon Prime. Stop listening to big-mouth podcasts. Breathe deeply. Be nicer to our weird neighbors. Be nicer to our weird selves. How's that?
Exhaling peaceful platitudes,
James
Dear James,
I'm exasperated by the overuse of the word existential—the trendy term everyone seems to be using to fill speeches and published articles. Also: consequential. I would have expected The Atlantic to refrain. Sigh.
Dear Reader,
Words I overuse: cosmic, vibe, flaming (or fiery), wild, harrowing, psychic. The reason for this is that I live in a wild and flaming cosmos, and my psyche is harrowed by its vibes. Similarly, existential and consequential are having a moment because we live in existential, consequential times. On this—to use Auden's line—what instruments we have agree.
(Also: We have no good synonyms for existential. Believe me, I've looked.)
Doing shots of language,
James
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Article originally published at The Atlantic
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The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Is anything ailing, torturing, or nagging at you? Are you beset by existential worries? Every Tuesday, James Parker tackles readers' questions. Tell him about your lifelong or in-the-moment problems at dearjames@ Don't want to miss a single column? Sign up to get 'Dear James' in your inbox. Dear James, In the second half of last year, I went to a naturist beach for the first time. I was afraid on my whole walk there that I would chicken out. But there was nobody around for miles—so I stripped. Since then, I've done it five more times, at various beaches, with growing confidence, in front of other people who have and have not been clothed. I've found great peace in lying naked on the sand, listening to the waves. But: Over the winter I started to get these feelings of shame and guilt. I was raised a very strict Catholic. And although my mother has been dead for a decade, I can suddenly feel her strong disapproval from beyond the grave. It's a conundrum. How would you handle it? Dear Reader, Well, I was in church on Sunday morning for the Feast of Pentecost, celebrating the wacky mandate of the Holy Spirit to go where it pleases—to land, if it likes, right on top of somebody's head (your head, my head, anybody's head) and nest there in a throbbing bolus of flame. So yup, I'm ready to get Catholic about this. I'm ready to get dogmatic. Your body is a gift from God. In the appropriate place (such as a naturist beach), you should be able to go as naked as Adam in the garden and feel not a twinge-let of shame. You should be like the primal newborns in the Doors' 'Waiting for the Sun': 'At first flash of Eden / We raced down to the sea / Standing there on freedom's shore.' (Who dares to say Jim Morrison isn't a great American poet?) Isn't that the true spirit of nudism? They don't call it a birthday suit for nothing. Shed your clothes; shed everything that cramps or abashes you. Air out those musty parts. Unshadow yourself. Let it all flap. Be a real American. Scamper shoeless across the sand into liberty's gold-green sunrise. Me, I'm not great at being naked. It makes me feel too … naked. So I know where you're coming from. But you've done so well, made such strides in self-development. The confidence, the peace, the waves: Keep going! Of course—as at any breakthrough moment, any evolutionary threshold of the psyche—you're being swarmed by the old demons, now at extra strength: guilt, disgrace, an image of your mother scolding you. They are to be stoutly resisted. Imagine instead your mother's delight in you as a baby, in all your sweet-smelling, roly-poly nudeness. Imagine reality taking pleasure in itself across the surface of your skin. Last word here goes to Gerard Manley Hopkins, great Catholic sensualist, nudist in his heart: 'The Holy Ghost over the bent / World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.' Safe in my trousers, James By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it in part or in full, and we may edit it for length and/or clarity. Article originally published at The Atlantic
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Editor's Note: Is anything ailing, torturing, or nagging at you? Are you beset by existential worries? Every Tuesday, James Parker tackles readers' questions. Tell him about your lifelong or in-the-moment problems at dearjames@ Don't want to miss a single column? Sign up to get 'Dear James' in your inbox. Dear James, In the second half of last year, I went to a naturist beach for the first time. I was afraid on my whole walk there that I would chicken out. But there was nobody around for miles—so I stripped. Since then, I've done it five more times, at various beaches, with growing confidence, in front of other people who have and have not been clothed. I've found great peace in lying naked on the sand, listening to the waves. But: Over the winter I started to get these feelings of shame and guilt. I was raised a very strict Catholic. And although my mother has been dead for a decade, I can suddenly feel her strong disapproval from beyond the grave. It's a conundrum. How would you handle it? Dear Reader, Well, I was in church on Sunday morning for the Feast of Pentecost, celebrating the wacky mandate of the Holy Spirit to go where it pleases—to land, if it likes, right on top of somebody's head (your head, my head, anybody's head) and nest there in a throbbing bolus of flame. So yup, I'm ready to get Catholic about this. I'm ready to get dogmatic. Your body is a gift from God. In the appropriate place (such as a naturist beach), you should be able to go as naked as Adam in the garden and feel not a twinge-let of shame. You should be like the primal newborns in the Doors' ' Waiting for the Sun ': 'At first flash of Eden / We raced down to the sea / Standing there on freedom's shore.' (Who dares to say Jim Morrison isn't a great American poet?) Isn't that the true spirit of nudism? They don't call it a birthday suit for nothing. Shed your clothes; shed everything that cramps or abashes you. Air out those musty parts. Unshadow yourself. Let it all flap. Be a real American. Scamper shoeless across the sand into liberty's gold-green sunrise. Me, I'm not great at being naked. It makes me feel too … naked. So I know where you're coming from. But you've done so well, made such strides in self-development. The confidence, the peace, the waves: Keep going! Of course—as at any breakthrough moment, any evolutionary threshold of the psyche—you're being swarmed by the old demons, now at extra strength: guilt, disgrace, an image of your mother scolding you. They are to be stoutly resisted. Imagine instead your mother's delight in you as a baby, in all your sweet-smelling, roly-poly nudeness. Imagine reality taking pleasure in itself across the surface of your skin. Last word here goes to Gerard Manley Hopkins, great Catholic sensualist, nudist in his heart: 'The Holy Ghost over the bent / World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.'
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Gen X's cultural fluency is unique, but it goes largely unnoticed. They're the translators no one pays. And being fluent in everyone else's world leaves them disconnected from their own. They were promised upward mobility, but got three economic collapses and skyrocketing costs instead. Many own homes they can't afford to renovate, and degrees they're still paying off. They're richer than Gen Z but poorer than Boomers—and still expected to have it all together. Gen X is quietly drowning in 'middle-class' appearances. They were told they'd be fine. But the math doesn't check out anymore. Workplaces ask Gen X to be tech-savvy like Gen Z, but as loyal as Boomers. They're told to mentor, update their skills, and lean into 'agility.' But there's no cultural or institutional support for what that costs. 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