1. Let’s kick this off with some laughs. First up, from the Hard Times, here are some “Forms of Existential Dread That Keep Me From Needing an Alarm Clock”:
I’ve always found it strange that people need a device to beep them awake. Partially because that sounds like such a harsh way to start your day, but mostly because they’re able to fall asleep in the first place.
And in step with the big anniversary of the first Harry Potter movie (20 years ago Wednesday!), here is some humor from the Wizarding World and/or McSweeney’s, “Draco Malfoy’s College Recommendation Letter”:
Whether in Potions, Herbology, or challenging other students to late-night duels, Draco’s spirited engagement motivates other students to bring their A-game, thus elevating the communal learning experience. His leadership and prowess extend to his extracurricular activities as quidditch seeker, Slytherin House prefect, member of the elite Inquisitorial Squad, and other, more ambitious pursuits. …
I would like to address the disciplinary infraction that appears on Draco’s record. In his sixth year, Draco attempted to assassinate Hogwarts Headmaster Albus Dumbledore on multiple occasions. Admittedly, this is a serious matter. As Draco will detail in his application essay, Lucius Malfoy was sentenced to Azkaban prison the previous year. For Draco, losing his father at such a pivotal moment in his life was devastating. He grew despondent and, in a moment of vulnerability, fell under the influence of the Death Eaters gang. … Because Draco was forthcoming about his actions and showed appropriate remorse, he remains in good standing at Hogwarts and is somehow still eligible to graduate this year.
Another that I enjoyed from McSweeney’s is “Mine’s the Kid in the Ramones Tee”:
Can you even with these kids? Not yet three and already obsessed with the same specific bands as us parents.
@ David Zahl.
2. Now onto more serious matters! Such as hair loss.
Perhaps recently you have noticed an increase in the density of the unsightly nest of hair clogging your shower drain, and if so, rest assured, you’re not alone, says Amanda Mull, who, in the Atlantic, denounces 2021 as the year American lost its hair. Unfortunate thinning results from TE, telogen effluvium, the arrival of which is “sudden and can be dramatic. It’s caused by the ordinary traumas of human existence,” like, hmm, a global pandemic, say.
Eighty percent of men and about half of women experience some form of hair loss in the course of their life. TE was first described in the 1960s, and it has long been a predictable side effect of surgery, changing medications, crash dieting, childbirth, bankruptcy, and breakups. The way TE resolves for almost everyone who doesn’t already have chronic hair-loss issues is that the hair eventually grows back — plain and simple. You would think, at some point, that someone would tell you not to panic if you lose some hair after something intense happens — that even if you shed for months, it will grow back eventually, and there’s no need to do anything but wait. […]
TE is temporary for almost everyone, but because of the vagaries of hair’s growth cycle, the shedding generally doesn’t start until two to four months after the stressor that triggered it occurred. By then, people are no longer thinking about the flu they had months ago — a new shampoo or medication might get the blame instead. And many people who experience TE have no idea whether their hair will ever come back; the shedding can go on for months before slowing down, and regrowth can take several more months to become visible to the naked eye. By the time people notice their hair growing back, a year may have passed since the process was set into motion. Once it starts, the only effective treatment is patience.
Mull acknowledges that all of this may sound like “vanity” — especially if you’ve never experienced sudden or intermittent hair loss. But a full head of hair, she reports, is “a crude, unscientific shorthand for youth, for healthy living, for vitality. Losing it can send people into a profound depression, or make them ashamed to leave the house.”
Where this piece gets spicy, especially for us here at Mockingbird, is when Mull cites a biblical edict as exacerbating hair-related shame. “If a woman has long hair,” Paul writes in 1 Corinthians, “it is her glory.” Facepalm. Paul! Although I am a professing Christian, I think it’s safe for me to say I am not a fan of this verse. Given everything above, it seems profoundly terrestrial, not to mention contradictory to what Scripture says elsewhere, that “man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”
Mull concludes with a thorough takedown of the hair regrowth industry, which exploits the panic/depression of hair-losers and the meandering timeline of TE-related thinning. So before you pull the trigger on that Amazon cart full of biotin, consider:
… the professionally beautiful absolutely do not rely on these types of products to ensure that their hair looks thick and luxurious. Celebrities … generally don’t have incredible hair. Instead, they have incredibly expensive hair extensions and lace-front wigs.
And note that, although most art depicts our Lord sporting a glorious mane, the prophet Isaiah assures us “There was nothing attractive about him.”
3. An equally quotable article comes from Yuval Levin at The Dispatch, all about “social inertness” — not that we have too many desires but not enough of them. This observation isn’t Levin’s alone, by the way. Recently the psychologist Jamil Zaki described “languishing” — our increasing tendency to isolate and self-medicate with solo pastimes (Netflix, Instagram, fill in the blank). Last week we talked about the near-universal desire of “coziness” — to be “safe inside our own lil homes.” (See also: this New Yorker cartoon.) For his part, Levin calls it “pathological passivity,” and it encapsulates the suspension of major things like marriage and having kids. Synthesizing surveys from Pew and elsewhere, Levin’s essay is big-picture, if slightly alarming, but not untrue:
… the challenges to America’s social order now seem less like exorbitant human desires driving people’s lives out of control and more like an absence of energy and drive leaving people languishing and enervated. …
The good news is often just one consequence of the bad. There are fewer divorces because there are fewer marriages, and so more of those that begin survive. There are fewer abortions because there are fewer pregnancies, and so more of those that happen are wanted. There are fewer out-of-wedlock births because there are fewer births in general. The same pattern is evident beyond sexuality and family too. Fewer teenagers are dying in car accidents because fewer teenagers are getting driver’s licenses. There is less social disorder, we might say, because there is less social life. We are doing less of everything together, so that what we do is a little more tidy and controlled.
Now part of this is economic:
Wealthier Americans are more interested in marriage and kids than those with lower incomes.
Oof. Not only is that terribly sad but it’s also something “family focused” Christians are going to have to reckon with soon. But “inertness” is not only pecuniary:
The waning of the life scripts provided by family, religion, and widespread traditional social norms leaves younger Americans less sure of where to step and how to build their lives.
Among other things, this likely contributes to the growing tendency to look to politics for such scripts, and so to seek more assertive and moralistic social agendas, whether of the left or right. The case for such agendas easily becomes too strident and desperate, and it runs the risk of drawing some among the young into a depraved and vicious vitalism. But it is rooted in the valid perception of a moral void that is surely at the bottom of much of the pathological passivity we now encounter.
Levin is careful not to prescribe the “4-step solution” — you know, 1) graduate, 2) get a job, 3) get married, 4) have kids. And I agree, listicles never help anyone in any serious way. Also I would guess that much “social inertness” is in large response to a need for control and certainty. When friends of mine were married recently, they faced no short amount of queries about whether they were sure that they were sure that they were SURE that they were ready to be married. Prospective parents and people looking for jobs face the same questions. Is this the RIGHT job?
Levin concludes that describing “a vision of a life well lived in loving commitment to others stands a better chance of showing people what they have to gain by coming off the sidelines.” What we tend to have, instead, are visions of “a life well lived” independently and/or online, per the influencers.
4. Related, but perhaps less surprising, is this: in 2020, Facebook conducted a survey of about 143,000 users, asking them “Is this post good for the world?” On a sliding scale of 5 options, respondents classified certain posts between “Good for the world” (GFTW) or “Bad for the world” (BFTW). As Slate says, “Some of the Results Were Shocking.” But for low anthropologists, not so much.
To wit: the “most engaged posts” were classified as BFTW. Posts about “socio-political” issues were also more frequently classified as BFTW, as were posts from men generally, both young and old. As for your original thoughts? BTFW! Mwahaha.
Facebook users have often complained about not seeing enough posts from their friends — yet original statuses [as opposed to re-shares or media from strangers] were often thought of as BFTW. …
But what about the stuff on FB that’s GFTW, according to the survey respondents? That’s a more complicated question. The study indicates that while posts typically marked BFTW “indicated negative content,” the posts marked as GFTW varied a bit more: from posts about positive developments in the world to stuff users simply — and subjectively — found “humorous.” This could get dark: Two example posts widely marked as GFTW among U.S. users included a QAnon-promoting status as well as a screed claiming that Jacob Blake, an unarmed Black man who was shot by a Kenosha police officer in August 2020, “is completely responsible for what happened” to him.
In short, what people thought was good was not always good. It reminds me of that classic meme where a judge looks down from his seat saying, “Aren’t you capable of distinguishing right from wrong?” And the offender, smiling dumbly, answers: “Can you give me a hint?”
5. Now about sci-fi: Perhaps in response to a new biography that paints H.G. Wells as somewhat of a sexual feminist (for his time), a relative swell of tributes have been circulating the ’net. Foundational as much of Wells’ work may be, I’m happy to share Adam Gopnik’s recent write-up in the New Yorker, which evaluates the famed author’s legacy like this:
Wells was a very big deal in his day. … But Wells got hit hard by fate. First, after two World Wars, his belief in perpetual progress came to seem fatuous, and then, in the age of Woolf and Joyce, his Victorian style looked baggy and gassy.
But Gopnik goes on to argue that the most problematic of Wells’ views — technological adulation, optimistic scientism (fancy words for being a fan of eugenics) — are less present in his fiction than some would have you believe. Even so:
It is telling that, after the war, he was unable to write a memorable work of fantasy, though he often tried. His most notable effort, “The Shape of Things to Come” (1933), is a futurist fable, later made into a movie, that gets many big things wrong: the secular World Police descend to shut down Mecca, the Nazis are too disorganized to persecute the Jews, and the Germans are outmatched by the Poles. As Orwell said once, Wells was too sane a man to understand twentieth-century craziness; the world had outstripped his imagination.
Which is why, for anyone jonesing for some vintage sc-fi, I would point toward C.S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet well before the War of the Worlds or the Island of Doctor Moreau.
6. Lastly, for this weekend’s devotional content, I highly recommend Justin Holcomb’s reflection on Psalm 88. Holcomb observes that this particular psalm, unlike many others, contains virtually no trace of relief or praise; indeed its final word is “darkness.” While there are “subtle hints” of confidence in God throughout, these mostly come through the boldness with which the psalmist voices his pain:
Psalm 88 is an invitation to an honest assessment of your life. God understands the full range of human experience and can handle your loneliness, your sorrow over your sin, your cry for help in a relationship, or your unwavering feelings of depression.
Psalm 88 shows us that God sanctions desperate, despair-filled, and barely-hopeful prayers — prayers about what the Puritans used to call “God’s dreadful withdrawal.” All of us experience moments in life when God seems silent. … It is because we experienced nearness to God that the distance bothers us so much. Our longing for God means we know him, and more importantly, that God knows us.
Psalm 88 is also meant to be sung. God meant for people to sing songs of lament as they came to worship him. This is the intermingling of hope in hopelessness … God’s grace is sufficient for anything you are going through now or that you went through in the past or that you will go through in the future.
Dovetaling this nicely is Courtney Ellis’ article, The Paradox of Playfulness:
My friend Kay reminded me of a truly horrific quote from Fiddler on the Roof: “God would like us to be joyful even when our hearts lie panting on the floor.” Ugh, no. Truly, he would not. Last I checked, Jesus is screaming psalms about God’s abandonment while in agony on the cross, not pre-quoting Paul’s admonition to “Rejoice always!” while whistling a happy tune.
Still, she says, “We engage in whimsy not because life is easy but because life is difficult.”
Often it is suffering that breaks our hearts open to the human necessity of play. People who have it all together — or appear to — love to take themselves much too seriously. But those who know of their desperate need for God and their own fallibility and foibles can begin giving in to the release of playfulness. What grace! What relief!
Strays:
- If you still need convincing to watch Last Chance U.
- ICYMI: Ahead of Thanksgiving week, I recommend Gracie’s advice for family gatherings.
- Adele’s new album “is different from her previous albums. ‘I realized that I was the problem,’ Adele says. ‘Cause all the other albums are like, You did this! You did that! … Then I was like: Oh, shit, I’m the running theme, actually. Maybe it’s me!'”
- The holidays are upon us, and this season I know what I’ll be listening to, thanks to Blake Flattley and the crew at 1517!
