The problem of Hamlet’s age
One of the first pieces I read in grad school was an excerpt of Franco Moretti’s The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (bildungsroman = coming-of-age story), which begins with two observations that have stayed with me. The first is that “the hero of the classical epic,” e.g., Odysseus, Hector, and Achilles, “is a mature man, an adult,” but the paradigm has shifted and the figure of the hero is now, and for the past couple centuries, usually that of a young person. “[Y]outh,” Moretti charges, has become “the most meaningful part of life” and in some way is even constitutive of the heroes in later literature. That is, their struggles, arcs, and readerly interest fundamentally depend on their youth, callowness, and potential. What makes them a hero is that they overcome immaturity. Again, this couldn’t be further from how heroism is portrayed in, say, the character of Odysseus. His heroism is proven through the deployment of his mature faculties (wit, control, bravery), not their development.
The second observation is that we’ve made a cultural choice in determining that Prince Hamlet is a teenager, not an adult man. Canonically, Hamlet is likely almost thirty. In the gravediggers scene, a clown remarks that Yorick has been dead for twenty-three years, and Hamlet remarks that Yorick “bore [him] / on his back a thousand times” (V.1.168–69) when he was a child. We know, then, that Hamlet’s age is 23 + n and n is probably >2. Some scholars say that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet as a boy but inflated Hamlet’s age in the final script because he wanted his favorite actor, who would have been too old to pass as a boy, to play the part. Other evidence: certain lines emphasize Hamlet’s youth, he engages in behavior that seems childish, and Hamlet’s uncle would have had a more legitimate claim to the throne if Hamlet was still young when his dad died.
But is it so beyond the pale for Hamlet to be almost thirty? Sure, we’re incentivized to pass him off as a teenager to appeal to high-school students reading the play for the first time (“He’s depressed and suicidal—just like you!”). But consider the circumstances that prompted his midlife emo stage:
His dad died, and his uncle probably killed him.
His mom started banging his uncle like two weeks later.
His gf definitely wanted to fuck her brother.
His claim to the kingship was effectively stolen.
He started seeing ghosts and has to murder a king.
I’ll say that at thirty-one years old, I’ve mellowed out a bit since I was a teenager, but not so much that I’d be, like, chill about this state of affairs. But maybe some of you are far more sex-positive than I am.
Your Twenties™
As a young millennial (b. 1992), I unfortunately was in college right when all the older millennials got book deals for their “Erp, adulting is so hard” books in the wake of the Great Recession. Chief among them was Meg Jay’s The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter—And How to Make the Most of Them Now (2012). It portrayed your twenties as the crucible for building friendships, sorting out your money problems, finding a partner, and achieving your professional goals. Which isn’t wrong, but it imprints a strange capitalist logic onto Your Twenties: the investments you make in yourself in your twenties will have the largest returns due to compound interest. By virtue of being in your twenties, you’re an investor and entrepreneur, and the capital you have is yourself and your youth.
For Moretti, good Marxist that he is, the cultural shift from adulthood to youth is the result of modernity. Youth turns into the center of life because it symbolizes the rejection of tradition, the possibility of mobility, and the exploration of self-becoming. No longer is identity, land, and vocation inherited. Rather, life’s unfolding results from self-determination. The aftermath of the Great Recession has accentuated these tendencies within our liberalized view of youth. Media figures such as Andrew Huberman (RIP) push a message of self-optimization onto their young audiences. Young adulthood is not about growing up but about maximizing your growth potential. Hence you should wake up early, become self-disciplined, learn to hustle, travel as much as you can, have countless sexual partners, and Never Get Comfortable.
I see the appeal of this message. If you’re in college, you have a lot of unstructured time, which encourages two different tendencies: dissipation or self-discipline. Outside of the strictures of the 9-to-5, you have “freedom”—the same freedom that entrepreneurial figures, such as influencers, have and advertise. You’re also exposed to a lot of medium-term uncertainty (Will I find a good job? Will I have to move back in with my parents? How will I pay off my debt?), and understandably, want to hedge your future on something more than luck. Further, college students in particular have an acute awareness of downward mobility, not only because many recently enjoyed their parents’ lifestyles but also because college itself offers many upper-middle-class amenities: food workers preparing your meals, cleaning services scrubbing your bathroom, and high-tech gyms within walking distance. An entire labor force exists to enable your lifestyle. Of course, this lifestyle is financed through debt, but its disappearance after graduation is nonetheless felt as downward mobility.
Having taught college students, mainly freshmen, for five years, I see the appeal of people like Jordan Peterson and Huberman who repackage very basic life advice by giving it meaning (more on that in next week’s post). Frankly, a lot of people in their early twenties do need to get their shit together in a very fundamental way. But this fetishization/optimization of one’s twenties quickly becomes an insane way to live. You see guys in their early twenties thinking about steroids, and it’s like, buddy, what are you planning to do after work for the next ten years of your life? You have plenty of time to get jacked. Why the hustle?
But life is a market, and your twenties are your only opportunity to invest before the window closes. After that, it gets dark fast.
20 Things I Learned in My Twenties
Everyone is bisexual until it’s time to give head.
Uhh… #2…
Growing up/Not growing up
The other reason why it’s understandable that we should hyper-focus on Your Twenties is because, culturally, we have only twenty-five or so years of life figured out. Go to school, graduate from college, get a job, find a long-term partner, get married, have kids. Typically, this has taken about twenty-five years to complete, though the timeline has some elasticity. But that’s about as far as we’ve gotten. Once you have kids, you essentially repeat the same narrative of the past twenty or so years but from a different perspective: instead of learning to read, you’re teaching a kid to read; instead of going to school, you’re getting your kid through school; instead of playing sports, you’re watching your kid play sports; instead of attending college, you’re listening to your kid’s stories about their roommates. By the time your kid becomes a parent, you’re in your fifties, but you’ve effectively just lived the first twenty-five years of life twice, at least on a narrative level.
Childhood and adulthood exist on a Möbius strip, and the distinction is less clear than Laschian weirdos on the internet would lead you to believe. I hate to tell everyone who writes articles about “young people don’t want to grow up” or—the worst portmanteau—“kidults,” but my impression of parenthood is that it entails a lot of chicken nuggets, coloring books, toys, and Disney movies for all parties. (To be fair, like half of the people making these arguments clearly never played horsey with their dads and it shows.) Being a parent is, in some way, re-experiencing childhood, and that’s part of its joy. So at least in some instances, the line that’s actually being drawn isn’t between childhood and adulthood but between parenthood and non-parenthood. Building a Lego set on your own as an adult is to be stunted—a perma-adolescent. To do so with a child sitting next to you is culturally permissible and morally good. Your joy is ostensibly a function of theirs, so it’s sanctioned.
What does adulthood mean or even entail when you don’t have children? What narrative undergirds your life? What sources of joy are permissible and impermissible? My perspective is basically summed up by a man interviewed on the phenomenon of young, low-income male gamers:
Through his lens, Arnade has been clued into a more intimate, nuanced view of the low-income gaming community than most. As such, much of the discourse around gaming pisses him off. “This whole language of, ‘Young men should be doing something better with their time,”’ he says. ‘Like what?’”
Shit talking straw men
One through line to my Substack output is that there is a certain type of argument that perpetuates and spreads, particularly within these “heterodox” spheres, because it flatters those who make it and those who agree with it. We could call it heterodox virtue signaling, because it takes different forms but has the same effect as liberal virtue signaling; the virtue’s veneer, however, is usually intellectual instead of political. The content of the critique is secondary to the posturing it involves, so criticism is often a covert form of self-congratulation. These critiques necessarily have an anti-establishment cant because they shore up individual media ventures (“Don’t listen to them—listen to me”).
Examples:
In dismissing the mainstream media and institutions, I’m placing my own intellect and judgment above “experts”
In expressing transphobia/racism/sexism, I’m willing to embrace hatred for my intellectual courage and ability to look at hard truths
In disavowing the Left, I’m declaring my freedom from ideological capture. In cozying up to the Right, I’m displaying my commitment to truth and principles above politics
In criticizing liberal democracy for producing mediocrity (or elite institutions for manufacturing conformity), I’m offering myself as a rare exception
In taking a free speech absolutist stance, I’m announcing that I’m so goddamn principled and socially virtuous that I’m willing to undercut all my other declared intellectual, political, and personal commitments in the name of higher values
The good news is that, if you agree with me and subscribe to my newsletter/podcast, then you’re also someone who’s smarter than “experts,” willing to look at hard truths, free from ideological capture, not a mediocrity, and morally and ideologically principled. You’re so smart and savvy! That’s so much better than being WOKE. 🤮
Which isn’t to say that such people are always wrong, but come on—it’s just so transparent what they’re doing and for only five dollars a month. You owe it to yourself to be skeptical of them and yourself.
Here’s another example: In calling others immature and narcissistic, I’m signaling that I’m the mature and socially responsible one. There’s a sort of adult who valorizes the idea of their own maturity in the same way that an eight-year-old beams when you tell them that they’re very mature for their age. Christopher Lasch became their patron saint, because narcissism is easy enough to twist into both a product of systems and an indictment of individuals, hence its particular appeal to dissatisfied leftists.
I don’t disagree with the “nobody grows up anymore!” line of argumentation entirely. But I think it belies a larger cultural problem: if you don’t have kids and they seemingly aren’t in your future, then it isn’t entirely clear what sort of narrative should guide life after thirty. (Unfortunately, “just have kids!” doesn’t seem like a promising social project, but good luck.) I’m reluctant to say that hyperconsumerism is the problem—that is, the ability for people to gratify their own desires immediately prevents them from building more meaningful lives. Rather, consumerism seems like the stopgap solution to the problem: in absence of any kind of personal narrative, you just buy nice shit and go on vacations, if you can afford them, and work on your career. In absence of plot, pleasure.
Gay death
Let’s look at it from another angle.
In gay male culture, there’s this saying that gay death is at twenty-five. (Some say thirty, but it’s twenty-five.) What this means is that your sexual, and therefore social, capital falls off precipitously when you approach thirty. This isn’t entirely related to your loss of youth—though premature balding doesn’t help—but to sexual market dynamics more broadly. Basically, the twinks are fucking other twinks and daddies, and the daddies are either partnered or fucking twinks or fucking twinks with their partners. When you’re in your thirties, you’re outside of both markets. Now, one might foolishly think that gay men in their thirties could just fuck each other, problem solved. Thing is, you’ve already exhausted this dating pool when you were all in your twenties. This isn’t necessarily because of hypersexuality, but because, unless you live in an urban center, your dating pool is very small. (During grad school, I could swipe through every man on Tinder within a thirty-mile radius in under an hour.) Your best option is to get jacked, buy a baseball cap, and rebrand as a daddy on your fortieth birthday.
(Pray for me.)
However, defining gay death through the sexual marketplace belies the more concerning fact that contemporary gay culture has very little left to offer after you turn thirty. How many more Netflix TV series about coming out and first loves do you really want to watch? Or how many more shitty European movies about the beauty and ephemerality of gay relationships? How many more seasons of Drag Race are you going to follow? Do you think you can recapture the sexual excitement of your early twenties by going cruising or to a sex club? Do you think you’ll feel the same thrill when you go into yet another club playing another Charli remix? Idk, man. I have a retirement plan—I’m not doing poppers.
It’s fair to say that I’m downplaying the gay social relationships that can still thrive after your twenties, because again, I live in a non-urban environment. But it still stands that so much of gay culture and gay life is produced for and around the desires of twenty-somethings. There can still be fun in it, but at some point, you do get the feeling that you’ve seen it all before.
So typically, when gay men reach this dead end, they have three options: they dwell there, either celebrating pop cultural dross naïvely or sardonically, their deepening knowingness belying the growing poverty of the experience; they try to move past this dead end by “assimilating” or exiting gay culture; or they try to move past by going into the archives to dig up gay culture and history of the 1960s–1980s, extending the narrative by looping backward. None really solves the problem, but segmented into an otherwise rich life, perhaps they suffice.
The Declining Decade
What’s the difference between your teenage years and your thirties? Like Hamlet, I’ve thought about death a lot at both ages, and I also still listen to some of the same music I did in high school. My twenties are hard to characterize as something special because I spent them all in higher education. (I went straight from undergrad to grad school and finished my Ph.D. months before my thirtieth birthday.) I don’t regret it, per se. Even when I was twenty-two, I suspected there was something fundamentally bullshit about your twenties, so it didn’t matter that I spent them institutionalized. I never could say specifically what I thought was bullshit about them. Something too provisional, maybe. Too inflated.
Everyone probably feels this way, but it sometimes feels like I barely made it into becoming a well-adjusted adult. There’s a certain type of fuckup I’ve always felt an easy identification with. You come across this sort of person on 4chan sometimes—not that I spend much time on 4chan—but a Murakami protagonist is the quickest description: the sort of person who’s past the age of the bildungsroman but has no real virtue and no real drive. No real prospect for transformation. He isn’t a fuckup in the traditional sense, and he isn’t necessarily a NEET. He didn’t make any bad decisions or have any major vices. But something deep within his spiritual anatomy has broken that’s very, very difficult to repair. I think I always saw that risk within myself, and to a degree, it’s probably been borne out.
I’m just grateful I’ve escaped the worst of it.
20 Things I Learned in My Twenties
Everyone is bisexual until it’s time to give head.
In a pinch, you can use CeraVe Hydrating Facial Cleanser to convincingly fake an orgasm.
Damn. That’s all I got.