20 minutes with “champagne problems”

Also: Conversation pits and magic windows.

Image: Can’t Even by Anne Helen Peterson

Remember parties?

Or, rather – do you remember the illusion of what a party could be? Opening yourself up to possibility just by accepting the invitation. Getting ready to go out with your friends with all of it before you. Stepping out into the night with no idea exactly where you’ll end up or who you’ll meet or fall for.

I recently found my old party-going self in an installment of Helena Fitzgerald’s Griefbacon newsletter that starts with the hideously 1970s conversation pit in Mad Men and wanders back to the Before time when we made our own conversation pits with friends in the form of parties we often flaked on and never felt ready for.

Fitzgerald writes, beautifully, “I feel guilty when I talk about how much I miss parties. I was often terrible at them, nervously failing to make conversation, cancelling plans or hoping someone else would cancel. I felt all the time like an overdue and unfinished assignment, I promise I’ll be done soon, just let me stay home until I am. Let me just wait until I look better, until I have more money, until I’m more successful, until nothing is wrong.”

Sometimes this is a newsletter that recommends other newsletters. I loved Fitzgerald’s long-form, wistful reminder that right now, in 2021, all the parties we went to in the past and all the parties we’ll attend in the future are an illusion wrapped in nostalgia inside a defiant hope that we will have such things again someday.

Fitzgerald also manages to sum up her 20s (and my 20s, and perhaps, your 20s) in one sentence that broke me a little bit: “My own life was precarious; my memory of that time is mostly about being very cold and wearing uncomfortable shoes.”

About one year ago, the pandemic took away our social lives and turned the world upside-down in a new way, but it also simply threw into relief the fact that too many people are working hard and never getting ahead. Being what I am (a millennial), I can’t help tying that precarious feeling to what I’ve been reading: Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Peterson.

A long-time reporter, Peterson got a lot of attention for her Buzzfeed piece on millennial burnout. “We’ve been conditioned to precarity,” she writes in the introduction to Can’t Even. While the historical context that Peterson adds and the in-depth research she offers are new to me, the millennial feeling she captures of desperately seeking the middle-class stability our parents had and not being able to secure it is all too familiar.

Every generation has had its struggles, but I tend to think millennials came of age uniquely accustomed to the ground shifting under our feet. For many of us, our first memory of a world event was 9/11; we have never known a world without airport security and bag checks. We entered college and/or the job market during the housing crisis and recession. We pay more for housing and are in far more student debt than any previous generation, and we put off landmarks of stability like marriage, a home, and kids often not because we don’t want them but because we can’t afford them.

Peterson’s qualitative research is built on hundreds of her own interviews, to which she adds historical data including Pew Research studies and Federal Reserve stats. Interestingly, the book kicks off with an in-depth look at the generation that now deprecates millennials in the same their parents once criticized them (yes, the boomers). Can’t Even is both an academic work and a promise that if you’re struggling without burnout, you are far from alone.

I’m a mid-generation millennial. Sometimes it’s hard to know where the specific difficulty of my generation ends and the general messiness of one’s 20s begins. I’ve also been reading Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler, a novel I picked up partly because I’m a sucker for a coming-of-age story and partly because the cover is irresistibly pink.

“Does anyone come to New York clean?” Danler’s 22-year-old heroine, Tess, asks in the novel’s setup as she moves to New York for a fresh start. As someone who also moved to New York at 22 for a fresh start, I took that sentence as a personal attack and also immediately wrote it down in my notebook so I could share it with all of you.

If you miss the quiet of museums and the bustle of restaurants and the art of people-watching and the aimless joy of wandering around your city, Sweetbitter holds all these things in its pages along with the specific precarity of being young and in New York with no idea of what you’re doing or who you’ll turn out to be.

I spent too much time in my 20s trying to defy that precarity by “being busy,” thinking that filling my time with the right combination of enough job applications, happy hours, networking events, free seminars, volunteer opportunities, etc. etc. would somehow kaleidoscope me into the life I wanted. But I didn’t yet know how to give myself the quiet space to first, picture what that life was to begin with, and second, to understand how to pursue it.

My younger self thought that writing wasn’t worthwhile unless I could devote a couple of hours to it at a time. But here’s the thing: I was never writing for all of those hours. I was researching, I had a TV show on in the background, I was checking Twitter or looking up something related to my to-do list, and then guiltily getting back to my Word document.

When I realized how much more effective a few focused minutes are, a new world opened up for me. I found that everyday creativity isn’t about having that imaginary unlimited time; it’s about finding those sneaky windows of time where you can get in 20 or 30 minutes of sitting with your craft and seeing what happens.

Opening the right window can be magical, whether it’s to focus on your craft of choice or something else you enjoy and struggle to find time for. I’ve been playing the piano again as a fun side hobby and somehow couldn’t find the right time to practice after the new year. I didn’t want piano to be a chore, but I also didn’t want to give it up altogether. I finally hit on practicing right after I finish work. There’s something about that specific time that lets piano be a total mental break and lets me feel as if I’m sneaking away to do something fun instead of jumping straight into housework, dinner prep, and my to-do list.

And the 20-minute rule always applies: If it’s all I can spare, 20 minutes at the keyboard trying to play the bridge of “champagne problems” is always better than zero minutes. I find myself looking forward to that almost-secret chunk of time when I’ve finished my day job work and haven’t yet stepped into my to-do list mode, when I can stumble through a song I love and try to make it slowly sound better.

We’re living in a strange time where every single one of us is experiencing some degree of precarity. I know life is demanding so much of you right now. But I hope you can look for your magic windows anyway, using at least a little of this time when the world is more still than perhaps it will ever be again in our lives to find the things that ground you. To discover the spaces that exist for an exact purpose, your own private conversation pit, if you will – except this special space you’ve cultivated is no 1970s relic or near-future illusion but something real, something you can hold onto and bring with you into the After.

I can’t wait for you to tell me all about it at the next party.