Life on Planet Me

Critics of Bushnev and his Busheviks, such as you find here, are often accused of being "leftists" and "extremists." There's no way, according to, as Natalie Maines put it so well, the 29% who still can't connect brain cells, that people of moderate, traditional, or even conservative beliefs couldn't love, adore, and dedicate children to Brezhnev's heir. Well, let me dissuade you of that.

Boston Globe Magazine today has an article on how "singles," pissed off about life in a world of "couplists" and realizing that that life has pretty much passed them by, are now deciding that they really have it better after all. After lives spent looking for "soul mates" and waiting for big love to reach out and touch, they see the handwriting and now embrace their singlehood, adopting, networking with other singles, doing things they always wanted to do with the freedom to do it. Clubs and websites have formed, and the economy, especially housing markets, may have actually benefited. Don't cry for them, you snotty, self-impressed couplists. Life is good.

I'm really not disputing that. They sound like decent people. What I have problems with is the culture and belief system that got these people into their late 30s, 40s, and 50s without being able to commit to someone or have someone commit to them. (This is where I go Bill Bennett on you, I know, but I'm really not that bad.)

Notice the ages of these people. These are people who grew up as this nation, and its effect on the world, became Planet Me, filled with people who placed way too much stock in themselves and their importance to the world around them. Their happiness, comfort, actually just their convenience became the most important things on the planet, as shown by every jerk who lets you hear his bass at full volume when you're driving or trying to sleep next door. "If I don't look out for me, who will?" becomes the motivating philosophy, extolled by such clear geniuses as Oprah and John Stossel. So the compromises and give-and-take necessary to a coordinated society, the trust and cooperation that allow great things to be built, they dissolve in the acid of me-ism and self-indulgence. The crime rates and substance abuse, the polarization and corruption that have infected us started when these people in the article were young and growing through the period when they had the best chance to find meaningful partners.

Yes, I know, the knees are jerking in response now. "You want loveless marriages. You want women to give up careers and opportunities. You want more divorces and more babies and you're nothing better than the Dobsons or Falwells." Thank you for not getting it. What I'm saying is in some ways even worse. I'm saying we went through a period in our history, one still at work, in which we consistently overvalued our worth, undervalued others', and let cliches change our lives in ways that, had we realized where they were leading us, we are not likely to have gone.

Think about what these folks in this article told themselves or heard as they were growing up. "Don't hook up too early, you need to 'find yourself' first, look at all the break-ups of young couples." I'm sorry, but Meists are never going to find the right partners, young or old, which accounts for divorces at young ages, and older. Meanwhile, people who might be good with others at 22 decide to wait until they're 32, and guess what? At 52, they're being quoted as singles in a Sunday magazine. And I've never been that fond of the "find yourself" argument. What if "you" are really not that cool? What if it would have turned out that the "you" with someone in your 20s turned into a much better person than the "you" who partied, drugged, sexed, and had so much "living"? "I can't be good with someone else until I know who I am." Please. On just what study was that ever based?

What happened to a lot of these people was this--They overvalued themselves on a 10-point scale and undervalued a lot of really good people on that same scale. They passed those people by because they appeared to be 4s when they were 7s or 8s, as good as or better than the judges themselves. "There's just no spark, no fizzle." "I'm waiting for someone who 'gets' me." God almighty. What phrases could better capture unrealistic visions of yourself and how the world operates? Has love never grown in arranged marriages or those of economic convenience? Sure, there are real chances for lovelessness or even abuse. Like there aren't in the "head over heels, let the endorphins take us away" romances? Again, where are the studies? It's all "conventional wisdom," fed by media and mirrors, using half-thought half-truths to justify our short-term interests and fears and freeing us from doing the ignoring of flaws and making of compromises that make relationships work. The people in the article based decisions on judgments and "truths" that were short-sighted and uninformed by history or experience. They "didn't settle," and, now, faced with the results of what for many of them were clear errors, they start to rationalize it away to maintain that pristine image of themselves.

This isn't the blast at those people that it sounds. I could have easily been one of them, and I would have acted and sounded the same in the article. Fortunately for me, I realized early in life that I wasn't close to the "10" end of the scale, and, when a female who was mistook me for someone who was, I grabbed her up and haven't let go. I am way too self-absorbed even now in the last third of my life to have any hope that I wouldn't have become completely unbearable if I hadn't convinced her to be with me. (Notice I'm not saying married--we're married almost 32 years now, but I'm not necessarily saying that's a requirement. I know great, long-term, never married couples.) The way I've had to restrain my self-interest, to moderate my Me-ness to get her to stay have made me a better person despite myself, despite the occasional accompanying frustration. Having and raising The Boy took me to even better places, even though I had much more self-interested things to do and be. If not for them, I very likely could have been someone who, by my early 30s, would not have been fit for the very life that has, because I didn't buy the cliches about marrying young or finding myself (good God, thank God that hasn't happened yet), been my personal salvation.

So I'm not criticizing these people in the magazine or those of you who defend their unfortunate choices. Fate gave me an out from that world that I'll always be grateful for. What I'm saying is that we built Planet Me in the time I've been alive, based on cliches and slogans that were more self-justification for self-indulgence than guides for productive and meaningful lives. Relationships on Planet Me have led to this growth of single folks, who, while happy now by their own admission, has cost us all the types of people trained and able to build Planet Us. The fragmentation and individualism that these people represent are also present in our politics and our interactions as Americans, making our Legacy that much harder to maintain. I don't feel sorry for or superior to them. I could have been them. But I do feel badly about the decay and dissolution that our "hey, hey, hey, live for today" BS from my youth has led us to. Would they or we have been better off if they had "settled," had risked love coming with the relationship instead of before it, had learned to make the adjustments to themselves and their interactions that make relationships work? I can't tell you "yes." But neither can they. And, in my case, the world is much better off, I have no doubt. So, if that makes me sound like Bill Bennett, so be it. It'll just make it harder for him to call me a "traitor" about Bushnev.