Adjustment, or Complacency?

 The late twenties of one's lifespan—the time when one has, perhaps, obtained and settled into what one considers to be one's first "career job"—are marked by a nagging fear: What if I'm not living up to my potential? At some point after thirty, this is replaced by another, superficially similar, but really quite different fear: What if I am living up to my potential?

A friend asks me: "didn't you always assume that you were going to be great; that you were destined for greatness?" I agree that yes, I did always assume that. But then I settle into what has become my more comfortable thirty-one-year-old view-point. "But you know," I say, "greatness is a spectrum, not a binary. One doesn't wake up one day and discover one is great. One can gradually make greater incremental progress toward greatness." 

"But," says my friend (we're superficially asking about each other's lives at this point, but really talking about ourselves)—"don't you think you're meant for greater, more important things than what you're doing now?" I reply "yes," again, but add: "My life has confirmed for me time and again that the best path to achievement is not to abandon what you're already doing, but to focus on the task immediately in front of you and do the best job with it as you possibly can."

And so one settles peaceably into the role society has designated for one, adjusts to it, and can't really tell anymore whether this is an act of virtue or complacency. The thought that one is in fact living up to one's potential as is—that what one is currently doing may in fact be one's real life, not a prelude to it—may sound scary; but it is also kind of cozy. 

It's like how all through my twenties the thought haunted me that I had missed my calling. That really I was supposed to have gone to a top flight law school, been offered internships at the most prestigious firms, and heroically turned them all down in order to become a crusading human rights attorney. 

Then at some point a couple years ago, I finally actually took the LSAT, "just to see how it would go." My scores were firmly and irreproachably in the "good not great" category. Huh, I thought. So it's not like I would have gone to Harvard Law and been editor of the review necessarily if I'd tried. 

A disappointing realization? Actually, it was liberating. I'm free! I thought. It turns out I'm actually doing roughly what I always should have been doing. I have a human rights policy job, anyways, and why don't I just make that the vehicle for my crusading human rights dreams and aspirations; which is way easier in any event than starting over in a whole new graduate program since I'm already doing it. 

Of course, I have to let go of the fantasy of heroic renunciation. I have to realize I'm not doing something because I nobly disdained the pomp and riches of the world, but because it always was more or less the right and only thing for me. But that seems a small price in maturity to pay for realizing that one's choices didn't actually set one moving in the wrong direction. 

Richard Yates's classic 1961 novel Revolutionary Road is essentially the chronicle of exactly this process of adjustment, and it too seems of two minds as to whether it is on net a gain or a loss. On the most obvious and glaring level, the book is straight tragedy. This is plain enough from its devastating conclusion; and thus the novel is typically read as an indictment of its protagonist Frank Wheeler and the compromises he makes with middle class values and the lowering of his ambitions and ideals. 

As with all other classic literary tragic scenarios, however, this one is fundamentally ambivalent. To reach the status of a glamorous and therefore interesting tragedy that people might want to read about, the tragedy has to have as much appeal as terror behind it. The supposed "decadence" and alcoholism and nihilism of the 1920s "Lost Generation"; the "boredom and alienation" of the 1950s Connecticut suburbs—it is plain enough from these examples that the most treasured literary tragic settings always remain closely anchored to the realm of "First World Problems."

We tend to think of Yates's Revolutionary Road as one of the founding texts of the latter of these two great literary myths of the twentieth century—up there with Cheever and the early Updike and Sloan Wilson and Joseph Heller's Something Happened in the ranks of books that insist on portraying 1950s upper-middle-class affluence as somehow a bad thing. 

But, as with many literary works that are taken to have founded a "myth," one actually discovers that the work in question—if it is really first-rate literature—was actually critiquing and subverting the myth in the very process of creating it. We think of Yates and similar writers as having invented the notion of the Connecticut suburbs as places of intolerable "Conformity," for instance—and yet here are his characters already mockingly capitalizing the word. Plainly, the idea for them as for us had already reached the status of cliché.

And as much as Yates ultimately sees his central characters as tragic, it is—as in all the real, classic tragedies—the result of a problem of their own making. They are not the victims of "The Suburbs" and "Conformity"—they are willful participants in them. They are no different from countless other people in their late twenties and early thirties wondering if they've lived up to their own expectations for themselves, or have traded away their birthright and chosen to settle for the easy and well-trodden path. 

And what especially saves this portrayal from the perils of self-pity and indulgence is that Yates finds the situation Frank and April have prepared for themselves to be funny as well as tragic. At one point, toward the end of part one of the novel, April is sketching out a bold vision for how the pair of them will abscond to Europe; she will take a full-time job, and thereby will leave him free at last to quit working, live out his extraordinary creative ambitions, and truly "find himself."

He is instantly oppressed, in the midst of this speech, with a vision of his future self in their new home in France, covered in egg stains, sipping booze, and picking his nose. 

He tries to tell April that perhaps she is overestimating his talent and potential. He gives voice to the thought with which we began this post: what if I was never actually destined for greatness after all? "Who ever said I was supposed to be a big deal?" he asks. But he quickly backs off from this conversational thrust, as soon as he realizes he runs the risk of actually persuading his wife to see his point. 

If tragedy this is, it's the tragedy of all adult life; or at least adult life as it is lived in the great American "middle class." At some point we realize that we don't have to spend all our time struggling; that circumstances have to some extent taken over and are carrying us toward our destiny; and that if the place we're headed is not as great as we always assumed it would be, it is not half-bad either. 

Most people I know live their lives—at least in their twenties—on a provisional basis. We're all still on probation, just trying things out. We say: "I'll take this job for the next year, just until I figure out what I really want to do for my career," and we keep telling ourselves this until we discover one day that that was our career. As my dad always told me, he spent 18 years in the corporate world without ever actually intending to have a career in the corporate world.

All of which makes sense. It's an emotionally-sound and rational strategy for managing the risks of potential disappointment and failure to treat our current occupation as merely a lark. That way, if we succeed it is all gain; and if we fail, it is no skin off our backs. If we don't have our eggs in any particular basket, we are always ready to substitute the basket. Which is in no way a bad thing.

Indeed, my whole point is that, while the situation can be read as a "tragedy," it is not at all an unpleasant experience when seen from within. In truth, it is not unpleasant from Frank's perspective either. 

Of course, there are aspects of his mid-century American career path that are no longer easy to relate to. His disdain for his corporate mid-level white-collar job that pays well and requires no work or effort strikes us as an unimaginable luxury from the vantage point of an era of far less secure employment. His assumption that women at his office exist to be sexually available to male executives is profoundly distasteful (shades in all this of the work environment described in Walker Percy's The Moviegoer—a book that came out in the same year, deals with people roughly the same age, and evokes a similar ambience).  

But the basic pattern of Frank's career—how he begins with the "probation" mindset, how his current job is only what he's doing to pay the bills until he finds what he really wants to do, until it gradually morphs into his real life and his real job—is deeply familiar. 

Frank for much of the book holds his current employment in contempt. He dashes off a piece of ad copy, with a moment's effort, simply to make another problem go away. But then his boss likes it, and the first taste of positive reinforcement leads Frank to think that perhaps this gig isn't so contemptible after all; perhaps he can imagine himself as the sort of person who actually works here, and doesn't have to fear the job as a contamination of his true self. Perhaps this job can actually be a vehicle for his talents and creative aspirations. 

By the end of the book, he has even managed to find the computers his company sells worth explaining about. 

Is this selling out? Or is it simply maturity? Yates' book is complex and rich enough to admit of multiple possibilities. Frank, by the end of the novel, is described by his erstwhile friend Shep Campbell as "not really living"; and Yates himself is of course among that generation of novelists who sought to get published precisely in order to escape what they regarded as the demeaning grind of corporate P.R. hack work (William Gaddis also comes to mind). 

But when Frank objects to his wife's fantasies, "who ever said I was supposed to be a big deal?", there is a ring of truth to that as well. 

There is indisputably a kind of liberation that comes from escaping the overhang of greatness and destiny. In Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, Biff finally throws off the oppression of his father's vicarious dreams, his tireless belief that his son was intended for greater purposes and is merely failing to live up to this potential out of willful spite, by hurling the truth at last in his face: "I am not a leader of men!" 

This too is what Frank discovers. Maybe his true self wasn't always elsewhere, insulated, protected from his job, waiting for his moment to step into the limelight. Maybe his job actually is quite well-apportioned to his needs and ambitions. 

Is this adjustment (healthy)? Or is it complacency (unhealthy)? Hard to say, from one's own vantage-point. Perhaps, like the damned in Anatole France's Thaïs, one cannot truly feel one's own damnation. All I know is that it was a breakthrough moment for me when I discovered that my real career wasn't something bound to start any day now, that I was merely postponing, but rather that this was my real career. I was the thing I always wanted to be; and if I was not in any respect, then it was incumbent upon me to make of my current job a vehicle for that aspiration. 

Just today, I found myself having to wrestle with a tiny amount of computer code for a work assignment. I thought: "maybe someday I'll have a second career as a communications professional who takes the time to study all this web development stuff." Then I realized that I am currently a communications professional, and I have every right to study that "stuff" now. 

Only one of many Frank-esque moments I have in the course of a given day. I am like Yates's protagonist in one of the novel's later scenes, holding pen poised over napkin at the breakfast table, reciting the details of how a UNIVAC computer works—the same computers he is tasked with promoting at work. "I guess it is sort of interesting, in a way," he finally allows himself to admit. 

Instead of starting over, perhaps one is entitled to actually focus on the work at hand; and perhaps one can find the interest in it, do it as well as one possibly can, and success will follow. As Yoda warns Luke: "This one, a long time have I watched. All his life as he looked away. To the future. To the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. [Jabs with stick.] Hmm? What he was doing? [Jabs with stick.] Hmph. Adventure. Heh! Excitement. Heh! A Jedi craves not these things."

But then again... perhaps Yoda was missing or ignoring his own Shep Campbell, swirling an afternoon martini, convinced that all of this was mere compromise and self-exonerating delusion, and that real life, full life, true life, is somehow, somewhere, still out there, passing them by.