The people we meet are a mirror of ourselves. Kindness attracts kindness, gloom draws in more gloom. There are those who seem unable to meet anybody but whiny losers and those who are always surrounded by outstanding, brilliant people.
I work with the younger generation, and my students are always bright, curious, enthusiastic, and hard-working. Other people, however, only meet self-involved, whiny and stupid youngsters. They need young people to be this way to reflect their own qualities back to them. Here is an example:
Although all of these young men and women had some combination of writerly dreams, none of them—not one—had any plan for, even an ambition of, a career. Not just in the economic sense but in the existential sense of a lifelong vocation or pursuit that might find some practical expression or social validation in the form of paid work. Not because they didn’t want a career but because there was no career to be wanted. . . The future was so uncertain, they said, the economy so broken, there simply was no point in devising a plan, much less trying to execute it.
I’m not meeting such boring drama queens because I have no need for anybody to confirm that I’m entitled to cling to this bleak, self-aggrandizing worldview. But if I had such a need, I’d be stumbling on this kind of freak everywhere I went.
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