I’ve been working on an essay about friendship, followers, and fans. Most of all, I’ve been thinking about the difference between seeing one person a thousand times versus seeing 1,000 people just once. Also, I’m halfway through Marisa Franco’s book Platonic about the role that friendship plays in our lives (compared to our families and romantic partners) and how our attachment styles affect how we form and sustain friendships. And the final inspiration was a thoughtful reflection by Anne-Helen Petersen about how friends with kids and without kids can better show up for each other. But that essay is going to need some percolation, so this week is a hodgepodge of reflections and recommended readings after spending last weekend down in San Diego with some old friends.
Dave and I met in 2000 when we were community college students studying at local coffee shops around San Diego. We became swimming buddies after we both transferred to UCSD for undergrad. Then in 2016, new jobs brought us to the Bay Area and we resumed our swimming routine — catching up on life in between sets at the local pools. We’ve done a number of races together over the years and I love how it sustains our friendship. We always have an adventure to look forward to and a goal to work toward. Next up is the Sharkfest Swim in San Diego in October. (We also like sharing news of shark sightings with each other. 😋)
The Joy of Mediocrity
I’m a crap swimmer. That’s what I realized — and then joyfully embraced — after finishing 15th out of 18 swimmers in my age group at the La Jolla Cove Swim on Sunday. In my cycling, running, and writing, I want to improve and perform at my best. But not swimming. Swimming I simply enjoy whether I improve or not. Generally speaking, it’s easy for me to get sucked into our culture of constant optimization and so I related to several of the quotes from a recent Wall Street Journal article, “The Case for Allowing Yourself to Be Bad at Something,” which reminded of Tim Wu’s essay from a few years back, “In Praise of Mediocrity”:
Here in the United States, the wealthiest country in history, we seem to have forgotten the importance of doing things solely because we enjoy them … there’s a deeper reason, I’ve come to think, that so many people don’t have hobbies: We’re afraid of being bad at them. Or rather, we are intimidated by the expectation — itself a hallmark of our intensely public, performative age — that we must actually be skilled at what we do in our free time.
The amazing deal that is community college
A friend of mine with a pandemic baby told me last week that her financial advisor recommended that they save $350,000 over the next 17 years in a 529 savings account for her son’s college expenses. Also, a lifelong advocate of public education, she’s now open to spending tens of thousands of dollars each year to send him to private school. No way! Send those kids to community college, I say. My first two years of community college cost $100 per year. My tuition at UCSD at the time was $4,500 per year. Altogether, my four years of college education cost less than $10,000 — as it should be. Over the weekend, Dave and I recalled how we learned more from our community college professors than from most of our lecture hall courses at UCSD. On a related note, three links:
The Daily on “The College Pricing Game” — the insane way that college administrators, students, parents, and lenders negotiate the opaque and complex cost of college tuition.
So extreme are the admission standards now that kids who manage to get into elite colleges have, by definition, never experienced anything but success. The prospect of not being successful terrifies and disorients them. The cost of falling short, even temporarily, becomes not merely practical, but existential. The result is a violent aversion to risk. You have no margin for error, so you avoid the possibility that you will ever make an error.
Anya Kamentz reminds us of the reason for public schooling during a time when no one is happy with it — neither teachers, nor parents, nor students, nor politicians. She emphasizes that if liberal parents won’t compromise with conservative parents about their concerns, then we might lose public education altogether.
If we lose public education, flawed as it is, the foundations of our democracy will slip. Not only the shared knowledge base but also the skills of citizenship itself: communication, empathy, and compromise across differences.
It’s a bit of a circular paradox that we won’t be able to sustain public education without a functional democracy and we won’t be able to sustain a functional democracy without public education.
A positive vision of masculinity
Over at the 12 Inquiries podcast, Luis and I published an edited version of the Twitter Spaces conversation we had with Marsha, Mischa, and Revaz about the future of masculinity. An excerpt from Marsha:
I feel like we're at a bit of an inflection point. Women are now unwilling to settle for less than all of the things that we were forced to become in our own upbringings, which is being emotionally available, being able to name your feelings and communicate them. I sent around an article about the rise of single, lonely men. Women don't have the same reasons to partner anymore. You know, we're more able to be alone if that's easier, as I think it is in many cases.
A useful tool
One of the things I love about swimming is getting lost in my thoughts while submerged underwater. So I was resistant when Dave recommended underwater headphones. Like my friend Jamie, I’ve been trying to be more mindful about when I slip in my AirPods and close myself off from interactions with neighbors, or paying attention to nature. But these Shokz underwater headphones have really been great. As much as I enjoy swimming, longer swims can become boring. These headphones transmit the music through the bones around your ears, so you don’t have anything inside your ear canal. In fact, I still use my earplugs to keep the water out, and yet I can hear the music perfectly. It feels like magic. Plus, they require MP3 files, so I’ve been enjoying the break Spotify’s algorithms and getting back into my digital music collection from the early 2000s.
Kudos
This section is meant to celebrate my friends and the folks I admire. So I genuinely apologize for the navel-gazing this week, but kudos go to me for being smart enough to ask Iris to spend the rest of her life with me. We recently celebrated our 7-year wedding anniversary and there is no one I’d rather spend my days, my years, and my decades with.
Have a great weekend!
David