Hurtzel

Elizabeth Wurtzel and I are cut from the same cloth.

I remember when her book, Prozac Nation, came out. I was 24 and living in Chicago. The 90s raged and whined. I didn't read the book as I had plenty of attractive self-obsessed depressed women in my life, thankyouverymuch.

A few days ago I read her piece in NY Mag. Although not someone I could probably bear an afternoon coffee with, much less a "carafe of Italian wine," or a session of googling ourselves on our iPads, the fact is she is a startlingly good writer. And while I'm not really a fan (anymore) of the confessional essay, there are things in this article that resonate deeply with me.

I also had a wretched 2012. It was the kind of year that brings you to your knees for the sheer brutality of its offenses. Mercy. You win. Uncle and I give. Jesus Christ.

But then how many lost connections make up a life?

Trent Reznor really was the voice of our generation when he sang, "I hurt myself today to see if I still feel." Millennials, take this, please. By this I mean everything - the trajectory of our lives, our country, our politic, our planet, our existence. Generations X and Y (was there a Z?) blew it. We can't handle it. In 3rd grade we stopped school because we watched the space shuttle land. In 8th grade we stopped because it blew up. We suffered Iran-Contra, Donna Rice, Clinton and Lewinsky. Kurt Cobain spoke the truth and then shot himself in the head. Before I start sounding too much like that Billy Joel song, just know that it's all yours. You and your president, your internet, your optimism.

I never wanted to be a millionaire or a billionaire or anything at all like that, because the happiest thing would be doing what I love. Which is how it turned out, and so it goes with talented and thoughtful people who move to places like New York and L.A. and Chicago and Austin and wherever else you take your wits these days. It isn’t just creative types, also public­-interest lawyers and public-­intellectual academics and political thinkers—collectively, the professional class. In a city, these are the people who make the place vital and fun.

But these are people who soon won’t exist anymore. Soon New York will be nothing but a metropolis of the very rich and those who serve them—and the lucky and desperate still hanging on. All of the fun jobs are disappearing.

Walking down the street in Manhattan, if you can find a quiet spot, and listen very closely, you can almost hear it. It's a high-pitched hissisng whine. It's the sound of an island losing its soul.

Look at how we live: We communicate in text messages and e-mails; even those of us old enough to have lived in a world where landline was not a word because it’s all there was have fallen into this lazy substitute for human contact. I have. When I was young...if I needed to tell a friend, an acquaintance, or the customer-service person from AT&T the smallest thing, I had to talk to him. Every day, many times a day, whether I felt like it or not, I spoke to people, lots of people. It is as obvious from a voice as it is not from print if all is well. Now...I may speak with people I care about only in type. When you add the mistake of Facebook and Twitter into this equation, very bad things can happen: The illusion of friendship defeats the real thing. Someone who people believe they care about and cannot live without could end up dead.

If you're still reading this, call your mom and tell her that you love her. 

As much as I hate to admit it - and there's plenty of hate out there, Wurtzel's rambling mess of an essay touched me. It's not empathy - my god, you live in Chelsea east of 8th Avenue yet consider yourself homeless...hang in there, Lizzy - but rather a recognition of that voice. The one that refuses to grow up. The one that gets an advanced degree on a lark. (I got one on a lark, with a Lark, and will be paying for it until I'm 53, by Sallie Mae's calculation.) I know that shrill, annoying, whiny self-self-self voice. It lives in my head.