My late grandmother loved St. John knit suits, but she would never pay designer prices. A child of the Depression, she remembered when cars, rather than clothing, cost $600. She wasn’t “price adjusted” to the 1990s, my father used to say. So, he called ahead to the store saleswoman in advance of our annual shopping trip, and she kindly placed “final markdown” stickers on top of the actual price tags of clothes in my grandmother’s size so she could shop with her mind at ease.
My grandmother had a Ph.D. in history from NYU, so I always wondered if she was really duped by the obvious ruse. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that in her old age, some things still felt familiar.
As my father has aged into his 80s, I have watched as he too has crossed the “unadjusted” line of life. It’s not just about price inflation. He shakes his head in disbelief at lots of things, like when he sees a young man walk into an elevator before a woman or when he is corrected for calling his assistant his secretary. So much of life seems confusing to him now. We haven’t even begun to try to unpack the Metaverse.
There is some irony in the idea that those who live the longest in a place may come to feel the most foreign to it. When it happens to the older among us, we smile because it seems like the natural order of things to “age out” of cultural, financial, and technological “norms.” But lately, I notice that the rest of us are finding ourselves lost in the world around us as well, wondering how everything has become so unrecognizable. This is nothing to smile about.
The grounding effects of so many of the structures that anchor us are under assault. Holidays, heroes, religion, biology, childhood, currency, reality — all of it is being “reimagined” by a generation of people who have no historical memory, or a reflexive disdain for it. They themselves are unmoored and seek to make everyone else feel as disconnected as they do. It seems to be working.
So many of us wonder aloud, “What is going on?” as our doctors talk about pregnant men and teachers label math “racist.” How does anyone adjust to a world in which thieves are legally allowed to steal $949 worth of a store’s merchandise? We are all maladjusted octogenarians now, bewildered by everything. To face the last years of life and discover that you ultimately understand little is poetic. To feel that way in midlife is maddening.
People have suffered bloodier and more decisive disruptions. I recently read Stefan Zweig’s memoir, The World of Yesterday. It was recommended to me by my friend, Douglas Murray, whose own work has brilliantly diagnosed and cautioned against the devastating effects of dramatic social and cultural reordering.
The late Austrian writer lived through the better part of both world wars, but what Zweig couldn’t survive were the disorienting effects of the loss of the Europe of his youth. His identity had been formed on that continent, and as he watched it fall apart, so did his will to live. In his suicide note in 1942, he wrote of his “long years of homeless wandering,” which may have referred to his exile to London, New York, and eventually Brazil, or just as easily to the wandering of his soul, disconnected and adrift in a world he no longer recognized.
Different as his circumstances were to ours, Zweig’s disorientation resonates. I often feel as my grandmother did — that the price of everything is too high: the price of gasoline, the price of free speech, the price of a single mistake.
The pace of change is staggering too. In his memoir, Zweig describes the Europe of his youth as “a world without haste.” That description made me nostalgic for a time I can recall when phones hung on walls and Atari was considered hi-tech. Change was always a constant, but until recently, it felt incremental and manageable. Today it is impossible to adjust to its ferocious pace.
Most people I know are feeling the same sort of bewilderment, but reactions vary. Many simply retreat, shake their heads, and wonder what is going on, like the elderly confused by a world they can neither fathom nor contend with. They are waiting for someone to step in or for the fever to break on its own. Some opt-out like the dejected Zweig who saw no way forward. They escape reality with white wine, social media, or 12 hours a day in their basements playing video games. But paralysis and denial are not useful. They just allow the problem to grow.
There is a real mid-life identity crisis in America. We 40–60-year-olds are old enough to remember our world of yesterday, filled with great memories of things like privacy, academic standards, objective reality, free thought, and television shows like All in The Family. These, and so much more, made us who we are. We appreciate their loss in a way no 25-year-old who never had them can.
We are also young enough to be personally invested in the fight to preserve as much of this inheritance as possible in a way no 90-year-old must urgently confront. We mid-lifers have several more decades to live in a world that increasingly feels alien to us. How uncomfortable are we willing to allow ourselves to become?
Our world of yesterday clearly wasn’t perfect, but it was certainly more worthy than those who are too young to recall it, or too fanatically ideological to fairly assess it, have judged it to be. As they try to erase it all and replace it with equity, collectivism, 74 different gender identities, calls to defund the police, ESG, and TikTok, the contrast between their offerings and our own should serve as enough justification to fight back. Why do we listen to these people? We can’t adjust, and we shouldn’t.
The good news is there is room for everyone. The Metaverse is a great frontier in which to experiment with ill-considered social overhaul. Let those who think identity is nothing more than a hash-tagged meme posted on Instagram build their world of tomorrow there and suffer the consequences. They can let virtual criminals out of virtual prison, cancel their avatars for misgendering other avatars, and place DEI monitors on every virtual street corner. When it doesn’t work out, they can always read Zweig.
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Rebecca Sugar is a writer living in New York. Her column, The Cocktail Party Contrarian, appears every other Friday in the New York Sun.
