Norman Podhoretz said making it was when you were being published, paid, and praised. For me, I’ll know I’ve made it when I’m old enough and have enough gray hair that I can criticize “kids these days” without being a hypocrite, like Jerry Seinfeld is constantly doing. On his pseudo-talk show “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee,” he and Kate McKinnon make a great point about the petty social tyranny of how kids these days use the word chill:
Seinfeld: Kids with the chill word. My son uses it as a weapon every day. “How was your date?” “Chill, dad.”
McKinnon: What am I doing?
Seinfeld: It’s a very controlling word.
McKinnon: Yeah. “Just be like me. Come down to my level. Chill.”
The idea that chillness is a virtue is basically the idea that not caring is a virtue and that caring is a vice. More specifically, it’s the idea that appearing to care is a social vice. This is of a piece with a tendency in a lot of millennial and Gen Z lingo that basically enforces an ethic that is inhuman. It’s a denial of things in us that can’t or won’t be denied, even if we pretend otherwise. And this ethic may reflect something worrying or deserve a second look.
Take, for another example, the term “catch feelings” out of the hookup culture of Generation Z. The idea, if you haven’t heard it while seeking advice from your 17-year-old sister, is that while you may be having sex with someone regularly, it’s important to make sure not to have any emotions of intimacy or warmth about them. The construction of the phrase is deliberately evocative of feelings being something like germs. Perhaps today’s ideal lover will be pasteurized.
But the very worst of the inhumanly stoic phraseology of us kids these days is how we use the word “judge.” Judge, judgmental, judgy (that last now added to the Oxford English Dictionary as an informal word for overly critical and elitist). “Don’t judge” is the best way to be “chill.”
A bit of dialogue from a more high-culture source, Plato’s “Theaetetus,” in which Socrates tries to figure out what knowledge is and how we can get it:
Socrates: Look for [knowledge] in whatever the mind is doing when it busies itself, by itself, about things which are.
Theaetetus: I think that’s called judging, Socrates.
Now, of course one should not be constantly critical and negative and it’s perfectly well and good to keep some opinions to oneself. Fine. But judgment is a process that is part of being critical and perceptive. It’s just human. And, as Plato crucially notes, it’s involuntary. One shouldn’t be a jerk. But one also shouldn’t use a vernacular which implies that caring, feeling, and having opinions about things are not a vital part of being a person. Chill with that.
