still here

September 11, 2019

Eighteen years today. I don't write about it every year anymore. For a long time I did. Then I wrote about it every other year. Now I write about it when something about the day catches me off guard, which happens less often but still happens. Today it was the weather. Clear and bright and cool, the way it was then. September has a quality of light in this city that I can no longer experience as neutral.

I've been thinking about 1999 lately. I don't know why. Maybe because twenty years is a round number and round numbers make you take stock. I remember 1999 very clearly. I was young and optimistic in a way I can't fully recover now, not because I'm old (I'm getting old) but because the specific flavor of that optimism requires a specific kind of ignorance that can't be restored once lost.

the specific flavor of that optimism requires a specific kind of ignorance that can't be restored once

We genuinely believed the internet would make things better. I remember believing this. Not ironically. Not as a slogan. As a real conviction. That connecting people would, on net, produce something good. That information would, on net, produce better decisions. That technology was on the side of progress.

I don't think we were stupid. I think we were making a reasonable extrapolation from available evidence. The evidence has since expanded considerably.

My brother still works in tech. He's doing well. Senior now, stock options, the whole thing. He's genuinely enthusiastic about his work and I love him for it. But he has a weariness around the eyes that wasn't there five years ago. I think the industry changed on him without asking permission. He still believes in what he's building. I think. But he talks about it differently than he used to. Less "we're going to change the world" and more "I'm trying to do good work inside a system that doesn't always want good work."

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The city is different. I know this is something everyone says about their city, that it's different, that it changed, that you can see the seam. But New York is different in a specific way. The skyline healed over healed over healed but the scar tissue is visible if you know where to look. There's a memorial now. I go sometimes. I stand at the edge of the pools and I watch the water fall and I think about how strange it is to build a monument that is fundamentally an absence. Two squares of nothing where something used to be. It's the right monument. It's exactly right.

The wars wound down. Eventually. After so many years that the word "eventually" does a lot of work in that sentence. I don't know how to summarize what the 2000s and 2010s were. I don't think anyone does yet. We're too close. I know what we lost. I'm not sure what we gained. The phones are incredible. Everyone carries a computer in their pocket now and it's connected to every other computer and to all the information that has ever existed and mostly we use them to argue with strangers and feel bad about ourselves. The 1999 version of me would find that funny. The 2019 version just finds it true.

I've been reading back through some old things I wrote in the late 90s. A journal I kept on paper, with a pen. In early 1999 I wrote a long entry about how excited I was about the coming decade. What the 2000s would be like. The list of things I expected: peace, basically. More of the 90s. Less poverty, more connection, gradual reasonable progress on the usual fronts.

Reading it now is a strange experience. Not because I was naive, though I was. That's not the interesting part. The interesting part is how specific the wrongness is. It's not that things are simply worse. It's that they're worse in ways I couldn't have invented. And better in ways I couldn't have invented either. Both at once. The texture of the wrongness was unimaginable from where I stood then. I had a vocabulary for certain kinds of bad futures. Not this one.

the texture of the wrongness was unimaginable from where I stood then the texture of the wrongness was un

I don't want to be maudlin about it. Things are okay. I'm okay. There's an ugliness in the politics right now that I don't have the energy to describe. But there are things to look forward to. There are always things to look forward to. The world continues. It's not the world I expected from where I stood in 1999 but it's the world I have.

I just wish I could reach back to whoever I was in 1999 and tell them something. Not "it will be fine," because that would be a lie. Not "it will be terrible," because that's not quite right either. Something more specific. Something about how to use the time well while they have it. How to be more present in the ordinary days because the ordinary days don't last. How to hold on to the people, because some of them won't always be there and you won't get to choose which ones.

How to be more present in the ordinary days because the ordinary days don't last. I just wish I could reach back. I just wish I could reach

I don't know how you'd get a message like that back there. But if I could, I would.

- M.

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