We are either cynical or naive by nature. I believe this to be true. You’re one or the other, inherently, by birth; it’s “baked in,” to employ the current cliché.
Cynical-versus-Naive is like those party-trick personality categorizations clever people bring up at dinner, categorizing their friends’ faces as either a fox or a pig. Or like the scene from the movie “Husbands and Wives” when Judy Davis can’t have an orgasm during sex with Liam Neeson because she gets mentally distracted categorizing her friends into either hedgehogs or foxes. (Liam Neeson is a hedgehog. Woody Allen is a fox.)
Cynical or Naive? I’m a Naive. Pig face and Naive.
Though if we’re talking Judy Davis’s Foxes-versus-Hedgehogs, which is about intellect, there I’m a fox. Fox brain, Pig face, Naive.
Perhaps physiognomy determines character. I couldn’t help but be a Naive because I have freckles and rosy-apple cheeks. I’ve always looked like I was about to carry a blueberry pie to a church picnic in a gingham basket. This didn’t help me win the hearts of alcoholic garage-rock drummers in underground bands, ankle-deep in beer in the basement bars of Alphabet City in my wild youth; I never acquired the correct expression of cool detachment. But the rosy-apple cheeks do help me convince others that I’m a nice person.
It has occurred to me that my baked-in naïvete is why it has taken me so long to grasp the obvious fact that unpleasantness is essential to the well-lived life. You need to be able to accept a bit of unpleasantness or difficulty — boredom, pain, bad weather — in order to do greater things and squeeze juice out of existence. Byung-Chul Han, the philosopher and cultural theorist, calls this “constructive negativity.”
These days, I spend a lot of time on ferries, going to and fro. I’m on the South Ferry and North Ferry, on and off Shelter Island, every week going to visit my mother at Peconic Landing in Greenport, and I take many trips on the Cross Sound Ferry, to and from Connecticut on the journey to fetch or drop off my daughter, who is a junior at boarding school in New England. I can’t ride a ferry without thinking of the passage of time, as Walt Whitman does in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”: the shuttle rhythm, back and forth, the generations of passengers carried out and home again, the black sky and stars overhead when you are crossing at night, the sparkling water and the briny air that cannot fail to shift your energy level. . . . That cannot fail to shift your energy level, that is, if you get out of your car. You feel nothing if you stay inside the car scrolling TikTok.
I am entertained by that Gregisms guy on TikTok, too — you know, the droll elementary-school theater teacher from New Orleans who urges you to #findyourjoy? — but you can’t truly #findyourjoy if you’re always on TikTok.
Facts. As the kids say.
This is one of those epiphanies that is so obvious once you think of it (and probably so obvious to the rest of you already) that it shouldn’t really come as an epiphany, but it did, just last week. It only just occurred to me as I was riding last Sunday on the Menhaden, the North Ferry boat from Greenport, that happiness requires a touch of constructive negativity. It was raining and the sun had gone down and I didn’t have a windbreaker, but I got out of the car anyway and stood in the drizzle watching the dark bay slip under the boat. Standing outside in the rain watching the water and the sky and the birds and the far shore is a thousand times better than sitting and cozily checking Instagram. I swear. I promise you.
The internet stream has no time, no markers of the passage of time, it’s just that: a stream. We float along in it, in a space of medium-happy, a place of almost-pleasant, that is kind of a purgatory, too.
We’ve become, as the human race — those of us with the privilege, I should say — so accustomed to coziness and comfort that we never get out of the car. We hardly leave the house. Leaving the house and walking to work, with the rusty-brown chestnut leaves crunching underfoot, brings us joy, but it’s so much easier to drive. Signing up for an evening Latin dance class would be exciting, and we always wanted to learn how to merengue, but Netflix and chill is too tempting so we do that instead.
Duh, right? I know!
My 1970s and 1980s education was lacking in this regard. What I got from my expensive schooling at hippie-dippy Hampton Day and then Concord Academy was that, because I was clever, I didn’t have to do my homework at all. I’d narcissistically pat myself on the back for getting an A on a social studies paper having started it at 11 p.m. the night before; that was my point of pride: “Look at me, I’m not even trying!” This obviously wasn’t the healthiest lesson to learn.
The mild and comfortable is a kind of purgatory. Human beings in previous centuries, millenniums, eras, and epochs by default — for survival — had to learn to stomach the unpleasant in order to reach a reward. Their muscles got a workout, like it or not, and they breathed in the scent of the mown fields and they heard the birds. They saw the sun come up. The water was cold from the stream, and delicious. I’m not arguing against all progress and the entire trajectory of civilization, obviously, and I certainly am not advocating for child labor, but, still, our experience of the world is diminished because we have lost the daily habit of encountering and embracing a modicum of hardship. We in the wealthy nations no longer need to embrace any unpleasantness in our quotidian medium-happy. We still get the reward, such as it is. Measly.
And I’m not even sure if the children of 2023 know the digital existence — the on-screen life — is measly, medium, “mid,” as my daughter would say. The intensity of the highs and lows of human existence for their generation has been shaved off, pared away at either end. Only those of us who grew into adulthood in the Before are aware of this diminishment.
My daughter is a Cynical and my son is a Naive. My daughter is a hedgehog brain (methodical), a pig face (with her adorable upturned nose), and a Cynical. My son is a fox brain (cunning), a fox face (huge slanting eyes), and a Naive (irrepressible smile). They didn’t get cellphones until they were 13 years old, the two of them, but their lives since then have been playing out in the medium-happy, the purgatory of comfortable non-time. I had to almost physically force Teddy to get out of the Honda with me last night on the Shelter Island ferry, on our way home from Family Weekend at Phillips Exeter Academy. He was unimpressed and said there was nothing beautiful about the night air or the dark shore. Right now, he just considers himself saddled with an eccentric mom. But give him time.