Volume 4, Issue 38: Sad Kind of Way

"Best I'll ever be, is the beauty you see in me."

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On Tuesday night, I went to go see the great Bob Mould, of Husker Du, of Sugar, of “The Daily Show” theme, of Bob Mould. He was playing a solo show at the 40 Watt, the great rock club here in Athens. (I wrote about seeing Matthew Sweet there a few years ago.) It was an excellent Tuesday night rock show.

It was just him up there. There was no big production, there were no pyrotechnics behind him, there wasn’t even a band with him. It was just Bob Mould, all of 62 years old now, going up on stage with nothing but a black T-shirt and jeans and his Stratocaster, and just shredding for two hours.

When I was younger, I thought all the rock heroes of my youth would become legendary as they aged. I thought we’d all walk around in reverence for Stephen Malkmus, or Chuck D, or Liz Phair, or J Mascis, or P.J. Harvey, or Bob Mould, that their fanbase would just grow and grow and grow forever, that they’d someday be Paul McCartney, or Joni Mitchell, or Neil Young. But the fanbase didn’t grow: In many ways, the culture moved on from them, almost immediately. The music they made fell out of style; the industry they both rebelled against and embraced, the world they helped create and inspire, it all just faded away. The generation they represented has become the most overlooked, even forgotten, generation, and the music they made is listened to today almost exclusively by the people who enjoyed it at the time, people who stubbornly and proudly held onto that music as niche, defiantly meant not to be enjoyed the masses. There are not people who are discovering Bob Mould’s music for the first time. There are just those who knew him back then, in awe of his brilliance and who even adopted his art as a driving influence of their own personalities and value sets, now feeling like this vital, formative part of their lives is something that only they remember and care for. It falls into that concentric circle of “absolutely imperative to the people who deeply care for it” and “completely irrelevant to the rest of the world” that, as I get older, I realize most legitimately good things fall into. Bob Mould is either a rock legend, or someone you have never heard of and have no interest in. And there are a lot more people in that latter bucket than the former.

I wonder when Bob Mould—an extremely smart and thoughtful person—became aware of this. What year did this happen? When did Bob Mould become someone who, after being at the center of the cultural universe, plays half-full shows at small (if historic) rock clubs with grey-bearded fans in white folding chairs on a Tuesday night?

I’m not sure it matters when, or even if, I suppose, he became aware of this. Because—as was obvious and apparent on Tuesday night—he does not care. He just doesn’t give a shit. He simply straps on his guitar and plays his soul out. He did not try to appeal to some theoretical “new” audience. He did not fret about his cultural relevance. He did not concern himself with his status in the alt-rock canon. He just played, for two hours, like his life depended on it. A 62-year-old man, not playing some seated, relaxed acoustic show, sharing stories about the good old days, doing anniversary concerts of his most famous albums. Instead, a 62-year-old man just walked on stage, plugged in his guitar, said, “Hello” and then played as hard and loud and passionate as any band I’ve seen in years. He sweated and grunted and screamed and gave every little morsel of himself, for two hours. I don’t know if he knew how many people were in the audience, and I doubt he cared. He just did the thing he is great at, and he did it as great as anyone has done it.

He wasn’t raging against the dying of the light. He was just raging. He was doing the thing he was put on this earth to do. And that’s all he was doing.

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There are two fundamental lessons that strike me as essential to growing older, lessons that, if you don’t learn them, you’re in danger of being miserable. The first is knowing what you are good at. The second is knowing what you are not.

These can be career-related, though they don’t have to be, and ideally they wouldn’t be. Are you a good parent? Are you a good listener? Do you bring people together? Can you paint? Does it make you happy to paint? These can be satisfying and fulfilling for other people, but what’s more important is that they are satisfying and fulfilling for yourself. We only have a certain amount of time on this planet, and figuring out our place in it—what we can provide the world, how the world benefits from our presence—is one of the most important jobs we have. It doesn’t have to be essential to the world, or useful, or capitalistic, or altruistic, for some greater cause. Again: It can be. But I’d argue it’s much more individualist than that. What are you good at? What makes you happy when you do it? What do you do well that you love? It can take your entire life to find out what this is, and some people, maybe even most people, never get there. But when you do, it can feel like peace. It can feel like this was where you were going all along.

But hand-in-hand in that is finding out what you are not good at—what is not who you are. This often flies in the face of what is expected of us, societal pressures, the sort of things would make our life easier, if what people wanted us to be, if what even wished that we could be, were what we actually were. It can be a painful process to discover that the thing you thought you were supposed to be, that everyone else believes you should be, is not what it turns out that you are. And you can only be what you are. Some of the most miserable people I know are people who ended up doing something that they do not enjoy, or acting like someone they know deep down that they are not. They find themselves stuck, in a job they hate, or in some sort of persona that isn’t real, an actor forever miscast. And their inability to escape—their increasing certainty that this isn’t how this was supposed to work out, yet having no paths to anything else—compounds the misery. You’re not only unhappy: You feel like every day is a little bit of a lie.

This is how people end up dissatisfied, and frustrated, and exhausted, and aggrieved. You spend years trying to figure out who you are and what you care about, and once you realize what that is, it’s too late to do anything about it. This is what mid-life crises are about. This is why people fall apart.

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One thing I’ve learned about myself, something that’s absolutely vital to understand about one’s self if you work in the field I do, is that I don’t like having to be “on.” I have the things I care about, I have the work I value, I know what I want to contribute to the world, what I can offer this place. I know what I’m good at, and I’m grateful for it. But part of this is understanding enough about myself to know the best way to produce the best work I can. And the best way to do that it knowing when to shut it off.

If you work in media (and, really, so many other fields now), there’s one thing constantly pounded into your head: You have to be on social media. You must be a constant presence. Post constantly, comment on other people’s posts constantly, like and retweet and regram and everything else. Be a presence that’s impossible to miss. Be at the center of the conversation. Never log off. Never stop Making Content.

But this is not who I am. I like to write, obviously: I make a lot of stuff! But that is something, for me, that has to be done at a distance, at some remove. I feel compelled to try to make sense of this world, to observe and then reflect and then try to convey my thoughts about this world, and my place in it, through the written word. That is, after all, why I write: I’m trying to make sense of it. I’m trying, often unsuccessfully and surely in vain anyway, to provide context and reason and perspective and even narrative to a world that steadfastly resists it. I’m just trying to figure it all out.

What I am not is someone who is particularly skilled at working out this process in real time, and in public. I do not feel as if the world needs my immediate reactions to anything, not just because most things do not in fact require my voice (and they don’t), but because I don’t actually trust my knee-jerk reaction to anything. Part of being a grown adult is supposed to be understanding that the world is bigger than one’s limited place in it, that there are literally billions of different perspectives from one’s own, and those perspectives count just as much, if not more. If I instantly just start shouting how I instantly think about something, I’m—by definition—saying something uninformed. Not only have I not listened to anyone else’s perspective, I haven’t actually thought about it enough from my own. I’m just blurting out what happens to be floating atop my brain at that moment. I’m doing a disservice to everyone—not least of all myself. Social media isn’t just a rough draft of one’s self; it’s the worst part of one’s self. It is the sound you make when the doctor hits your knee with a plexor: Unthinking, instinctive, reactionary. It’s not you who are. It’s just how you are for a split second. Unfortunately, everyone can hear you.

This is the opposite of what I want to do with my life, of what I want to be. So I’ve stopped. I now treat social media not as a content-generation system and more as an official press office: Here are occasional press releases from the desk of Will Leitch, sputtered out into the world before the author crawls back in his cave. One of my favorite baseball players died. A friend needs help. The Illini won, yay. I write a newsletter, I hope you like it. There is little of me on social media because social media is not who I am. I’m not good at it, I don’t like it, I do not think it reflects the way I think about the world. It’s something I know about myself. And it is valuable to know things about yourself.

I am sure that this has cost me. I have writings I want people to read. I have projects I want to promote. I have books that I want to sell. There are ways that social media could help expand my reach, and expand the reach of the work that I care about. There are topics that people are yammering about on social media all day that, because I don’t check it, because I’m spending that time thinking and writing (and occasionally just staring off into space), I don’t know anything about. I have no idea who the Try Guys are or why I should care about them, and I do not feel particularly deficient remaining in the dark. I’m sure there are opportunities I miss out on, regularly, and a natural thinning of a potential audience for the work that I do care about, because I’m just not an active part of social media. I know that’s where the action is.

But if I tried to be a part of it, if I were spending all day on it just because I thought I was supposed to do … I think I’d be miserable. And I think everyone would see through me. There was a time in my life that I would have embraced social media because I would have thought it was good for me, and my career, and my work. But part of getting older is realizing that because I’m not skilled at it, and because I don’t like it, it is inherently, definitionally, not good for me. If I miss out on some things because of it, so be it. I know what I am. And I know what I am not.

That’s a goal of any of us, I think, one I surely still fail at as much as anyone else does. But it made me admire Bob Mould that much more, up on that stage, playing music to a smaller (and dwindling) audience, but doing it with as much passion and vigor as he ever has. He knows what he is, and he knows what he is not. And he has embraced who he is: What he cares about, what he’s great at, what makes him feel like the person he wants to be. And he is great at it. It’s impossible not to admire—and impossible not to envy. Because Bob Mould looked happy up there. He looked like he was exactly where he was supposed to be. He looked free.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. Have You Thought About What Happens if Donald Trump Wins in 2024? Medium. It’s maybe time to start?

2. This May Have to Be the Year for the Yankees, New York. Those Yankees fans look pretty nervous to me.

3. It Is Increasingly Difficult to Believe That Crime Doesn’t Pay, Medium. Maybe this is just news to me.

4. Your Saturday MLB Matchup Previews, MLB.com. Up to date, thanks to me staying up late last night.

5. Your Friday MLB Matchup Previews, MLB.com. Less up to date.

6. Your Thursday MLB Matchup Previews, MLB.com. Much less up to date.

7. Your Wednesday MLB Matchup Previews, MLB.com. Whoa, this is old.

8. Your Tuesday MLB Matchup Previews, MLB.com. Who even remembers these games now?

9. The Biggest Storylines for a Padres-Mets Game 3 That Is Now Long Over, MLB.com. The winner of this week’s “Most Outdated” award. Congratulations, long obsolete story.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, we dug into “Amsterdam,” “Blonde,” “The Greatest Beer Run Ever” and “Bros,” the best of the bunch.

Seeing Red, Bernie and I recapped a season cut very short.

Waitin' Since Last Saturday, we previewed the Georgia-Vanderbilt game and recapped the Georgia-Auburn game.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“The Really Big One,” Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker. From 2015, this won the Pulitzer Prize. I just re-read it again this week and, yep: Just as terrifying!

Also: This is a terrific piece by Franklin Foer about Merrick Garland in The Atlantic.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Sometimes A Pony Gets Depressed,” Silver Jews. Always worth a revisit.

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section.

This is what I did on my birthday this week: Had a bunch of Little Leaguers pour Gatorade on my head.

Best,
Will