On the inside of my high school locker door, I regularly posted cartoons that I liked: Jim Unger’s Herman, Jerry Van Amerongen’s The Neighborhood, Gary Larson’s The Far Side, Dan Piraro’s Bizarro, cartoons by John Callahan, Lynda Barry, Matt Wuerker, Ronald Searle, Gahan Wilson.
One that remained on my door longest was one by the late Ashleigh Brilliant (requiescat in pace). It became the title of his fourth book, I Feel Much Better, Now That I’ve Given Up Hope. That witticism still crops up in my mind frequently, particularly when I have to deal with the existence of this thing some people call The Seattle Star.
Writing my birthday remembrances of The Star two years ago I was hopeful. Last year I was the opposite of hopeful. This year, I suppose, I am simply beyond hope. Hope doesn’t matter much to me right now. I still have flashes of the Vaclav Havel-denoted type of hope not that things will be wonderful in the future but rather the type of hope that somehow this life right here, right now makes sense. But that hardly makes life more pleasant.
I’ve noted the rise of what people refer to as “male loneliness” over the past decade. When Surgeon General Vivek Murthy first labeled the phenomenon in his 2023 report Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation his point was that this loneliness affects men and women both. 79% of people surveyed between 18 and 24, in fact. It affects young men disproportionately because our culture has broken many bonds that used to make men feel connected to a higher purpose.
This isn’t just churches, but clubs, NGOs, unions, and other membership groups that have been under attack in social life for the past fifty years. As people become more and more obsessed with abstract labels and their personal identities, too, the sense of connection to people who are not 100% similar to them has also faltered. These are not individual problems. They are community problems.
Dr. Murthy’s proposal to alleviate this loneliness is to reconnect with 1) relationships, 2) service, and 3) community. And yet…
- Relationships need to be deeper, but instead of deep discussions with close friends that last all night, there are neatly scheduled appointments with strangers whom one pays for conversation.
- People are told over and over and over that they have to value their time as coin, not as merit.
- Communities have to have protocols. But then the insistence is that protocols do not matter because someone’s coffers or personal freedom or “identity” is more important.
The thing connecting all of this is the excess of American libertarianism and its insistence that everything is a market transaction, with techno-libertarianism à la Musk and Bezos its most naked and grotesque example. Personal labels and identity and all the rest of the nonsense only matters in such a milieu because it makes it easier for marketers to identify you and sell you whatever trendy crap their Mustapha Mond chooses to dole out to you for your social anesthesia.
In our very first meeting for the new Seattle Star back in October of 2011, I insisted that our job was to be deeper as journalists, and as thinkers, rather than broader. That didn’t mean focus on specialization. It meant believe in slower, more thoughtful consideration by both our staff and our readers. The most common objection at the time from outside of the room was “People don’t read online!” Our retort was well, if they’re on social media seven hours a day, then what are they doing? (Remember too, this was well before TikTok and Instagram only had still photography.)
I held to my belief then, as now, that there is no such thing as capital A-Audience or capital-P People who don’t do ___________ (fill in the blank). Because obviously someone, somewhere out there does. There are people who read online, or e-readers would not exist. There are audiences who appreciate experimental art, otherwise there would be no On The Boards, or Frye Museum sessions, or Wayward Music series at The Chapel in Wallingford. There are readers who are seeking to connect with the world and who want their time in the world to be more profound. Saying these people do not exist is simply a lie.
The question has always been “How do we find these people?” In my case, The Star has always had the material. I will put the writing of The Star up against any similar general-interest journal that combines history, literature, criticism, and cultural reportage, and we will come out just fine. And if we narrow things down to people who have created their work to be read and shared within the Global Commons, I am pretty sure we will stand head and shoulders above most.
It was a lot easier when I had six writers contributing biweekly. It was even manageable when I had four writers and two editors. It’s much harder now that everything administrative and much of the creative work too has fallen solely to me. It has become, in a word, lonely.
The cure is, I think, exactly what Dr. Murthy suggests: become more involved in relationships, service, and community. Last year it proved more difficult to do this than usual. Some of it was my fault. Some was “Events, dear boy, events!” But as I’ve learned over the years, life is a long game. So let the game continue.
This year the plan is to reconnect more with the community. I think we can at least get back to the level of participation we had before COVID-19 rudely interrupted our world. And I think the key to that is “Events, dear boy, events” — but planned ones. While it’s true I remain the head of the largest international event for freely-licensed music, Netlabel Day, I’ve never connected The Star to that. That may have been an error on my part. This year, I may test that hypothesis. I plan to host at least a few musical events this year under the aegis of The Star. I expect also that we will return to our remix events: music plus poetry, film plus art, art plus music.
At the very least, it’s time to reconnect with our writers, our readers, and with any luck our new readers too. One can hardly predict the rest of the future, and I am not foolhardy enough to try. What I can do is make plans and follow through. So expect more events in the near future. Expect, too, The Star to continue putting out a consistently high level of writing and continuing our search for deeper intellectual connection.
We may not solve the loneliness epidemic, but with a little hope and lot of hard work we might help others solve their own. And that will have to be enough.
