David Remnick: The birth of the generation we call millennials spans from 1981 to 1996 according to the Pew Research Center. The eldest of them turn 40 this year, and the youngest are in their mid-20s, The Radio Hour's Ngofeen Mputubwele sits close in the middle of that generation. Lately, he's been looking into what seems to be a tide of despair among millennials. It has something to do with the state of the planet, the state of the nation, and the state of the internet. Pretty much everything, here's Ngofeen.

[pause 00:00:32]

[music]

Ngofeen: In the biblical story of the flood, Noah pulls the animals and his family onto the Ark, and when the waters come, they come from two places. They fall from above, from the heavens gaping open, but also, they gush forth from below, from the great deeps. It conjures an image in my mind of water inching up from below the ground, like a great swamp, slowly engulfing the people.

I've grown up in the church. I'm confirmed Catholic, spent years in a black Baptist church, but then from middle school on, have spent a lot of time in the white evangelical church. When I say spent, I don't mean I've visited, or am familiar with, I mean there is no part of evangelical life I don't know. Bible study and community group and D time and VVS and missions trips. Lately, I've been working on a memoir about the one little wrinkle in my story, my being gay, it's a text about queerness and race and God.

The first attempt of my life outside this, as I say, to talk publicly about my sexuality. A plea not to be disowned or excommunicated, just heard. Gay folks in the church must forfeit romance and go at their lives alone if they don't marry a woman. After 17 years of celibacy, I write about how the weight of the ask is gravely misunderstood, and the waters rise.

[music]

[background conversations]

Ngofeen: Hey, Kaveh.

Kaveh: Hey, friend.

Ngofeen: [chuckles] A few months ago, I met a friend. My queer poet friend Kaveh Akbar, to work through what I've been writing. We were in Indiana, so we went to IHOP and we ordered buttermilk pancakes, and breakfast sausage, and over-easy eggs, and hot chocolate like you do at IHOP, and midway through the meal, the man in the booth next to us stood up, scowled and left. Later, our waitress comes over and she's like, "I don't know if you heard any comments the man made, but I just wanted to apologize." Kaveh asks, "What was his deal?" "Well," she clasped her hands together, "Your sexuality."

Kaveh: My first thought was that sense of how we're still doing this. Jesus.

Ngofeen: I was flabbergasted. I literally thought, "I'm wearing jeans, a hoodie, and a Steeler's hat."

Kaveh: I remember the Steelers hat really well. You were deeply, deeply incognito.

Ngofeen: "He felt very uncomfortable," she continued, "And he paid for the table next to you for having to endure our conversation. Then he left," and the waters rise. I know my people and I know in that Indiana town where we dined and where incidentally, I was born, that man believed he was being holy by not eating with sinners, us, a table away. I imagine him, boarding the ark, leaving Kaveh and I behind with the other unfortunate ones, gasping for air as still the waters rise. Why did you tell me, "You should write this down"?

Kaveh: You only have those, "This is what I am feeling right now," feelings in that moment. If you don't write them down in that moment, then you lose them. As a species, we're really bad at remembering pain.

Ngofeen: Back to Brooklyn, where not so long ago, a man hurled spit at me, and then in another instance, venomous words because of my sexuality, that's an ordinary part of life for my friends in this progressive city. In the circles that I move in, in media especially, the narrative is that things are getting better. They might be bad, but they're getting better, but I still can't go to an IHOP and eat in peace without repulsing others.

I'm constantly in meetings where people talk about diversity in the industry and how it's improving, and once again, I'm the only black person in the room. Despite that, I'm always hearing about getting outside our bubble, which I get, but also I've been outside the bubble my whole life. Growing up black, queer, son of immigrants, singing opera, dancing to ballet in white churches in Tennessee and Indiana has constantly put me around people unlike me.

Has made me regulate the pitch of my voice, the look of my body, the gestures my hands make, so someone else is at ease. When people keep telling you you're not thinking enough about people different than you, or that things are getting better when they feel really bad, you start to despair. You start to feel like you're being, as my millennial cohort might say, gaslit, and the waters rise.

I'm lying in bed, on the internet and I'm up to my neck in the waters. As I lie back, I go onto YouTube for a bit of release and relief and watch a video essay like I do, and it's a new one called How To Be Hopeless, and I watch it. For once on a screen, I finally see the world I'm inhabiting reflected back to me, and I'm like, "That's it."

[music]

I know what the waters are. I know what I'm feeling, hopeless, and then I realize, "Oh my gosh, I am not alone." All around me, I see people of my generation, millennials, people born from 1981 to 1996 writing about this feeling in memoirs, on television, in essays, all grappling with this feeling of hopelessness. I decided to talk to us to ask, "Why do we feel hopeless? What do we do with that feeling?" One, Carlos Maza, 1988. To answer my questions, I started with the guy who made that video essay How To Be Hopeless. To me, he's basically a scholar of hopelessness. All right. Easy stuff first. Tell me who you are, and what you do?

Carlos: My name is Carlos Maza. I'm a video producer/writer who used to work in a newsroom-

Ngofeen: Carlos worked for Media Matters and then Fox.

Carlos: -and now produce independently on YouTube, making videos about politics, media, ethics, generally trying to be a human in what feels like the end of the world. [laughs]

Ngofeen: Carlos grounds the essay in his experience of living through COVID. Picture Carlos in March of 2020 sitting in a park in New York City, cold, masked up, reading Albert Camus' The Plague. Go back in your mind's eye a bit. What did it look like outside?

Carlos: It's almost like the rapture, you have all the dressings of a city, but everyone else is gone. I would just read and listen to the wind. I was holding these two realities which is like one, "This is such an awful thing that's happening for no reason. Thank God we're all in this together," and then seeing more broadly this other reality like, "This is fake. I'm not going to wear my goddamn mask. This is all China's fault. Just go after the people who are coming here from China."

Donald Trump: The fake news doesn't get it, do they? They don't get it.

[cheers]

Carlos: So much, I feel, like of the work that I've read since Trump got elected, especially the progressive writing has been about hope and overcoming the odds and rallying together, especially when it comes to stuff like climate change. In the video I talk about, I show a CNN reporter sobbing while covering COVID deaths.

Sara Sidner: To get through this. This is the tenth hospital that I have been in. [sobs] It's really hard to take.

Carlos: An activist during the George Floyd protests saying, "Why does this keep happening? I don't understand why this keeps happening."

Activist 1: How? How is this still happening?

Carlos: I'm a little bit more honest about my own grief.

Sara Sidner: It's just not okay. It's not okay. What we're doing to each other.

Carlos: The desire to go numb in the face of the world and just commit suicide, and say, "I'm not doing this anymore," or just mentally check out, and commit a kind of spiritual suicide by saying, "I'm just going to watch Netflix, and grow plants in my apartment, and do my thing and not worry about the rest of the world anymore." I wanted to let the audience know that I struggle with that, so that if they felt that, they would know that they were not alone.

Ngofeen: The refrain of American culture for the last several years has been that Americans are so divided, that the situation seems worse than ever. It's not just the youngs who say it, you hear the olds say it too. They can't remember another time like this. I just fundamentally disagree with that idea. The notion that things right now are unprecedented, ignores so many people for so long.

Reporter 1: Name, but tell me exactly how do you feel about all of this?

Activist 2: I feel that it's a great travesty of justice, I feel that the--

Ngofeen: Take the '80s and early '90s when I was just a kid, people cried out in despair, whether because of police violence-

Activist 2: I feel that the jury gave the okay to continue to abuse and oppress and suppress black people in this country.

Activist 3: We just want to come out and show our support for Rodney King and his family.

Ngofeen: -or as Carlos points out in his video essay, because of a lethal virus.

Reporter 2: Do you think it really accomplished a great deal?

Activist 4: What else can we do? We're dying. We're sitting here, dying.

Activist 5: Plague, 40 million infected people is a fucking plague. We are in the worst shape we have ever, ever, ever been in.

Ngofeen: What is it that you feel when you talk about the AIDS example?

Carlos: It's just this tremendous feeling of heartbreak and care. Obviously, I wasn't around for the heyday of it, but I do live in a generation that very profoundly feels the aftermath of not having elders, having the generation before us obliterated, and feel every day the absence of gay men that we can look up to and who define culture and serve as shoguns for the rest of the community, that void--

Ngofeen: In 1994, AIDS or gay cancer, as it was called for so long, was the leading cause of death for people 25 to 44.

Carlos: On one hand, the story, I think, of the AIDS crisis in America is that the activists won. Look, in the long run, they secured all this funding for AIDS research, and now HIV infection rates are way down in the United States, and now we had this pill called PrEP that protects us from it. In the long view, it's a victory. They fought, but their sacrifices were worth it because look at this big thing. There's people who died.

Ngofeen: Died.

Carlos: Died. The story ended for them. They died to a stupid plague for no fucking reason while the world around them did nothing. I just wanted to challenge that idea that things will always turn out okay, because we lost a whole generation of people who fought their fucking asses off and died. I don't accept the ego story about that, which is, the sacrifice is worth it. No, it wasn't.

Ngofeen: The first question I set out with was why all the millennial hopelessness. For a lot of us millennials, we walk around and see pain, and it feels like we're being told to stuff down our grief. Carlos and others I've been talking to are saying, "No, we need to sit with the brokenness." Two, Shauna McGarry, 1983.

Shauna: I am realizing that this was a terrible time to do a podcast because I'm nine months pregnant and I burp every other word. I'm so sorry to your listeners and everybody.

Ngofeen: [laughs] It's totally fine. A lot of millennial writers are starting to create a vocabulary for facing the enormity of the pain. Shauna wrote on the Netflix series Bojack Horseman, which I think, one person's opinion, is the archetypal millennial show. When were you born? For the sake of this, since I'm talking to a millennial.

Shauna: In the early '80s. I'm right in between that, and I think they're calling us geriatric millennials right now. I would come home and watch almost every day when I was about 11 or 12, Northern Exposure, I think and we used to watch ABC Family Friday. What was it called? TGIF.

Ngofeen: Oh, TGIF, shows like Full House [theme song playing] and Family Matters. [theme song playing]

Shauna: I think you're just watching a world where young people and their parents are getting along and they're making jokes together.

Steve Urkel: Did I do that?

[audience laughter]

Shauna: It's like a similar language.

Ngofeen: Shauna helped me see how the shows deal with conflict, which is to say, neatly, a character with a drug addiction doesn't suffer any lasting effects beyond that episode, no need for rehab.

Bojack: Yes, I'm Bojack, oh, God, it feels so dumb, and I'm an alcoholic.

Group: Hi, Bojack.

[theme song playing]

Ngofeen: Bojack Horseman is a comedy at its core, but in this world, problems do not have easy answers. The writers have this fierce commitment to not resolving issues neatly. After Bojack's Ottoman catches on fire, it's burnt for the rest of the season until he buys a new one.

Bojack: Goddammit.

Ngofeen: If he has a party in one episode, the house stays messy until someone cleans it. Plants that go unwatered die in a cartoon, and when the character breaks their wrist, they wear a cast for several episodes. Every action has an effect. Shauna took the same tack in the episode she wrote about depression.

Shauna: It's like I'm a person. I am depressed. It doesn't make me feel better to see people in TV never even talk about taking antidepressants.

Ngofeen: In her episode, one of the main characters has been diagnosed as clinically depressed.

Diane: You're making this a bigger thing than it is. I'll be fine.

Shauna: One of the things I'm most proud of in that episode is the Diane story. She goes back on antidepressants. We had a lot of conversations in the room about how to best portray that.

Ngofeen: The episode touches on Diane's fear of gaining weight and the antidepressants work. The writers then change her character in the show to reflect that. From that point on, not just that episode, she's drawn bigger after gaining weight. In this world, if you've hurt someone, that hurt lasts too.

Todd: You had sex with Emily?

Bojack: What did you think?

Todd: I don't know. Not that. I just knew something sketchy happened.

Bojack: Todd. I'm sorry. I screwed up. I know I screwed up. I don't know why.

Todd: Oh, great, of course. Here it comes. You can't keep doing this. You can't keep doing shitty things, and then feel bad about yourself like that makes it okay. You need to be better.

Bojack: I know, and I'm sorry. I was drunk and there was all this pressure with the Oscar campaign, but now that it's over, I--

Todd: No, no, Bojack, just stop. You are all the things that are wrong with you. It's not the alcohol, or the drugs, or any of the shitty things that happened to you in your career or when you were a kid, it's you. All right? It's you.

Ngofeen: Do you think that '90s TV set us up to be sad?

Shauna: Sad? I don't know.

Ngofeen: I'm not fishing for an answer. I'm just curious. [laughs]

Shauna: It is funny. I think being sad as a bigger part of my life, that it's okay to be sad, and that there's that balance between sad and happy all the time, was something that '90s TV did not tell us. It felt like in TV there was this also realization of that, and that we really let the pendulum swing the other way with shows like Breaking Bad and The Sopranos that we were like, "No, no. Everything's shit. These men that you idolize, they're bad men. Bad." I think Bojack was also satirizing that a little bit, and that that is also not true. That the world is not so black and white.

We were coming out of the Reagan era in the '90s, I think there was a lot of terrible social programming. A lot of people were in bad financial situations, there was this idea of, "Can there be a middle class that's happy and every week you start over?" I think we've progressed past that as a mature audience of television. We don't have patience for that anymore. Obviously, like Harvey Weinstein, that artifice that Hollywood was able to maintain both behind and in front of the camera, it just doesn't exist anymore, so why pretend that it does?

Daniel Sherell: It's like you have to actually see reality.

Ngofeen: This is Daniel Sherell, a climate organizer in Washington DC.

Daniel: Part of what the climate movement, I think, is out to do, much like the Black Lives Matter movement, is to force the polity to actually live in reality and see the full picture, and see the full humanity of everybody, and see the full tangibility of all ecosystems. It's like a reorientation.

David Remnick: That's climate writer, Daniel Sherell, whose recent book, Warmth, is about coming of age in the era of climate change. Our story continues in just a moment, so stick around. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour.

[pause 00:20:08]

[music]

David Remnick: This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We'll continue now with a story from our producer Ngofeen Mputubwele. Ngofeen has been talking to millennials about a state of despair that he sees in his generation and he asks them, "Why do we feel hopeless and what should we do with that feeling?"

Ngofeen: Three, Patrick Nathan, 1984.

Patrick Nathan: My name is Patrick Nathan. I wrote Image Control: Art, Fascism, and the right to resist.

Ngofeen: There's another element to millennial despair, man, it's a big one. The influence of social media. One way millennials differ from previous generations is that we grew up presenting ourselves online. What was your screen name? Back in the days of screen names.

Patrick Nathan: [laughs] Great Purple Cow.

Ngofeen: [laughs] Would you like to explain this?

Patrick Nathan: No.

Ngofeen: [laughs] Like Patrick and I, millennials were kids or young adults when we were introduced to the internet.

Patrick Nathan: You went there to find a community that you did not have. You presented yourself as a kind of person that you wanted to be. People literally referred to you by your screen name.

Ngofeen: Then with the socials, MySpace and Facebook, Twitter, Instagram came the change.

Patrick Nathan: That online avatar and your real-life self are no longer two distinct identities and start to blend together quite a lot.

Ngofeen: Online screen name you, and real-life you merge. Suddenly we're all brands with platforms.

Patrick Nathan: Everybody is suddenly responsible for their own PR as if they were some sort of celebrity.

Ngofeen: This does a few things. Your life is lived in public and so your failures are public. You live in a semi-constant state of anxiety about saying the wrong thing in public. Since you're fundamentally a public person with a platform, there's this pressure to comment on events because silence can sometimes feel as though it's unethical.

Patrick Nathan: I do think there is a distinction between the millennials and Gen Z because we are still old enough to have been raised in a completely different reality. I think it makes us an especially fragile generation.

Ngofeen: Four, how to be hopeless. I started out with two questions. One, why do we feel hopeless? Two, what do we do with that hopelessness? Let's go back to Carlos Maza who posted that video, How To Be Hopeless. The how is real. He takes it seriously. It's not, "We should be hopeless. Let's give up and sit in the content stream." He's saying, "This is our reality. How can we live with it?

Carlos: I picked up Camus' The Plague in March of 2020. Camus, the author wrote it while trapped in Nazi-occupied France. The book is actually an allegory for the plague of fascism. Like the experience of being stuck in a country that is losing its mind and engaging in mass violence and senseless destruction. At the time that I was reading it, it gave me language for a feeling that I didn't know what to do with.

Ngofeen: What's an example of something that you read in The Plague that when you read it, it articulated something that you were feeling?

Carlos: There's this ongoing debate between the doctor who's fighting the plague, this journalist who wants to get the hell out of Dodge and escape the plague, and this volunteer who's stuck in the city by accident and chooses to just fight it cheerily about what the purpose of life is. Why a person should respond to a plague by fighting against it. One of the characters says, "All I know is that in life there are plagues and there are victims, and one must try as hard as they can never to side with the plagues and always to side with the victims."

It's such a brutally simple way of describing the experience of being one human stuck on the planet. Which is like, "I don't know if any of my efforts will be worth it, but I do know that something bad is happening, and that the victims need help. Wouldn't you like to die knowing that you made this easier for people, that you made life better for people, that you brought joy or alleviated suffering?" Even saying it out loud now, it's not enough. It does not fix grief, but it is a way of making sense of it. Like to just say, I'm not going to abandon the other volunteers who are stuck here too just because I'm frustrated and sad and hurt.

Daniel: Walking that tightrope between those two poles of despair and optimism is to me, part of my life's work, staying on that tightrope that I would call reality.

Ngofeen: Five, Dan Sherell, 1990. When Carlos talks about this need to keep fighting that he borrowed from a 70-year-old book, it's very much like what Dan Sherell the climate organizer told me. Dan has just written a memoir called Warmth that is all about this complicated reality, needing to inspire people without lying to them. I often describe it this way to people is that climate has never been one of my things. Whenever it's come up, I've just been like, "I guess it's too late." I don't even have basic vocabulary. I don't have subject and verb.

Daniel: My dear friend Emily and I, who's featured in the book, we've been talking recently about, especially in the wake of the Glasgow COP about the Horcrux model of climate change.

[laughter]

Daniel: Just to flip us back to middle school for a second, bear with me. There is a huge swath of outcomes between 1.5 degree Celsius of warming and three degree Celsius of warming, which is what we're currently on track for. When I was growing up in the ' 90s when nobody gave a shit about the climate crisis, we were on track for four or five degrees of warming. That's basically like Mad Max. It would've led to mass human die-off. We still might be heading in that direction, but we have bent the curve of emissions down somewhat.

There is this vast array of outcomes between 1.5 and 3, and for every tick of the thermometer between those two poles, you are saving or consigning millions of people to life and death. Emily and I are like, there are 15 tenths of a degree between 1.5 and 3 degree Celsius. [laughs] Much like the Horcruxes, each one of those things is going to take an incredible amount, is going to involve an almost impossible seeming political mission, and that the rest of our lives is going to be spent on-- probably all of my work for the rest of my life will maybe be some small part of shaving off one of those 15 tenths.

When I imagine myself behind a veil of ignorance, not having been born yet, and somebody were to tell me, "You would be born in the year the first popular book on global warming would be released, you'll see it as you come of age, it'll transition from a niche research topic to an ongoing global catastrophe." Obviously, I would've felt grief about that, and I do feel grief about that. Also, if somebody had likewise told me that you're going to spend the rest of your life coming together with people who share your values to try to create a polity and economy that actually treats everybody with dignity, I can't think of a more meaningful way to spend a human life.

[music]

Ngofeen: In Christian theology, there's this idea called the already not yet. Scripture teaches that one day, not yet, Jesus will usher in a new heavens and new earth. Also, in his earthly ministry, he proclaimed that the kingdom of heaven is here already. If you fixate on the not yet, the new heavens and new earth to come, you can become an escapist. If you fixate on the already, the kingdom of heaven that's already here, you can despair because justice is slow and coming, and things don't look great.

You're meant to hold the two ideas in tension, live in the present new kingdom that Jesus ushered in through his life, and look to the future, new heavens, and new earth. In queer theory, there's a similar idea of futurity, that while we live right now and right now it's flawed, we look ahead to a queer future that we can't see yet and only imagine and begin to live that way in the present.

Both of these frameworks reach for a better way to live, a way to grieve the failed present and let a better imagined future shape our lives now. In my case, that means grieving that my words, even the words of this essay, may come cost some of the relationships I've held most dear. It's something I can't change. While I mourn that loss, I can, at the same time, imagine a new family, perhaps one forged of blood, perhaps not, that will embrace me in a bright, glorious future.

[music]

David: The New Yorker Radio Hour’s Ngofeen Mputubwele. We heard from the writers Kaveh Akbar, Carlos Maza, Shauna McGarry, Patrick Nathan, and Daniel Sherrell.

[music]

 

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