Some other advice for young people

I'm turning 40. What did I learn?

“The Students,” Thomas Rowlandson, 1793. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Today is my 40th birthday, which is not something I feel strongly about! I am a desperately unceremonial person who doesn’t dwell much on past choices, which is a poor quality for creative work but tremendous for my mental health.

Mainly I just bop along and drink my little coffees on long morning walks, enjoying nice new people I meet, and mildly resenting myself for not reading more books.

However: this date has caused me to revisit Choire Sicha’s 2012 essay “Some Advice for Young People” in The Awl, which became canon to me as a then-young person.

Choire’s essay was mainly about the types of other young people you meet at work, the importance of ignoring the crazy ones and being supportive to everybody else — except The Soulless Careerists. (“When people ask you about them, tell the truth. Practice saying ‘They’re useless and horrible.’”)

I’m a little too nice to say that so explicitly, but—

Anyway, my advice mainly boils down to: work hard, be honest, and, once you’ve put in a bit of time, take your most trusted older coworker out to drinks and nicely ask them how much they make.

(Separately, one of the most important rules of organizational survival you’ll understand later is to never be the most important person to know about something bad.)

But because I’m a professional media person, I struggle to say much substantive to soon-to-graduate students about how to be a professional media person too. I can’t really say “do what I did,” as a lot of what I did doesn’t really work anymore.

Make fun of white nationalists for the local alt-weekly? Write essays for obscure but weirdly influential left-wing websites? Crash the national desk of a metro newspaper? Post too much on Twitter? I’m not even technically professionally in journalism right now!

You have to keep your feet moving. When I was an undergrad, I was a creative writing student, and Joyce Carol Oates was famous to me as one of our best short fiction writers. Today, I’m a media policy meddler and Joyce Carol Oates is famous to me as one of our best posters:

I guess I’m probably supposed to say something smart and forward-looking here about YouTube and AI, which is the kind of thing I normally do for this newsletter.

But the stuff I’ve really enjoyed this year — like, that actually made feel happy and human — has been old-school, kind of snobby human-curated media: discovering new bands on Bandcamp radio, exploring subjects outside my comfort zone via my print subscription to London Review of Books, and wandering through the bazaar of films streaming on Mubi.

I’m revisiting my copy of the Scottish empiricist David Hume’s “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,” and find it thrilling when a guy from more than 250 years ago describes accuracy as a social good.

I don’t write all that to suggest that you should consume snobby stuff too — just that you should proactively seek out what you find excellent, and then just drink up as much of it as you can.

Resist too many recommendations! Including mine. You’re drowning in them right now, with recommendation algorithms and AI agents as the new Soulless Careerists in our midsts, spewing constant bullshit. It’s all gotten very pushy.

If you find that pervasive algorithmic media makes you unhappy by being overly optimized for empty engagement, just practice telling the truth: It’s useless and horrible!

Or you could just go for long morning walks with your little cup of coffee instead, that seems to work for me too.