James Sexton (26:11)
I totally agree. I don't think anything you've said, I can't argue with anything you've said there. But I do think that like most things, it's a function of overcorrection. Like I think the old way, the structure that was built on an evolutionary reality, the world was a hostile, antagonistic place in a very real way. Like there was a time like not talking about World War II era. Like it wasn't like they were like, you know, you walk out the streets and people are just attacking and raping each other. Like, I'm talking about, like, primal society. Like, yes, you're right. Brute force, violence, all those things. Like, it's a. It was a different kind of a world. Now, I'm not saying we don't still have those same drives. I'm not saying that there aren't still those same dangers in some way. But, you know, civilization and its discontents, like, we. We have figured out, like, okay, we're going to create laws, and we're going to create structures and societies and civilizations that are going to result in our suppression of certain drives that we have for the purpose of the greater good in civilization. So I get that. I think that created certain boxes that fit a lot of people. Like, a lot of men like to be the provider and protector, and it's a good fit. And a lot of women liked to be provided for and protected, and they liked to nurture. And there's something biological to it, and there's something social and personal to it. But it became a prison. I really think it became a prison. It became a prison where that is all you're allowed to do. Like, my mother was a product of her generation. She was the smartest math student in her public school in Brooklyn. And they said, that's so great. You can be a nurse or you can be a teacher. And she said, well, I could be a doctor. I have the absolute best math and science scores. And they went, right, sure, that's cute. You can be a nurse or you can be a teacher. Those are your two options. And then you'll be a wife and you'll be a mother, because that's what you have. Those are your options. That's it. And I'm of a generation. I'm a bit older than you. I'm of a generation that, like, you got to be Clint Eastwood or Richard Simmons. Those were your two choices. Those were your two choices. Like, growing up, you were either the stoic, like, hard guy, or you were gay. You were, like, effete. You were. And really, the truth is human emotional complexity, like, that's not how it works. Like, we all have, you know, proclivities. We all have different drives in us. But, you know, there's a lot of men that are deeply emotional and sensitive and poetic and have, like, a lot of feminine. If you want to call it that, traits. And there's a lot of women that have tremendous masculine energy, if you want to call it that are aggressive and good. So the idea that, like. But again, what did we then do we then said, okay, so anything that says it's good, that men are strong willed and capable and domineering and dominant and aggressive is bad. And anything that says that women are submissive and nurturing is bad. Because you're trying to push people in these boxes when in fact all we're doing is like observing reality. But we're making it a prison. We're making it way too tight by saying it has to be so it has to be prison or it has to be no prison. It has to be this postmodern, existential. Everything is class struggle, everything is right. And so, you know, again, we love this as a culture, this overcorrection. We've done it for a long time. But then add the amplifier of social media, add what you just said, which is, I will now not only do I get to see more women in a day than any man before me in my lineage saw in a year or in their lifetime, women get to talk to more women than they've ever talked to in their whole lives. If you're scrolling your Instagram feed, you're listening to men and to women. And by the way, the algorithm makes it even more fun because now we know what's going to infuriate you and we know what's going to like, you know, get you, like, excited and, and, and behind it. So we just start to feed that to people again because we want your attention. And it's an attention economy. It's engagement, engagement. Like I get it. But it's created this world where none of it's really about nurturing something in any of us. None of it's really about the broader societal thread. Like, what is our common dream anymore? Like the thought that it's become controversial to say, I love America, I'm an American, I love America. By the way, saying you love America but seeming to hate Americans doesn't make a lot of sense to me either. Because all America is just a bunch of Americans. Like e pluribus unum, you know, on our money. Like, you know, from many. One, like the pluribus part's easy. The pluribus part. You just get a bunch of dissimilar elements and put them in a room. Like, the unum part's the hard part. Like, how do you take all of these different people from different religions, different cultures, different places, different capabilities, different constitutions, and we have this thing in common. Well, it used to be a thing. We all stood up when the flag, you know, got raised or we all. That's gone now. It's actually almost profane to say, oh, I love America. If you say I love America, you're automatically presumed to be right wing. You're automatically presumed to be, you couldn't possibly be a progressive leftist, which, by the way, I lean more progressive left politically. But I still think, like, there is value in these common threads. We lost that. And then to say, well, we lost our touch point, our North Star, our Rosetta Stone, like, the thing that made all of it make sense, we lost that. And we're wondering why we're all wandering around like the Smurfs in the woods without Papa Smurf. Like, I don't think it's that hard to figure out that that's what happened. And the same thing happens in relationships because relationships are just a function. You know, again, it was always world, country, culture, community, family, couple. And these, these building blocks, like this basic one became very unfashionable. And that's why in the 70s, your temporary happiness became much more important than the broad social thread. The thing you're trying to do, like when you and Lisa started a business and when you started the business of your family life together, your couple, your coupling together, like, you decided to, like Jocko Willinek would say, you discipline, you trade what you want now for what you want most. So you both said, hey, what I want most is deep connection to another person for a lifetime. And so I'm going to trade the shiny things. I'm going to trade autonomy, I'm going to trade maybe some of the pleasure of solitude sometimes I'm going to trade that because I think this other thing is worth more. That's even controversial to say now, that deep connection with another person over the course of an extended period of time. And again, not to tie it to the bigger thing, again, but it's not a coincidence that around the 1970s is when TV really proliferated. My mentor in graduate school, before I went to law school, I got my master's degree and I was working on my PhD in a field called media ecology, which is the study of information environments.
