Why You Truly Never Leave High School

Jennifer Senior:

Robert Faris puts an even finer point on this idea. "If you put adults in a similar situation"--meaning airlifted into a giant building full of strangers with few common bonds--"you'd find similar behaviors." Like reality television, for instance, in which people literally divide into tribes, form alliances, and vote one another off the island. "And I think you see it in nursing homes," says Faris. "In small villages. And sometimes in book clubs." And then I realized, having covered politics for many years: Congress, too. "It's not adolescence that's the problem," insists Faris. "It's the giant box of strangers."

As adults, we spend a lot of time in boxes of strangers. "I have always referred to life as 'perpetual high school,' " Paul Feig wrote me in our first e-mail exchange, later adding, when we spoke, that his wife's first order when she landed her Hollywood dream job was to go fire her predecessor. Brown tells me she frequently hears similar things from men in finance--as a reward for outstanding quarterly earnings, they get to pick their new office, which means displacing someone else. (The corresponding shame led one to consider quitting: "I didn't sign up to terrorize people," he tells her in her latest book, Daring Greatly.) Today, we also live in an age when our reputation is at the mercy of people we barely know, just as it was back in high school, for the simple reason that we lead much more public, interconnected lives. The prospect of sudden humiliation once again trails us, now in the form of unflattering photographs of ourselves or unwanted gossip, virally reproduced. The whole world has become a box of interacting strangers.

Maybe, perversely, we should be grateful that high school prepares us for this life. The isolation, the shame, the aggression from those years--all of it readies us to cope. But one also has to wonder whether high school is to blame; whether the worst of adult America looks like high school because it's populated by people who went to high school in America. We're recapitulating the ugly folkways of this institution, and reacting with the same reflexes, because that's where we were trapped, and shaped, and misshaped, during some of our most vulnerable years.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at January 30, 2013 3:53 AM
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