Gen X Is Career Limiting

On the distaste for selling out

In addition to powering through a bunch of Harlan Coben novels on planes, I recently read the new Chuck Klosterman book, The Nineties. Klosterman’s about a year younger than I am, so his experience of the decade was on a similar trajectory to mine, other than the part where he went into pop-culture journalism and I went to physics grad school. I generally enjoy his takes on things, so I was happy to get this and read it pretty quickly.

(I should maybe also note that he’s on the list of writers who are dangerous for me, in that for a week or two after I read his stuff, I have to watch my own writing really carefully lest it morph into second-rate imitation Klosterman. If you catch me jumping to weird provocations based on references to semi-obscure bands, just smack me in the head and tell me to stop.)

This is a less autobiographical book than a lot of his previous work, something he’s taken pains to point out in podcast interviews, shooting for a more high-level overview. I generally agree with the version of the decade that he presents here, though— there aren’t really any places where he says things about events in the 90’s that are starkly at odds with how I remember them unfolding at the time. Though, as he takes pains to note both in the book and in interviews, memory is highly fallible here, because when thinking about the past we tend to do a thing where we project our current views back, and imagine ourselves interpreting events then as we would interpret them now.

Reading this book during a book-promotion cycle of my own was an interesting experience, particularly the lengthy discussion of the concept of “selling out” as a 90’s preoccupation. He points out that the idea that trying to get rewarded for your professional accomplishments— or indeed, to regard what you’re doing as professional activity in the first place— is morally questionable is kind of a weird one. I might push back slightly on the idea that this is solely a 90’s thing— you definitely see it coming in the “I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career” speech from Say Anything in the late 80’s, and arguably in stuff dating to earlier decades like The Graduate— but I think he’s probably right that the mid-90s was a high-water mark for this kind of thinking. He particularly calls out the movie Reality Bites as an especially clear expression of this, and also a film that’s baffling to people from generations both before and after its core demographic.

The funny thing about reading this during my book-promo cycle was that it made me realize that I had internalized this anti-sellout attitude to a much greater degree than I realized. I didn’t particularly care for the movie at the time— my personal experience as a grad student at a government lab was at odds with the slacker stereotype for most of the decade, other than the “having no pocket money” piece. But I do have a pretty deep antipathy to self-promotion that probably reflects a little of the culture of those formative years.

To be clear, I don’t mind doing a lot of the core activities of self-promotion— book talks and podcast interviews and all the rest are good fun, and I rarely decline any requests. The thing that makes my skin crawl is chasing those promotional opportunities— I’m happy to accept any opportunities that come along, but just loathe the process of pitching stuff in a professional sort of way. It feels incredibly tacky to be beating the metaphorical bushes in search of interview invitations, let alone campaigning for honors, etc. I’m not even all that aggressive about using the public platforms I have to promote my own stuff— I tend to tweet links to posts here and on Forbes at most 2-3 times on the day they’re posted, and not beyond that. Given the deliberately ephemeral nature of most social media, that’s probably not remotely sufficient— on those occasions when I re-post links a day or two later, I’m often surprised that people seem to be seeing them for the first time— but it feels like too much to me.

Some of this is just a kind of laziness and satisfaction, of course— pitching things is work, and I don’t desperately need more of that, and I’m doing quite well already so feel vaguely guilty about explicitly competing with people who need those opportunities more than I do. But to a large extent it really is just an ingrained aesthetic preference, a feeling that self-promotion per se is crass and gross. This, it goes without saying, is a career-limiting kind of behavior.

So, while I’m not one for New Year’s Resolutions and that sort of thing generally, in a weird way, this has prompted me to take a more intentional look at what I’m doing, and try to be a little more proactive about seeking things that I think would be interesting opportunities. I don’t know how long this will last or how well it will work, but it’d probably be good to stop waiting for interesting opportunities to just drop into my lap.

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You can still expect a lot of this to come with ironic/ apologetic deflection, sort of like these postscripts where I sheepishly note the availability of these buttons:

And if you want to castigate me for even thinking about being more self-promotional than I am now, well, that’s very 1994 of you, and you can do it in the comments.