The Great Millennial Predicament
Echo and Narcissus by John William Waterhouse, 1903
Shortly after I was certified to instruct yoga, I began teaching at a community organization in the Tenderloin. The Tenderloin is a vibrant neighborhood in the heart of San Francisco known for its delis, drug market, and lively inhabitants—many of whom are down on their luck.
I figured there were already enough gringo yoga instructors offering classes in the Marina, running the sexy spandex Instagram hustle. Instead, I was drawn to teach free sessions to my comrades in addiction, in my old battleground.
I taught weekly classes, as they shifted from in-person to Zoom, through the apocalyptic days of Northern California fire season and the pandemic. Then, my life got busy, filled with projects, clients, writing, pulled groin muscles—all the activities that fill up a “solopreneur’s” calendar. I felt I needed to reclaim some space in my schedule, so I said goodbye to my students and put the volunteering gig on pause.
When I updated one of my spiritual teachers, he said, “Hold up, Al. You’re forgoing your weekly act of seva to make more time for all your … ‘stuff’?” (In the yogic tradition, seva is selfless service, like the name of Ram Dass’s non-profit the Seva Foundation, which treats child blindness.)
“Guess so,” I replied in shame.
He paused. Then he, like a good guru, said, “I am not a fan of this decision. Thus, my challenge for you over the next year is to always leave bathrooms—even public ones—cleaner than you found them.”
I spent the next few months brushing up against my self-preservation instinct to stay clean, becoming intimate with my OCD and neurotic pathologies. Each time I’d walk into a bathroom, my shoes creaking in the stickiness of a piss-covered floor, a part of me would metaphorically dart for the door, desperate to get the hell out of there. Grabbing fistfuls of toilet paper made from the cheapest material imaginable, I’d look for pools of water—or snot?—to quickly wipe down before I left. I had to remind myself, over and over, why I was doing this.
***
So, why would you ever obligate yourself to clean public bathrooms? Well, it’s a great way to avoid getting a Messiah complex.
Have you ever seen HBO’s series Girls?
While high on opium, Hannah Horvath—an aspiring and broke writer played by Lena Dunham—confesses to her friends:
“I think I might be the voice of my generation. Or, at least, a voice of a generation.”
The layup critique of this line is that it reveals Dunham’s inflated sense of self-importance, neatly symbolizing all that is misguided within a naïve liberal mindset.
Yet its brilliance, the reason this scene emerges from the uncharted banks of my unconscious more than I’d care to admit, is because of its profound relatability. For just how eloquently it captures the pre-tragic millennial predicament, which is a titillating dance between self-doubt, cosmic insignificance, and … narcissism.
In our secular modern world, there’s nothing obvious to worship, so we end up worshipping ourselves. This is more likely to happen for those of us who ditched whatever religion we were born into, first by lamenting its futility, then by distancing ourselves from any of its associated systemic havoc. There’s only one God universally accepted in all social circles across the West—and that is the deity known as the Individual. Like Hannah Horvath’s efforts to become the voice of her generation, or my attempts to become the Tiger Woods of Substack (pre-tragic, obviously).
We all have dreams. Wild ambition, for its own sake, is often a type of trauma response. Yet there’s nothing objectively wrong with nurturing major personal ambitions and goals. We need big thinkers, especially today.
But our culture places individual salvation above community liberation. This can produce a confusing, messy interpretation of what we are meant to do with our lives. In its worst form, we become divorced from a grander perspective, convinced we are the Messiah come anew. We believe our self-actualization journeys should be prioritized above all else—desperately typing the Next Great American Novel in the basement as the rest of the house burns.
This tension is precisely why I’m obsessed with the line, “I think I might be the voice of my generation.” It contains the obsessive scents of individualism, along with the soul-crushing confusion of not knowing one’s place in the world. It’s a type of Messianic thinking around meaning and purpose I know well, because it contributed to my downfall.
***
I must confess: there have been many times in my past when I, like Hannah Horvath, felt I was the voice of my generation. I told myself, this is why you pour over cultural philosophies like postmodernism and metamodernism—so you can make sense of the vibes of our times, and then report back to eagerly awaiting ears.
Hell, my “work” wasn’t even writing or philosophizing then. But I clung to this falsely inflated sense of self-importance—the man who must make sense of things. It became yet another rationalization to bio-hack my way into other dimensions with narcotic drugs. Because, research!
Perhaps the most potent lesson I’ve ever learned is that I am not dancing at the center of the universe. Nor am I the voice of my generation. Building an online readership from scratch teaches you early on and often that the universe is mostly indifferent to your work.
Before one shakes their Messiah syndrome, their perspective is deluded. It might feel empowering, but self-inflation actually makes it difficult to find a day job, let alone one at the magical intersection of ikigai—where your passion, talents, skills you can actually get paid for, and what the world needs, meet.
When Socrates was put on trial for “polluting” the minds of Athens’ youth, while facing certain death, he defiantly declared that “an unexamined life is not worth living.” What he meant is that a life of self-deception is not worth living. And damn, Messiahs sure are good at gaslighting themselves. Trust me, I am a triple black belt in the jiujitsu of inner bullshit. Like the time I told myself I’d discovered the Philosopher’s Stone—a precise cocktail of cocaine, OxyContin, Adderall, and Xanax—and that I “deserved” it because I was giving a massive presentation in Dallas.
If you do not find the strength it takes to be soft and listen to your heart, your mind will run the show. And then, with awareness trapped above the neck, if you do not think tremendously hard about what you value, you will default to the Machine’s values—wealth, status, lip injections, The New York Times, likes and replies, light beer and football. Entire lives are built around these gods.
Archetypically, there’s only one way to distance yourself from these idols, should one even desire to do so. And that’s by facing existential tragedies like death, disease, addiction, depression, or betrayal.
This, though, is good news. Because existential reckoning is precisely where so many of us find ourselves today, fawning upon the post-Covid liminal stage, uncertain of where to go next.
I will not make a Hannah Horvath-esque mistake and claim I know where to head. But I do know how I have evolved from an extremely narcissistic person to a … slightly less narcissistic person.
That is by serving the interests of others—and not just my own.
A part of me feels bashful, even preachy for mentioning “being of service” as a solution, likely because of the New Age spiritual bypassers who have attempted to co-opt the term service. The word, like so many others, is experiencing semantic creep, eroding its meaning and corroding its sacredness.
But service is one of those simple, yet deep cosmic truths. It challenges you to reach beyond the confines of the individual self to participate in larger communities, thereby embedding yourself into more complex webs of meaning and identity.
Say what you will about Alcoholics Anonymous, but one of its tenets beyond reproach is the notion that, in order to heal yourself and live a meaningful life, you must be of service to others. That we have to give it away to keep it.
Service like this starts small. First, you might make the coffee at a meeting. Or maybe, collect donations. Eventually, you begin paying attention to the newcomers who raise their hands at the start of the meeting. Then, you start approaching those tender impressionable babes after the meeting. Not to fix them, just to relate to them. Trading war stories, maybe sharing a cigarette and a laugh. The next thing you know, you are traveling to rehabs and prisons, giving motivational talks to a bunch of people just like you.
There’s a host of research that suggests service not only makes people feel more fulfilled and purposeful in their lives, but improves physical health and well-being. But this is not about taking vitamins. It is a more profound irony that bears repeating: we are more ourselves the less we think about ourselves.
The path of service can be the way out of a self-looping cycle because it is the path through the Self. An artist might contribute to the collective beauty of this world, or call out injustice with their words, but their salvation lies in the creative journey itself, which is a solitary one. A therapist might sit in front of traumatized clients, which itself is a form of support. But the real service to themselves and the world—the therapist’s true growth—comes from understanding the countertransference they feel. Contextualizing all the ways in which their clients trigger, infatuate, and annoy them—then using those as the seeds for their own personal transformation.
You have to start somewhere to escape a life of self-obsession and sabotage. In this way, serving others is never a purely selfless act. It’s more like a life hack towards inner peace. And unlike most life hacks a millennial such as Hannah Horvath would read on a BuzzFeed listicle, this one actually works. If you’re in search of better Gods, serving interests outside yourself is a good way to find them.
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