At that point in mid 20- 30s where half of my contemporaries - and not precisely the half I would have expected - have come to define themselves by the very most cliche rituals of family formation and middle management career progression.

I’m not part of that half, and intentionally guided my life to avoid so being, and so find myself part of the other half, whose public performativity consists in reveling in our self-loathing (quite possibly projected outwards onto The Enemy).

Honestly it seems like the even given an uncharitable reading of the virtues of the first path it might just generate a pleasant effect by the mechanism of crowding out the second for time, attention, centrality in self-narrative. Like, I took “childraising is a life-affirming, radically happiness-enhancing experience” and “childraising consumes you with a regular succession of stressful, time-demanding, but not particularly complex tasks” as necessarily in conflict but I’m starting to rethink that.

If the danger of following a bourgeois suburban life-path was that you might, at age 50, look back and realize that the past few decades lacked for transcendent purpose, meaning, satisfaction, or majesty, well, the alternative might not be living a life full of those things, but rather to live through those decades in full contemporary awareness of that lack.

Which would explain some things.