Month: June 2026

Back in 1990, I was a grading assistant for Paul Groth’s course in American vernacular architecture. As the junior member of the teaching team, I was sent downstairs to get fancy coffees for the rest of the team and myself. When I came back up the stairs, I had the cardboard cup tray on the palm of one hand, and distributed cups to friends with the other. Paul noticed that, and complimented me on my skill. I said that I’d spent a little time as a waiter. And Paul, who was gay and lived in San Francisco, took a beat, and then said, “In my community, waiters have to be gorgeous.”

We all know that every upscale restaurant in Los Angeles and New York employs a wait staff made up of aspiring performers who rely equally on talent and on physical beauty . You can still encounter a normal human at a neighborhood taco shack, but if you have to make a reservation, you’ll be waited on by a perfect specimen.

I was at an event recently at which one of the guests was a professional party organizer, employed to put on bridal showers and lawn gatherings for wealthy families. She told us of one such party in which she and her team were selecting “cater-waiters” from a portfolio provided by a modeling agency. They had requested both clothed and shirtless photos of all of the men they were browsing, quickly sorting into piles of acceptable and unacceptable based on the character of their abdominal muscles rather than food knowledge or service experience.

The family’s criteria for service staff had been explicit and simple, she said. No Uglies.

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“The hustle” has become a defining work mode of our time. Everything is done with an eye to how it moves you forward. And it has a lot in common with drowning, grasping in desperation at any passing branch, hoping it’ll keep you afloat a little longer. When stability and security aren’t available, you need to have your eyes in motion and grab whatever feed presents itself.

About the time I was working for Paul at Berkeley, the sociologist Hugh Klein published one of the most influential articles I’ve ever read — “Adolescence, Youth, and Young Adulthood: Rethinking Current Conceptualizations of Life Stage.” (Youth & Society, 21:4, June 1990) His argument was simple: that we conflate culture with nature, and so presume that stages of life like “children” and “teenagers” and “retirees” are biological facts. Age is certainly a biological fact, but the social roles that a five-year-old would be expected to fulfill have varied enormously across history and place.

Klein focused his research specifically on the stages of life that we’ve created to describe people between 14 and 25 or so. There weren’t really any teenagers until compulsory high school education created them; there weren’t really any young adults until college became such a ubiquitous experience that we had to call those people something. ¹ So in light of our current economy — in which pick-up work is often all that’s available, influencers are dense as dandelions, and Patreon and OnlyFans and Substack offer the chance to make a living one subscriber at a time—I’ll propose a stage of life between 25 and 35, specific to contemporary American life, that I’ll call the Hustlers.

I think that by the time you’re a few years out of college, you’ve started to realize a fact that’s both unspoken and irrefutable—that the boundary between prodigy and has-been is sudden, sharp, and unpredictable. That with no warning, and by someone else’s decision, you might find yourself on the wrong side of the fence. That you might find yourself left out of the cater-waiter portfolio, that the arc of your trajectory has apexed out. There’s an increased awareness that the clock is running and there’s a deadline.

You’d better hustle.

1. Endless intellectual nonsense has been generated because of the unwarranted generalizations of Neil Howe and William Strauss, who codified the idea of Gen X and Millennials and all that crap. Their work lives in the same general neighborhood as astrology. ↩︎

I was having my weekly coffee with a friend this morning, who’d recently finished reading my book & Sons. He had another commitment to get away to, but he asked if we could talk about the book next week. And he asked a question I’ve never been asked before: “How would you like to talk about it?”

Having been in lots of situations where a group of people were talking about what I’d written, I can tell you that the same handful of questions and comments come up over and over.

• How do you know so much about (plow truck driving, table tennis, being in a big band…)?
• I really liked it! (Usually followed by the recounting of one particular scene that stuck out to them.)
• I know someone like that, or we’re going through something similar right now…
• It would be better if (followed by some major restructuring that completely negates my work as a writer, and takes agency for themselves)
• There’s a typo on page 187.

So, if not just those, how WOULD I like to talk about it?

Well, the surrounding conversation was about letting go of imagined futures, about those richly imagined stories we’d once built about who we were bound to be. Stories in which we had become professional baseball players, or musicians, or college faculty members. When those mirages inevitably vanish, I think we don’t do enough work to acknowledge our grief. And what is grief, really, but coming to terms with a new future that doesn’t include the old one? We grieve our partners, because our own future doesn’t include them. We grieve our pets, because our own future doesn’t include them. And I think it makes sense to grieve our truncated dreams, whatever they were, when our own future doesn’t include them

That’s what my best writing does.

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I shared a story with my writing group a year or so ago, and they reiterated their core complaint with my work, which is that the characters don’t have enough bad things happen to them. They subscribe to the aphorism (of unclear origin) that the writer’s job is to get the protagonists up into a tree and then throw rocks at them.

I’m not interested in hostility as the basis for writing, and I’ve talked a lot about that in this space. But they followed that recommendation with the idea that this story felt to them like “wish fulfillment.”

Close, but no.

I think, in the work that feels closest and most successful, I’ve played out one of my lapsed selves, as realistically as I know how to do. That means knowing its disappointments and disillusionment as well as its successes and pleasures. I’ve been able to be a professional table tennis player, and to know how much of the rest of life I wasn’t able to taste because of the singular focus required to be that good. I’ve gotten to be a college faculty member, gotten to be tall and attractive, gotten to be a professional musician, and I’ve learned those lives well enough to NOT have them be merely rainbow-pony wish fulfillment.

I’ve done the same thing on behalf of others. I wrote a book in which my mother had some of the life she never got to have, and felt what it meant to have her success be both powerful and anonymous. I wrote a book in which our local road foreman got some of the respect and resources he’s deserved, while still acknowledging how brutal the work is.

Wanting those other lives so badly, on behalf of myself and others, is what made them worth writing about. It’s what’s lifted those stories beyond the realm of their instigating ideas, and made them fully inhabited. That’s not wish fulfillment. It’s a form of grief, allowing the lapsed dreams to be realized so fully that I can finally let them go.

“Writing to me is an advanced and slow form of reading. If you find a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” This statement, spoken by Toni Morrison in 1981, is the basis of my writing. No one else has written about the lives I’ve lost, so I guess I have to do it myself.