The Awkward Stage

As part of his transition strategy, President Barack Obama introduced a web feature meant to symbolize his commitment to expanding the national conversation through the magic of Hope and Change. The feature, a component of the change.gov transition site called the “Citizen’s Briefing Book,” ultimately revealed that the “expertise and insight” that a large component of his web audience wished to share with the incoming president in this moment of crisis related to the need to legalize marijuana.

Perhaps Obama overestimated the American public’s maturity. Over the past week, I’ve spent many potentially productive hours entranced by a website by the name “F*** My Life,” which may be found—for those willing to risk time better spent—at www.fmylife.com.

Browsing through the site, one gets the impression that fmylife is much more emblematic of the national mood than whatever’s on offer at change.gov. The contents provide a disheartening image of the American psyche as a mental landscape whose anxiety cannot be assuaged by visions of hope and change but rather dwells upon the consequences of economic “structural adjustment.”

Fmylife works by presenting an array of reader-submitted faux pas, each concluding with the initialism-exclamation “FML”, and allowing readers to vote on who “deserved” it and whose life is really “f***ed.”

The top anecdotes tend to follow a certain pattern: a brief recount of one of life’s little disappointments, followed by a twist of the knife that makes it just that much worse. For instance, one classic submission reads, “Today, my girlfriend dumped me proclaiming she wanted someone more like her ‘Edward’. I asked her who Edward was. She held up a copy of her ‘Twilight’ book. She was talking about a fictional vampire. FML.”

Unfortunately, few of the stories are so unambiguously amusing. A distressing number recount long periods of time in which the only person to contact the poster was his or her mother, clumsily discovered affairs, and the experience of getting laid off—often after having driven through a snowstorm to reach work on time. With consumer confidence plummeting after a month in which the U.S. lost nearly 600,000 jobs, this is a site for the recession.

The site’s essence, then, lies in evoking the mindset of adolescence. Sometimes this is literal—a primary cause of angst on FML seems to be whether the writer’s “friends” are conspiring against him. More generally, though, adolescence tends to represent the stage in life in which one’s life is “f***ed” by social forces beyond one’s control, often represented by parents, teachers, or peer pressure.

This feeling of adolescent helplessness is the analog for our current economic condition. As a teenager, one’s fundamental capabilities seem undefined and one’s independence constantly under threat. As we look ahead nationally to a period of economic reorganization—a slump to “grow out of”—America embodies the awkward maladjustment of the pimply ninth grader, but on a macroeconomic level.

Reading about breakups via text message and unfortunate ways to find out that your mom is dating again may just be the perfect complement to a material world in which no employment relationship is safe, and your company may be flirting with setting up shop in China.

The economist Joseph Schumpeter described economic growth under capitalism as a process of “creative destruction,” under which the old productive edifices are torn down in order to erect newer and more efficient modes of production. Few these days have the optimism to glimpse this creativity, however, within the current milieu. “We are all Keynesians now,” and the system is a heedless and uncontrollable beast, controlled by “animal spirits.” Logic and predictability have disappeared.

So why not find solace in those little moments where failure comes in the form of a fictional vampire?



Max J. Kornblith ’10, a Crimson editorial writer, is a social studies concentrator in Cabot House.