nathan’s Reviews > See Friendship > Status Update

The cliché is that everyone young is filled with fire and brio and not much sense, and I understand the risks of generalization, the nuances that exist from person to person, but by and large—in my experience, that is—I’ve found it to be true. Young people can be geniuses, but they’re often just very silly.

The majority of life experiences that might happen to us have yet to happen. We’re so bereft of real perspective, everything feels so immediate and consequential, when in reality the bulk of it will average out to nothing. Nothing at all.

He could be a symbol next to all the other symbols, a stand-in for something greater and deeper about the way life worked. It mattered how he’d seen himself, but it also mattered how other people had seen him, too, and what he’d meant to them. And maybe we could even fold in the theory about his suicide in order to spark a larger conversation about, I don’t know, suicide.

Life was about surviving, until you could make sense of it. Sometimes you didn’t even make sense of it. You just kept going until you were dead too.

“You know, work sucks. You do it or you don’t, until you die.”

But you know how people are at that age—they don’t want to believe that anything less than what they want is possible.”

“I don’t regret anything,” Olivia said, “and I don’t know if I can put this into words. It’s more like thinking about the decisions you made, and how they swung your life down whatever road. The small moments that end up deciding the larger moments.

It was just what you did—latch on to some unexamined dimension of your personal life and share it with everyone. We tell ourselves stories in order to live, Joan Didion had written, but the fact that she hadn’t meant it positively had been lost in translation, especially in an era with reputations to build and raises to earn.

the loss I’ve experienced is a different kind—not the absence of an entire person, but the diminishing of potential.

I tried to concentrate on mingling, cycling through the dialogue I’d repeated several times since arriving in town—my life was going like this, New York was going like that, I’d done such and such and was looking forward to doing such and such more, the tone of my voice pitching toward something I recognized as false cheer, as though I were auditioning to sing Christmas carols.