This past month, I’ve frequently found myself staring into any reflective surface I can find, desperately seeking to envision an older version of myself. I mentally paste my face over my mother and professors, test out smart casual attire and discuss the weather with increasing fervor. Yet nothing seems to stick. All I’m left with is a growing collection of silky button-up tops and the nebulous fear of the monotony awaiting me. In my attempts to find adulthood, I’ve not become mature, but horrifically boring.
As much as I would like to believe that the anxious business casual lifestyle emerging among my friends and me is a new phenomenon brought on by the inventors of LinkedIn, I have reason to believe that this isn’t anything new. That reason just so happens to be Britpop band Pulp’s 1994 single, “Do You Remember the First Time?,” a song about convincing a woman to cheat on her boring, stable boyfriend, but more importantly, about the battle to grasp onto youthful frivolity when adult corporate pressure begins to swallow up one’s world. I’ve listened to it 24 times this week — and do not plan on stopping.
Upon first listen, “Do You Remember the First Time?” is an invigorating, slow-burn pop-rock track that ever so carefully seems to take the listener from the nervous outskirts of the dance floor to the ecstatic center. The song shimmers with ambient synthesizers and an addictively cheerful guitar riff, only to be haunted by the repeated line, “you want to go home.” This line seems to suggest that lead singer Jarvis Cocker’s subject has chosen an early night in with her suffocatingly stable lover rather than returning to a lost, messy romance.
I find this repetition particularly moving, because it begs the question: What is home? Is it to be found in the cold, modern spaces we mould ourselves into for the sake of a prosperous future, or the chaos and nostalgia of our youthful experiments in maturity? Maybe home is just as unfathomable as the image of yourself any older than you are now.
Whatever the case, there is an eerie sense of placelessness in being just old enough to start figuring out what forever should look like while still learning how to become a functioning human being in the present. One can insist that they have grown, but what does this concretely mean beyond a desire to retire your spontaneity for the sake of potential financial and emotional security?
Whatever the case, there is an eerie sense of placelessness in being just old enough to start figuring out what forever should look like while still learning how to become a functioning human being in the present. One can insist that they have grown, but what does this concretely mean beyond a desire to retire your spontaneity for the sake of potential financial and emotional security? The chorus of “Do You Remember the First Time?” helps us ponder this very question:
Do you remember the first time?
I can’t remember a worse time
Oh, but you know that we’ve changed so much since then
Oh yeah, we’ve grown
This is where Freud comes into the picture. In “Civilization and its Discontents,” he writes that “humanity is wont to reduce its demands for happiness” when faced with the pressures of its external environment. Against a backdrop of the economic discontent experienced by the vast majority of the world, we sideline joy to hone in on our survival.
With lowered expectations, we begin to consider ourselves happy if we have evaded immediate dissatisfaction or trouble. We learn to conflate desperate grasps at security with pleasure, allowing the words “consulting” and “networking” to guide us towards salvation. Just as the love interest in “Do You Remember the First Time?” escapes economic precarity via an uninteresting, unpleasurable man, we seek out not what will thrill us, but what will allow us to persist under capitalism. Bleak!
That being said, I refuse to believe that our lowered psychic standards for joy are set in stone. In his 1940 essay “On the Concept of History,” philosopher Walter Benjamin suggests that every second in time is a gate through which one can choose to walk, reigniting something revolutionary from a repressed past.
In the same way that Cocker can look upon the growing boredom of the present while pondering the perils and the delights of the past, so can we begin to deconstruct what is so seductive about a job in finance while also growing out of the objectively bad decisions of our past. Rather than insisting upon the linear progression of a life into dullness, we can, as Benjamin suggests, “explode the continuum of history.” It is possible to make space for joy amid a state of financial, geopolitical and social peril which attempts to steamroll through the radical present.
I suppose all I want to leave you with is the practical thought that there is time in the ever-quickening present moment to learn how to exist with oneself, with all of the dreams and poor choices of the past and all of the cloudiness of the future. My final, and almost certainly more useful suggestion, is to listen to Pulp’s “Do You Remember the First Time?” 24 times in a week and see what sorts of revelations arise. At the very least, you will enjoy yourself, and that’s what really matters in the end.
Chloe Mossey PO ’29 loves tender, warmly lit movies about chefs, loud, angry music about Ronald Reagan and the tattoo of a clown on her stomach. Whatever that means.