Katie Roiphe, who seems to be making an impressive career out of writing thought-provoking essays and books about sex, has a nice piece in the NYT that asks whether we aren't too obsessed with health and goal-oriented activity in comparison to the brilliant slackers of the past.
There does seem to be an almost unbearable focus on "professionalism" on the job today. In addition to Roiphe's piece, the NYT regularly runs features about how, if your Facebook account references or--gasp!--shows pictures of yourself enjoying your alcohol, you can pretty much say sayonara to any chance of getting that job you were hoping for--even though your recruiter has probably detagged countless similar pictures of him-/herself.
I wonder if there isn't something about the immediacy of digital media that makes us more delicate and more shocked by evidence of behavior that people have always engaged in and always told stories about. It's one thing to hear "X had too much to drink at that office party" and another to see images of X passed out on a bathroom floor with someone giving a thumbs up above her head. One provokes a chuckle, and the other a much more visceral, judgmental reaction.
The kind of devil-may-care behavior Roiphe describes hasn't exactly vanished, I don't think--it sounds a lot like most people's idea of college. But nowadays we put a lid on it after those four years, or at least demand that adults publicly pretend to have put a lid on it in professional circumstances.
There is some evidence downright contradictory to Roiphe's argument. Even "back then," in the early '60s Roiphe eulogizes here, contemporaries were reporting a sense of falsehood or disingenuousness to their supposedly carefree sinning, a sense that even their craziness was strictly scheduled. Here's Walker Percy, from his National Book Award-winning 1961 novel The Moviegoer, talking about the "malaisian," his word for modern man:
[Christians] keep talking as if everyone were a great sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it . . . The highest moment of a malaisian's life can be that moment when he manages to sin like a proper human (Look at us, Binx--my vagabond friends as good as cried out to me--we're sinning! We're succeeding! We're human after all!).
