The Jena Set
Unsubscribing from the sameness
2023 was the year I unsubscribed from The New Yorker. This might not seem like anything momentous or worthy of an announcement, but The New Yorker has long held a near holy place in my family.
My dad once told me I would know I was grown-up when I understood the comics.
My parents, beatnik intellectuals of the Silent Generation, planned to paper our powder room with New Yorker covers they’d saved.
They could have done it too, as it was a very small bathroom, an actual converted closet. But home improvements or décor plans that required my dad usually petered out due to inaction.
I appeared in an ad that ran in The New Yorker, advertising expensive children’s clothes we were not allowed to take home. (I always loved the cheerful shaggy Americans depicted in the art and cartoons by Edward Koren.)
Sadly, I fear this is the only time I will be ‘in’ The New Yorker
I have always read The New Yorker with varying degrees of attention. I flipped through it at either of my parents' homes, or later read it with my own subscription. I canceled my subscription once before, overwhelmed with medical school during the Y2K era.
Part of the reason I unsubscribed in 2023 was also due to overwhelm - I need to have some limit to the content flooding my inbox, both real and virtual. I want to read novels, not reviews of novels. I don’t have the time to read through The New Yorker and then turn my attention to a new chapter of a book.
Another reason was money. I subscribe to several Substacks, the local newspaper, and a variety of podcasts. I am sorry media is collapsing around us, but the future cannot count on my contributions.
But probably the main reason I unsubscribed was because of simply how bored I feel with it all. The New Yorker, the NYT, the topics and new cultural products on offer - all in a carousel rotation of sameness. All of it seems promotional and forced. Where is innovation? How can a person think something new when all the input is the same?
In flipping through the last saved issues from 2023, hastily given to me by my mom to redress my New Yorker break, I came across an article that caught my attention by Nikhil Krishnan. Of course it did. It was entitled The Jena Set.
Jena is a university town in Germany where Karl Marx was educated, and, according to this article in the New Yorker and a book from 2022 by Andrea Wulf entitled Magnificent Rebels, it also briefly formed the center of German romanticism.
Romanticism is a movement in the arts and philosophy that values the creative power of the individual. In the broadest of senses we are all still living in the Romantic era. Our whole ethos is one of looking inward for authentic meaning. The romantics taught us - looking outside the self for a model to live by is futile; it can be found only within. What matters is the Self and self expression.
I have a lot of reservations about fully embracing the Romantic ethos. Does the world need more narcissism? (This is a rhetorical question). I am full of self-doubt and insecurity about my ideas…but still, I am here, thinking and wondering. Why not me?
Maybe the Romantics of the Jena Set can inspire me to take my intellectual and creative life more seriously.
But what most captured me about the article was the idea of a social scene established around ideas. The set in the Jena Set refers to the people.
Like many people after Covid I am looking for real life exchange of ideas. I think my days of louche and libertine living (cf. the romantics of Jena, Germany) are over. But I don’t want to give up on the possibility of the truly original. I even flirted with the idea of renaming this Substack The Jena Set to remind myself to keep sharing ideas and to find ways to bring my creativity into the real, non-internet based world. For 2024, I want to do what I can to join or create a community of thinkers and writers. For the moment, this is my key to freshness and the new.
At the very least, The Jena Set proves that The New Yorker still has the power to introduce me to something new, even charming. I look forward to catching up on the back issues - the next time I visit my mom.