First I thought I'd link to my latest media appearance, on FOX's KOKH (intriguing call letters) in Oklahoma. They edited my on-air time down to a rebuttal of about 20 seconds in the midst of an otherwise happy-faced piece—which is what I basically suspected would happen. Still, at least I get to make a good point about the unreality of the SHAMland promise. You can play it on full-screen by clicking the tab that appears in the lower righthand corner of the vid screen a few seconds after the page loads.
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Social inadequacy of varying stripes seems to be the generational bugaboo, gaining steam with Jenny McCarthy's misguided crusade on behalf of her son's autism (and its supposed cause), then reaching critical mass a few years back with the publication of aut-savant Daniel Tammet's remarkable memoir, Born on a Blue Day. Alienation is the anthem of this new decade (whispered very softly and without eye contact). I've been doing a lot of reading about the fabric of latter-day society, and I come across the signature terms again and again: social anxiety, social awkwardness, social def
icit, panic disorder with agoraphobia, Asperger and so forth. Social malaise gives indications of being to this decade what fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome were, respectively, to the first decade of the new millennium and, before that, the 1990s. (I know people who claim to be beset by both CFS and fibromyalgia; they acquired each new syndrome as it came to the fore. I suspect that they will declare themselves agoraphobic before long.)
In some ways it's not surprising that the generation now coming of age would indeed experience such maladjustments. They were too often the products of divorce and/or significant family dysfunction; even if Mom and Dad stuck around and tried to make a go of it, the family was nuclear only in the sense that the household featured regular detonations of atomic intensity. In many cases these kids had computers for parents and turned to so-called social media for an ironic, disembodied form of friendship.
Etiology aside, this much is sure: The shrinks and gurus and life coaches will rake in the fees hand over fist, as will the drug companies that brew the various concoctions typically prescribed in such cases.
If I may be permitted to inject my (untutored, unresearched) 2 cents here, in hopes of perhaps settling the mind of just one person who sees himself/herself as a freak ...
We are all socially awkward.
We always have been, too. This is not a new phenomenon. Some of us have just learned to do a better job of faking it or overcompensating in the opposite direction, acting the gregarious fool.
I don't mean to trivialize the plight of the now-and-then person who is truly the odd man or woman out. My point is simply that while the person with social deficit may look and seem more alone or detached than the rest of us, he or she doesn't necessarily feel more alone than the rest of us do. I'm not sure how such things could be measured on a comparative scale with any objectivity/accuracy, but I have confidence in the observation nevertheless.
It's been said many times before, but you can be at a party surrounded by 50 drunken, laughing revelers and feel every bit as alone as the Death Row inmate confined to solitary. Certainly this is true of one's facility as a sexual being. A guy can empty himself into an ever-changing cast of obliging lovelies and end up feeling...well, empty. If you're a young woman, you can end the weekend full of the semen of three different men and...still feel empty.
For those of us who are not clinical cases—which, I'm convinced, is almost all of us—the answer to social awkwardness is to find two or three people who appreciate you for who you truly are. Ideally one of those three should be a mate, and the other two good friends. One good friend may suffice.
The rest of it, as Shakespeare tells us, is sound and fury signifying nothing.
In the summer of 2010, NBC tried to tap into Secret-mania and the rest of woo-hoo-world by trotting out its new reality series, Breakthrough with Tony Robbins. But NBC was late to the party, catching the wave after it had already broken on-shore and begun to ebb. By summer 2010, SHAMland had taken its share of shots. By summer 2010, major networks, like, oh, ABC, were already running hour-long shows like, oh, a certain self-help critic's Prime Time Mind Games segment on James Ray's sweat lodge debacle (which ABC plans to rerun, by the way. Check your listings). Tony failed to, er, attract a sufficiently large audience, and the series was unceremoniously canceled after just two shows.
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