[...] Of course in a way it was all pretty academic. The Bush years were winding down disgracefully, the Iraq war was lost, the Middle East was lost, the environment was lost: YOU DO NOT SUBJECT YOUR COUNTRY TO SIX YEARS OF MISRULE BY FANATICAL INCOMPETENTS AND EMERGE SMELLING LIKE ROSES. But what can you do? The trash was still getting picked up on Mondays, water came out of my faucets, hot and cold, and the subway trains ran through the night. In the mornings sometimes I saw pretty girls on those trains reading the New Yorker and opposing—too late— the war in Iraq.

There were so many things I’d once wanted to do! The trouble is that when you’re young you don’t know enough; you are constantly being lied to, in a hundred ways, so your ideas of what the world is like are jumbled; when you imagine the life you want for yourself, you imagine things that don’t exist. If I could have gone back and explained to my younger self what the real options were, what the real consequences for certain decisions were going to be, my younger self would have known what to choose. But at the time I didn’t know; and now, when I knew, my mind was too filled up with useless auxiliary information, and beholden to special interests, and I was confused.