A Well Earned Distrust of Permanence
As I’ve grown older and experienced life, a strange transformation has occurred. With several marriages—entered into with nothing but a lifelong commitment in mind—and jobs galore, I’ve come to distrust the promises of loyalty and permanence from almost every corner. This is not to say I distrust people. I don’t trust the promises. Like DiNero in Michael Mann’s Heat, I’m practically thirty seconds from walking away from anything if the shadow of betrayal or drama or simply the violation of boundaries I’ve placed in my life based upon years of those two aspects approach.
Turns out I’m not alone in this.
Once upon a time, back when men smoked indoors without apology and station wagons were aspirational, there was a cultural consensus that the long game was the only game worth playing. You stuck with the job, you stayed married even when the sex shriveled into polite choreography, you invested in your neighborhood, your church, your bowling league, your porch. Permanence wasn’t simply respected; it was required. If you left the long game, you were a flaky traitor, the human equivalent of a car with a salvage title.
Now? Playing the long game in America gets you treated like a sucker, an earnest schmuck who bought stock in Blockbuster because you believed in “stability.” The very word permanence has become an insult, like calling someone a hoarder of outdated emotions.
People stop trusting in loyalty and permanence not because they hate them but because they’ve seen these old idols dragged behind the cultural truck long enough to recognize the rope burns. They’ve watched the long game die by committee, assisted by a tag team of corporations, hustlers, social media prophets, and a culture of attention-deficit ambition.
The corporate world helped ruin loyalty by making it unreciprocated. These places used to be fortresses where loyalty meant advancement; now loyalty means you’ve stayed long enough to justify cutting your benefits. They’ll throw a pizza party to thank you for your “dedication,” right before handing you a box for your desk.
People stop believing in permanence because permanence stopped believing in them.
Contrary to the sense that this is cynicism creeping into my worldview, I’d argue that this is realism based on the culmination of scar tissue. Recently, I threw out my back and was told by a doctor that the only reason the inflamed disc wasn’t herniated was because of the build up of scar tissue from an earlier injury. I think I’ve got some protective scars emotionally, as well.
