The In-Between Things

On college, proximity, and what only becomes visible twenty years later

At some point during my 20th college reunion last weekend, our class survey results were revealed.

They were not presented as a scientific study or a success showcase, but as a kind of class portrait: broad, imperfect, voices-first. Which made it more interesting.

The slides began with the roundup you’d expect. Percentage of classmates with jobs in healthcare, law, tech, finance. Median household income north of $400,000. The Harvard class of 2006 had performed.

Then the survey turned a corner. Only 23% of my classmates were doing what they had imagined in 2006. Again and again came the strange backward logic of adult life: decisions that had made little sense while people were living forward began to cohere in retrospect. Chance encounters. Doors that opened sideways. Paths no one could have planned.

Then this: “It happened to me more than I drove it happening.”

At twenty-two, I would have thought that sounded like surrender. At forty-two, it sounds true.

A slide on health and loss quieted the room. Cardiac arrests. Parents gone. Children arriving after grief. The kinds of turns no life-plan contains.

And at the end: what matters most now. Family at 70%. Career at 1%.

The people who had spent four years inside one of the most achievement-oriented institutions in the world had spent twenty more discovering that achievement was not the point. Or not the point in the way we had imagined.

A parenting slide produced laughter that was also completely sincere. “I didn’t realize my cold stone heart could expand this big.”

Another answer was less lyrical: It’s SO MUCH WORK!

And then the line that could have been the reunion’s hidden motto: “No amount of wealth or education can insulate you from the emotional messiness of it.”

I sat in that room thinking this was the curriculum no one could have assigned.

—

After the survey, I walked around campus.

My memory had not preserved an entire map but it kept fragments. Long walks back to my dorm before smartphones existed to fill the silences. Singing with my a cappella group, taking rehearsals almost comically seriously. Century old houses full of twenty-year-olds trying to figure it all out.

I was at Harvard at the precise dawn of social media. Zuckerberg was a classmate, building that thing in the same buildings, though none of us could yet see how completely it would change the texture of being young. But we were still, mercifully, pre-smartphone. There was no glowing rectangle to rescue us from every awkward pause, no infinite scroll to fill the space between dinner and rehearsal, between loneliness and the possibility of company.

Our days still had empty rooms in it.

What strikes me now is how much of my college life was permitted to be boring. Genuinely, unproductively, wanderingly boring. The boring hours were not empty. They were where memory gathered.

—

You remember rooms. Yet the outside world sees a brand.

Elite education feels as if it may be entering its own brand age.

I keep thinking about what happened to the Swiss watch industry in the 1970s. Quartz made accurate timekeeping cheap. What generations of watchmakers had spent centuries perfecting could suddenly be replicated for almost nothing. The mechanical watch survived not by outperforming quartz, but by becoming something else: heritage, taste, status, brand. It moved from instrument to signal.

Elite education is entering a version of that transition. Knowledge, or the credible appearance of it, is becoming cheaper everywhere. A machine can summarize the book, polish the sentence, generate the argument, imitate the form, etc. We are all able to create the artifact of thought without the full human encounter with difficulty.

The brand name remains. It may even grow more valuable as the thing it once promised becomes easier to imitate.

But the name was never the whole thing. What mattered most, I can see now, was proximity.

I write this with some caution, because I was always susceptible to the visible parts of institutions: the gates, the emblems, the old names and dress codes, the suggestion that belonging somewhere might settle something about who I was.

Several years ago, as I was building my AI company, I got to spend time with the brilliant Tyler Cowen. Over a meal, I asked him what the strongest argument for college was now given AI, the credential economy, the cost, the institutional suspicion, etc.

He answered without hesitation. “Charisma and network.”

I pushed back. How does one actually acquire those things in College?

“By being around people who have them,” he said. “By increasing your surface area to those who already demonstrate them.”

I sat with that for a bit. It was hard to refute as it described what had actually happened to me. Not the curriculum, but the proximity.

Charisma, in this sense, is learned by proximity: watching how people enter rooms, ask questions, recover from embarrassment, carry ambition without collapsing under it. And a network is not a list. It is what remains when proximity has lasted long enough to leave a mark.

For four years, we were placed near one another before we knew what proximity was worth. Near great books and teachers, yes, but also near talent, insecurity, discipline, wit, awkwardness, longing, risk. We were surrounded by people who made us want to become sharper, freer, funnier, more serious, more ourselves. And most of it happened in the in-between hours - those unscheduled, unmonetized, wandering hours.

The survey bore this out. People wrote about how hard it had become to keep up with friends who once felt like family. How much geography and children had dictated their schedule. They expected adulthood to be more active with tennis, book clubs, potluck suppers only to discover that life had become work, childcare, and chores.

This is one of the tricks adulthood plays. It makes the things that once happened naturally gradually require constant effort to sustain. In college, friendship was built into the architecture. You ran into people because they were there. You did not need to plan intimacy. You only needed to leave your room.

That may be why reunion felt less like a return to youth than a brief restoration of conditions. For a weekend, we were near again.

—

The useful thing about a reunion is that it does not cooperate with vanity for very long.

Someone I remembered as untouchably confident now spoke quietly about his children. Someone I barely knew greeted me like I mattered. Someone I had envied had become genuinely kind.

Several people had read this newsletter and found resonance in the essays. That moved me more than I expected. The validation felt nice, of course, but that wasn’t it. What moved me was the sense that the proximity had not ended.

My network was not a list. It was a living thing, still carrying some of the original charge.

Then I walked past an old library and remembered it had never been impressed by me.

Nostalgia has a way of editing the past into an accusation against the present. It says things were purer then, truer then, I was more myself then. This is almost never accurate.

The more honest thing is this: you remember that your life was not always this life. That somewhere in the adult mind there are small rooms where earlier selves are still sitting, not waiting for anything in particular. The boy at St. Albans trying to understand why certain books made the world larger. The Harvard sophmore trying to sound smarter than he was. The late-20’s actor, driving home late, wanting to be known and fearing he was ordinary. The husband. The father. The sober man.

By the end of the weekend, I had stopped asking the campus to remember me. This made it easier to love. The buildings were doing what old buildings do, which is outlast our claims on them. Harvard was neither as holy as affection wants it to be nor as fraudulent as resentment needs it to be. It was a place. Powerful, compromised, beautiful.

The most important things a place gives you may be invisible at the time. They may stay hidden for twenty years. Then you return, expecting the buildings to give back the past, and find instead the people. Older now. Kinder, maybe. More tired. More themselves. Carrying children, losses, marriages, recoveries, disappointments, private revisions. Doing work they did not imagine. Loving lives they did not plan.

The gift was being placed, for a little while, close enough to other lives that some of them became part of mine.