Mad Men and the Apocalypse

I have a zombie apocalypse game plan. It’s not well fleshed out, and I’ve never written it down, but it’s something I’ve thought about. It’s a millennial thing. We sit around, watch the Walking Dead, Zombieland, or one of the others, and then talk about what would happen if….?

And everyone, always, always thinks that they will live. Sure, we joke. I always say that the ugly people Hollywood that I live in would get even uglier. I say that the rich and powerful would go to their bunkers, and all of the remaining intelligentsia and professors would then barricade themselves into the Metro stations. They would present a chart, explaining exactly why all of us students and unpaid interns couldn’t come in.

But really, I think I’d live. Everyone does. The game is not fun if you don’t. If you don’t think you’d live, the apocalypse becomes what it is — horrible — instead of the epic self-discovery odyssey we wish it was. We’ve romanticized the apocalypse. As my friend Alexi says, “We realized what it’s all about; we, as millennials, feel so constrained by the rules of society, the constraints of modern life, and all of the expectations of our family, friends, and general peers weighing down on us. We’d like to overthrow all of that, but not in a realistic sense. We don’t want to deal with the actual hardships of an apocalypse. In our romanticization of the apocalypse, we somehow survive the initial apocalyptic event, we band together with good friends, and, somehow, each of us, in our own individual fantasies, meets the love of our life. It’s what we all secretly want; we want to be free from the constraints of the modern world, we want to do what we want to do, and we want to be ourselves.”

I’ve been watching Mad Men lately and I can’t help but think; the characters in Mad Men, they’re living in a world where people have done just that. The young generation in the 60s felt constrained by society. So instead they freed themselves and stopped doing what society expected of them. Women worked, people got divorced, they tried to abolish the traditional class, race, and gender structure society had already set up. In general, they just blew things up. Looking at the world from Don Draper or Roger Sterling’s point of view, the 60’s was a social apocalypse. They aren’t romanticizing it. They’re too busy living it. Whereas before people made do with the boxes they had been put in, now when they were not satisfied they voiced it. Instead of leading lives of quiet desperation, people were breaking boxes.

As millennials, we grew up with the aftermath of those broken boxes. We’re the first generation who, when we are unhappy, are not told to keep a stiff upper lip. Instead, we’re told to do what we want, to just be ourselves, to be successful, and be happy. Except, there are still pressures. All of the old structures from the 60s left their remains…you are still supposed to want to make a lot of money, have a family, give your kids an even better life than what you had. Except, now you are expected to do all that and be happy. Not just have a good job, but have a good job that you love. Not just have a spouse, but have a spouse that you love, respect as a person, can talk to, and have amazing sex with. You are expected to take the box, paint it your own colors, make it a little bit your own, and then be happy and satisfied when you step inside. And if you aren’t careful, happiness itself becomes one of the pressures you face. The idea of having to be happy starts to constrain you.

We romanticize the apocalypse, because the apocalypse is freedom from all of it. There’s no families, no jobs, nothing like that. But at the same time, things are legitimately awful. We’re the Walking Dead. We aren’t expected to be happy anymore, we’re expected to survive. You and your husband are suddenly working together to forage for food, instead of arguing over whether it was passive aggressive when he asked you to put away the groceries. Things are simple.

In that simple world, we get to rebuild things. We don’t have to even feel guilty about all the stuff we’re breaking and leaving behind. Last night’s episode of Mad Men was all about the decline of the American family. Peggy tries to create a campaign around a fast food joint by appealing to the great American family. But in the end, she goes with a campaign about how “here, there is always food, and everyone is family.” There isn’t a single traditional family or traditional marriage in the whole episode. The final scene shows three of the characters, all with broken families, all largely alone, sitting down and enjoying a fast food dinner together. And honestly? It’s really sad. But with an apocalypse, there is no decline. There is no sitting and having to watch someone go from a family man to eating alone 5 nights a week. Instead, the American family is just over. In a post apocalyptic world, the boxes explode and all of the parts are thrown away. It’s the difference between a fast quick death, and a slow painful one. And we all know which one we prefer.

When my own parents got divorced, it was partially because they were striving. Their marriage was not toxic, not abusive, or horrible. But it was not happy. And when they split up, it was because they refused to settle for the status quo. They desired something better. It’s the same thing that young people in the 60s were doing. When you break a box like that though, it’s not always clear what comes next. As Neil Gaiman said, “the price of getting what you want is getting what you once wanted.”

All of a sudden, in Mad Men, in America in the 60s, what you desired mattered. It really mattered, in a visual, out in the open way. We went from a society where if you desired another woman you’d cheat on your wife with her, to a society where if you desired another woman you left your wife for her. If you weren’t happy suddenly you didn’t need to get a stiff upper lip. You needed to figure out a way to get happy. You were not longer expected to constrain your desires. Now you were supposed to fulfill them.

Fulfilling desire is a funny thing though. As Don Draper says, “even though success is a reality, its effects are temporary. You get hungry even though you’ve just eaten”. He’s right; desire is nothing more than hunger and it will always reappear. Pursuing an ideal instead of the status quo leads to quite a bit of desire. But that desire is also what keeps us alive. It’s what makes us human. As Karen Marie Moning puts it in Shadow Fever, “Desire makes life happen. Makes it matter. Makes everything matter. Desire is life. Hunger to see the next sunrise or sunset, to try again. Hell would be wanting nothing.”

She’s right — if you don’t want in a physical, important, consuming way, there is something very wrong. Desire lights the fire in all of us, and without it, the candle goes out. But, in a post 60s world where you are supposed to achieve your desires, instead of curtailing them, where does that leave you? You end up feeling like a millennial. Pressured to be successful and happy, wanting something else to break your box for you. Desiring for your desires to be stripped away. Almost everything that we want is possible, a few clicks away. We want for nothing, at least not for long. Living in Karen Marie Moning’s hell, all we want is the end of the world.

But wanting the end of the world will not make it happen. And, as we all well know, if it did come, it would be horrible. And not only would it be horrible, we would, inevitably and inextricably, keep wanting things. Desire is infiintie. The characters on the Walking Dead fuck and fight and read and struggle for power. They desire. They live.

Because understanding that desire is infinite and that you will always be hungry is the best way to deal with your box. You will be unhappy, standing out in the cold, if you simply break it. But you’ll be unhappy and just plain hungry if you sit in it. So the only thing to do is to modify it, add a little here, a little there. Make it better, more you, but not perfect. Keep the parts that work and leave the parts that don’t. Being happy building is the only way to keep happiness from becoming a pressure in itself. As the millennial goddess Miley Cyrus would say, it’s the climb.