I can’t count the number of times over the past few months that someone has come up to me and asked, “How are you?”—only to then smile self-consciously and try to withdraw the question. This question, like the brief, upbeat answer it reflexively provokes, seems to fall short of the moment.
It reminds me of a stretch after my mother died when seemingly everyone I ran into eventually asked, “Where are you really at?” They wanted the truth, but How are you? was too easy to dodge, too light. Instead, this version of the question, especially with a pause—Adam, where are you really … at?—asked after something deeper and more difficult.
That grammatically unsound at did a lot of work. But I didn’t. I dodged that deeper question and often still do. Even now, if you ask me how I’m doing—especially if I’m not doing so well—I’m not likely to tell you. If I can, I’ll usually respond with “How are you?” and instead seek a light exchange—a quick, shared laugh.
Yet even while I avoided people’s sincere attempts to move past niceties and reach the more difficult substance beneath, I continued to seek out books and movies that hurt. I curled up close with Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. I seemed to believe that terrible, sad stories were the true ones, and that sunny endings were false. That any story worth buying into must be shot through with violence, cruelty, loss. Of course, the dark or terrible is not always true, and is almost never the whole truth. Even the frothiest rom-coms portray some reality, and peace can exist even in the midst of war—but that’s not what I’ve often felt while consuming these stories.
What to make of this strange inconsistency—that in regular conversation, I’m sometimes more comfortable dwelling on the light and happy surface, while in my reading and watching, I’ve been quick to dismiss anything that doesn’t tear off that gentle surface to reveal the jagged truths underneath?
In these contrary tendencies of mine, I see a reflection of our culture’s growing dissatisfaction with the question How are you? And I’m afraid that this dissatisfaction reveals something deeper: a crisis of trust—trust in each other, in the stories we’ve inherited, and even in our own instinctive desire to hope.
It doesn’t take an afternoon buried in Pew surveys to recognize the rising appeal of distrust. It’s seductive to think that conventional beliefs are almost always wrong and shallow. This is the juice of conspiracy theories—and also the drive behind philosophy, history, and any investigative journalism worth its name. Almost all efforts to know begin with distrusting what we think we know. We want to see the world as it is, and to do so, we have to peer beneath the world as it seems to be. We have to go beyond the light How are you, world? to the heavy Where, world, are you really at?
But a not-so-funny thing happens when we take this step toward the deeper, heavier truth—it can quickly assume a darker truth, too. Take US democracy, for example. You want to really understand it? Fine, some might say—forget what the anthem and textbooks tell you. Here’s the “real” truth: Our democracy isn’t actually set up so that we can govern ourselves, and the more that people tell you your vote matters, the more they’re quietly working to disempower you.
No one wants to be wrong, and it feels good to be able to see, or to think you can see, what so many don’t. It’s gratifying, even elevating, to think of oneself as something other than a bamboozled patriotic citizen, another cow in the herd. But it’s also sad, and isolating, to lose our sense of connection and community, perhaps even to lose our faith and hope, in the name of clearer vision.
Could it possibly be the case that what is true and what is good only rarely align?
To this question about truth and goodness, I have no tidy answer. But I can say, if asked, that this question, and this friction
—between knowledge on one hand and connection on the other—that’s where I’m really at.
Where, I wonder, are you?
Adam Davis is executive director of Oregon Humanities.
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