Our time feels deeply stuck, deeply repetitive. I wish to find a way through it.
Words have always shaped cultural renewal. But our words feel worn out, tired.
On the left: inclusiveness, hope, change, diversity—words that have become automatic, empty of meaning. On the right: freedom, patriotism, fake news —no less rote, no less tired. Each side marshals its words in opposition to the other.
These words no longer invite thought. They sort.
I don’t have an answer, only a suspicion: if we are to get unstuck, we may need to listen differently, speak differently. This means aspiring to different words. Not just in our political thoughts and conversations, but in our daily lives.
Today I want to reflect on an old word that might still have something to offer: rejuvenation. Different than ‘renewal’, rejuvenation is the capacity to remain youthful as we mature.
It is, I believe, at the heart of the American Experiment. We should not risk its loss.
The American Experiment
The American Experiment has never unfolded in a single rhythm—it has always been a negotiation of multiple tempos.
The tempo of governance moves slowly, deliberately by design.
Meanwhile, the economy accelerates, channeling ambition into innovation while remaking or eliminating whole industries. ‘Creative destruction’.
Both tempos are vital. Acceleration without deliberation burns us out; deliberation without acceleration halts time.
Creative destruction without rejuvenation is disastrous.
Jefferson knew the Constitution must move with the times. He compared it to a boy’s coat: ‘We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy…’
The coat must be regularly refitted. The tempos must be continuously recalibrated.
Recalibration
Recalibration requires reckoning with loss — the loss of industries, the loss of livelihoods, the loss of life’s familiar rhythms.
These losses set our relentless sorting in motion. Wealth flowed to the coasts, leaving the middle to catch up or drift in a slowing time.
We have not reckoned this sorting well. Resentment thickens, scapegoats multiply, the weight of grievance has settled into place.
And now, the republic itself stands as our ultimate scapegoat.
We were told this would happen.
Jefferson wanted us to refit the coat. Reagan wanted to tear it up. ‘Government is the problem.’ We’ve been navigating his turbulent waters for going on three generations.
Do we still know how to move together, to refit the coat? The Constitution hasn’t been meaningfully amended since 1971. Certainly, we haven’t achieved the more perfect Union.
Are we done?
No. We are stuck in time. We lack the capacity for rejuvenation.
Authoritarian Speed
Elections recycle the same choices. Nothing new. We are trapped in an Eternal Recurrence that we refuse to break.
A time that cannot rejuvenate breeds resentment. When renewal feels impossible, nihilistic destruction becomes the easy outlet for frustration.
Chainsaws become political symbols, authoritarian speed looks attractive, executive orders move faster than thoughtful policy.
Are some exhilarating in the speed while ignoring the resulting destruction?
We should never mistake pure speed for thoughtful rejuvenation.
The Art of Navigation
Rejuvenation is about learning to move through and across the dissonance of multiple tempos and rhythms.
Think of it as navigation.
Helmsmen do not force the wind; they adjust the sails. But in a storm, even the best navigator can lose their bearings.
There is no single trajectory through time, only the currents we must learn to move across and through. Not every current leads forward — some threaten to pull us under.
Disorientation is not automatically failure; it is necessary for rejuvenation.
The Unfinished ‘We’
If cultural and political rejuvenation is possible, we cannot wait for clarity from above.
There is no national We ready to receive the message — only fragments, rhythms, and truncated conversations.
The Greeks had at least two names for time: kairos and kronos. We live in a kairos — a rupture in the steady, measurable, and predictable flow of kronos — a disorientation that is as much a problem as an opportunity.
The question is not whether we can go back to an old coherence that never existed, but whether we can unstick our inertial time.
‘in Order to form’
The Preamble tells us that We the People and our Union are unfinished work. We are our own perpetual work in progress.
The phrase ‘in Order to form’ points us to a future that is yet to be defined — ambitious, yet exceedingly fragile in the present.
The We, the People, the Union can never be finished. They are constellations of motions and tempos, held together by the effort to move toward something more perfect but that can never be perfected.
Let’s repeat Jefferson: the man should not be forced to wear the boy’s coat. The Constitution is not an ‘ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched’.
It is a contract with ourselves about our future. Like all contracts, it is an ongoing orchestration of time, motion, and mutual intention.
‘in Order to form’ is an ambition, a demand that time itself be shaped. This requires rejuvenation. Have we lost that power? I wish to play some role in bringing it back.
Where do we find ourselves?
Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked this question (1844). It was a question meant to bring clarity, to locate a ‘we’ in relation to its time and place.
Today the question itself is disorienting. The ‘we’ is not settled, and neither is the ‘where.’
Rejuvenation will not and cannot be the same experience for all of us.
A university teacher’s work of renewal will differ from that of a politician, an immigration attorney, a pastor, a judge, or a parent. A politician speaks to a broader public than a teacher, a pastor tends a larger flock than a parent, yet each moves within the rhythms and pressures of their particular where’s and when’s and we’s.
The possibility of collective projects is shaped by these scales of influence. The relevant ‘we’ depends on the relevant ‘where’.
Neither are fixed. They must be navigated.
We all navigate multiple wheres and whens — some intimate, some expansive — each unfolding at its own tempo, each shaping what kind of ‘we’ and ‘me’ is possible.
Rejuvenation depends on recognizing the scope of our own reach and navigating from these we’s and where’s.
Emerson’s question, renewed for today, will not have a single, clear answer, not even for each one of us.
What feels urgent in one domain may barely register in another.
Revaluation of Values
What comes next will be assembled from the everyday — from an infinity of where’s and we’s.
Rejuvenation will not come from a political savior who offers us clarity.
Our values need to be revalued. They will come from the everyday — from the day to day living of our lives in their myriad tempos and the values we deploy.
This will require navigating our infinity of Eternally Recurring nows ‘once more and countless times more’.
The infinity of our immediate locals accumulates into the global. The long term will emerge from our infinite short-terms, lived as rejuvenation.
But How?
If rejuvenation is possible, it will begin in the unnoticed places where familiar words, automated habits, and trusted categories quietly hold us in place.
For the majority of us, rejuvenation will happen below the turbulent threshold of politics, in the day-to-day rhythms of thought, speech, and actions where a culture is made.
Do certain words trigger immediate certainty in you — so much so that you no longer stop to consider what they have come to mean?
Do you ever find yourself preemptively dismissing an idea, not because you’ve thought it through, but because you already know which camp it belongs to?
Are there conversations you avoid, not because they are unworthy, but because you already know how they will go?
Do the circles you move in reinforce your convictions, or do they surprise you?
This isn’t about self-improvement. It’s about movement. About lifting the weight of our own expectations and certainties. About finding ways to notice where words have become automatic, where thought has settled into well-worn grooves.
Rejuvenation is about navigating a turbulent sea, not driving on familiar roads.
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Further Reading
Robert Pogue Harrison, Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age. University of Chicago Press, 2016. ‘Rejuvenation gives the past a future to grow into and gives the new a foundational staying power’. (117)
Thomas Jefferson, ‘Letter to Samuel Kercheval, July 1816’.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘On Experience’ and ‘Self-Reliance’.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Science: ‘341. The Greatest Weight’. ‘Do you want this once more, and a thousand times more?’
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