The Man in the Rain

Before my grandfather was Mike Quin he was a skinny, black-haired kid named Paul Ryan, out of work in the wet gray bottom of a depression, walking building to building and street to street with his collar up, asking for a job that was not there. He never forgot it. Years later, when he had become a writer, that boy turned into the single most important figure in his imagination. He called him the Man in the Rain — the unwanted one, the unseen one, the kid nobody had a use for — and he understood something about that figure that the comfortable never do.

He understood that the Man in the Rain is not only a person who is suffering. He is, in the words his own memorial volume used, someone whose very existence comes to pose a threat to the security and progress of everyone else. Not because he is wicked. Because despair has to go somewhere. A human being who has been told, in a thousand small ways, that he does not matter and never will, is a human being with nothing left to lose — and a society manufactures such people at its own peril.

My grandfather did not theorize about this from a desk. He went and looked. Night after night, in the worst of the thirties, he sat in the back of Los Angeles courtrooms and watched a parade of homeless kids hauled in off the freight yards and the highways, booked for the crime of having nowhere to be, and fed through the legal mill. He talked to the judges and the cops and to hundreds of those boys and girls. Then he and a young artist set the testimony in type on a little hand press and called it We Are Millions. That was the title. There were that many of them. There always are, when a country decides some of its young are surplus.

Read that again, because he could have written it this morning. We have never lacked for ways to measure the discarded — to study them, survey them, score them, sort them into case files. What we lack is the willingness to see them, to hand them a place and a purpose and the plain dignity of mattering to someone. Quin knew the difference. He spent his short life on the second thing. And he was, by every account, the least bitter man alive while he did it — a lover of life who, dying at forty-one, wrote that he meant to enjoy every last sweet moment of it. That is the spirit. Now let me bring his Man in the Rain into our own weather.

The freight yards are mostly gone, and the kid with his collar up is more likely to be alone in a bedroom with a glowing rectangle than out walking in the literal rain. But he is the same figure, and his weather is, if anything, worse — because the storm now comes from inside the device that was supposed to connect him to everyone.

We have built an economy that runs on two things: consumption and attention. It does not profit when you are content, connected, and out living your life. It profits when you are anxious, comparing, and scrolling — so it has become extraordinarily good at keeping you that way. And our young people, who grew up inside it, are paying the bill. The country’s own doctor has put numbers to the damage.

And underneath the loneliness sits the deeper wound, the one the researchers keep naming: a hunger for meaning and purpose that nothing on the screen can feed. A young man scrolls past a hundred curated lives an hour — the vacations, the bodies, the effortless success, the highlight reels edited to hide every ordinary struggle that would have told him he is normal. He measures his real, unedited insides against everyone else’s polished outsides, and of course he comes up short, because he is comparing a life to a performance of a life that does not actually exist. He ends the night more alone than he started, having been “connected” the entire time.

We gave a generation infinite connection and somehow left them starving for the one thing it cannot deliver: the sense that they matter to someone in the room.

Now we arrive at the hard part, the part my grandfather saw in those courtrooms. A young person with no purpose, no place, and no one is not only sad. He is combustible. History is blunt about this: upheavals are not, in the main, made by the comfortable. They are made by people who have nothing left to lose — and, more than that, by people who have no connection and no purpose, because a person will accept almost any hardship if it means something and belongs to someone, and will tolerate almost nothing that means nothing at all.

This is the most important thing I can say in this whole piece, so let me say it plainly: I am not asking you to fear our young people. I am asking you to recognize that we have failed them — and that their drift is our indictment, not their crime. A purposeless young man is dangerous the way an untended fire is dangerous: the danger is real, but the negligence is ours. And there is always someone waiting to hand the unmoored a purpose — a gang, a grift, a movement of grievance, a voice that says I see you, and I will tell you who to blame. If decent people will not offer the young a purpose worth having, indecent people will gladly supply one that isn’t.

And here is what should make us angriest of all: a great deal of this is being done to our kids, on purpose, for money. The loneliness is not a glitch in the attention economy; it is the business model. The comparison, the outrage, the endless scroll that leaves them hollow — that is the product working as designed, monetized by a handful of the richest enterprises in human history. We are letting a few people with insatiable appetites strip-mine the attention and the self-worth of a generation, and then we wonder aloud why the kids seem so lost. We are losing our youth because a few cannot stop feeding.

The answer is not complicated, which is exactly why it keeps getting overlooked in favor of things that are. We do not need to out-engineer the machine. We need to do the oldest human thing there is: see one another, and mean it.

I propose that we value every citizen — every single one — and build a country that actively helps each person find a purpose and live with the dignity of knowing they matter. Not as charity. As infrastructure. As the thing that holds the whole structure up. This is what our politicians should be championing, instead of the daily theater of outrage that is, not coincidentally, just the attention economy wearing a flag pin. A leader worth the name would wake up asking how to give the young of this country something to belong to and something to build.

And it starts smaller and closer than any policy. It starts with the question I keep coming back to, the one this whole publication is built on:

Ask a young person that — not “what do you do” or “what are your plans,” but what do you love, what lights you up — and watch what happens to their face. You will have done, in ten seconds, the precise opposite of what the machine does to them all day. You will have treated them as a person with an inside worth knowing. That is purpose’s first seed. Somebody has to plant it.

The people who profit from our loneliness are, in the end, in the wall business. Walls between the rich and the poor, the young and the old, your county and mine, your screen and the person three feet away from you. Walls are how you keep a people too divided and distracted to notice what is being taken. It is a good racket. It has only one weakness, and the weakness is almost embarrassingly simple: walls cannot survive a picnic.

You cannot hate, abstractly, the man whose kid you just watched chase a dog across a field while you both laughed. You cannot stay afraid of the stranger once you have asked her what she loves and listened to the answer. Connection is the one thing the wall-builders have no defense against, because it is free, it is human, and it cannot be monetized or forbidden. So let’s use it.

Here is my actual, literal suggestion, and I mean it: get in the car. Drive across this ridiculous, beautiful country — the deserts and the cornfields and the rusting little towns and the mountains that don’t care about your politics — and somewhere along the way, talk to a stranger. Ask them about their life. Ask about their kids, their work, the thing they’re proud of. You will learn more than any feed will ever teach you, and you will come home seeing the whole thing from a vantage the screen is engineered to deny you: that almost everyone, almost everywhere, is just a person trying to matter to someone, walking in the same rain.

My grandfather did exactly this. In his last years he learned to drive, and he ambled home across the country by the southern route just to see his native land. And when he knew he was dying, he spent his final months on a little orchard at Olema, planting flower seeds he knew he would never see bloom — “to be discovered,” the record says, “when he had gone” — and quietly setting aside his writing cabin for young writers he would never meet, who had something to say and needed a place to say it. A dying man, planting purpose for the young out of pure love of the living. That is the whole assignment, right there.

So let’s plant it. Let’s value every last one of our people, hand the young something worth building, and refuse to lose a single one of them to a few men’s endless hunger. Let them build their walls. We’ll spread a blanket on the grass, and we’ll fight like hell for every kid out in the rain — and then, work done, we’ll pour the lemonade, lean back, and watch the fireworks go up together.

Pointed in our chosen direction. For the living.