The Shared Skeleton
Updated: 15 hours ago
Last month my family gadded about Austin visiting museums, vintage shops, and even a cavern. Time dedicated to this idleness is essential in allowing my thoughts to coalesce. A mantra for me this year is — Consuming deserves friction.
It deserves confrontation, and being able to decide what you like or don’t like. Otherwise, it’s too easy to live in the bubble of a tiny screen where the content stays in a perfectly round patch.
Our first jaunt was to the Blanton Museum of Art. We began in a data-driven art exhibit that I expected to barrel right through. How interesting could it be? Then I found myself in front of The Graduate — a digital chromogenic print by Jason Salavon from 2004.
It had no obvious beauty. Salavon took 100 graduation portraits that he found online and used a computer program to produce a soft, blurred composite.
But it lingered — A single portrait of a personal milestone morphed into a collective average. It felt like this had something to tell me about the rituals we keep generation to generation. Graduations trace back to the 12th century, and yet our world has vastly changed in that time.
Even smoothing data to an average — feels ahead of its time in 2004. Now it’s inescapable. The digital world is organizing and repackaging our experiences everyday.
Standing there, I started with “Whose graduation is this?” and left with “What does graduation mean to us?”
What does it mean to experience something that many others have and will experience?
The things we preserve represent us.
Graduation is a celebratory rite of passage, but what awaits us on the other side is deeply tied to our generational inheritance, and improved or hindered by individual circumstance. It’s layered.
So as I think of those entering their final year of high school or college, I wonder about that generational inheritance — What do we owe to those who come next?
For me, college graduation was nothing to celebrate. I’d worked most of my life to be a writer, only to enter the workforce with The Great Recession looming. Twenty years later, and I’m watching new graduates enter a familiar, dire workscape.
At the same time, my peers languish in the “Millennial Career Crisis.”
We jumped into the first jobs that would take us, burned out, watched our salaries lag job-to-job, and saw no trappings of earlier generations — gone were pensions, vacation time was “unlimited,” and layoffs, once a shameful beacon of financial woes, became commonplace.
Corporate work, once an emblem of security and social standing, doesn’t want to nurture the “entry-level” and the folks in the middle, don’t want to be there.
Our experience feels deeply personal, yet it’s a composite of so many around us. Even the roles we inherit were abandoned, the memory from one person to the next person blurs into its own composite portrait.
The things we dig up reveal the past.
How long does it take for a bone to no longer feel alive? It’s a question I pondered as my family pulled into our next stop — Inner Space Caverns.
It’s space I’ve inhabited many times as a kid, college student, field trip chaperone, and now as a family. Different versions of me have altered the cave, but the stories they tell are the same ones.
Our guide shared stories about ancient flora and fauna all unearthed through exploration. Each layer carved a story about life — the climate, the organisms that adapted to the dark, and the bones of prey v. predator revealed through the brushing and smoothing away of dirt. What was once buried came to the surface.
What will history say about how we carved a life together?
Perhaps a robot guides robot assistants through some abandoned skyscraper to showcase for the humans at home what life was like in 2026.
Our email scraps paper the halls, the cubicle sits enshrined by rope and stanchion, and the guide regales the crowd with stories of corporate prey and predators.
And perhaps in some other hallway hangs all the odd art that we created and crafted to distance ourselves from that part of our life.
It’s easy to feel lonely or alone in our experiences, but we’re all intertwined. I hope in some distant land our excavated bones will reveal shared clues about society and the corporate or creative spaces built for us or by us.
So, if everything comes to the surface one day — What stories will have settled into your bones?
I wonder what gossip our fragments will spill.
The things we bury could rise from the dead.
LinkedIn is a living, public relic — showing roles passed one person to the next or one person passing from one role to the next. What’s not seen are the private ghosts, the things we bury, the stories that linger.
During this time off I read Welcome to the OC: The Oral History. I was a huge fan of The O.C. in the aughts; I even set my work schedule at Abercrombie around new episodes.
The book is at heart about a workplace 20 years later — the stories people remember, the stories people told themselves, who was protected, who wasn’t. Or even who is willing to take accountability?
Spoiler it wasn’t the people in charge.
There were a lot of set rumors at the time, and I finished the book feeling that most of those weren’t real, but rather a distraction from the actual problems. Notably, the showrunner confesses that he hid from the cast and made character decisions based on his personal feelings, not audience opinions, which ultimately hurt the show.
At one point, the interviewer lines up two versions of events that contradict each other as a little wink to us about perspective and who gets the final say on what happened.
A book that started with behind the scenes takes on the casting and music that created a zeitgeist-y show devolved into a cautionary tale about leadership.
Leaving me with the question…In the oral history of your career—How do you want to be remembered?
The things we consume influence us.
As I stood in front of art, nature or stories, I wondered if others left with the same thoughts as me; were we unknowingly sharing a collective experience? Or did they leave with something totally different, and how would I ever know anyway?
xoxo,
Courtney
Originally published in my career centric newsletter: The EverMore Edit.
