Writing Boots

I wrote this so many years ago that “ghosting” was a new term at that point. Some things I’ve written seem overheated in hindsight. The longer I live, the more understated this piece seems to me. Good thing, because it’s also one of the essays in my book, An Effort to Understand. —DM

Some crimes receive too much punishment, and other crimes don’t receive enough. For instance, every boozer knows that hungover driving is twice as dangerous as buzzed driving, but perfectly legal.

Similarly, you can lose your livelihood for making a pass at a colleague. But you can commit the arguably more abusive act of “ghosting” someone you said you liked or loved, and no one can hold you accountable.

Ghosting is a new word, but not a new concept. 

Growing up, we all heard stories of people whose parents (usually fathers) disappeared or “ran off” when they were young. 

And long before Tinder, ghosting was one of the 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover: “Slip out the back, Jack.”

It was how I resigned my first job in Chicago—near the end of my first week as the “night waterman” at a public golf course. After four endless midnight-to-eight shifts with a deranged Vietnam veteran as my only companion, I simply turned off the alarm on the fifth night and didn’t go in. I remember writhing in my bed as I listened to the voice of the disappointed superintendent, who had hired me (and paid to have me drug tested) earlier that same week. He said he’d send my check in the mail.

I only had to feel that way once to realize I would never do that to anyone—boss, friend, lover or even enemy—ever again. I think it’s one of the most violent things a person can do to another, to break off a relationship without telling why, or saying goodbye.

And yet it’s become a near standard practice in online dating, where people see one another as profiles first, sex partners second and people only on the off chance that things happen to go really well. A dear friend of mine got ghosted not long ago and it made me feel just about the same way I bet I’d feel if the bastard had hit her. Not just protective of her, but protective of us—people with consciences who are supposed to be doing what Kurt Vonnegut said we were all put here to do: “Help each other through this thing, whatever it is.”

If you feel strongly enough to break off a relationship—or quit a job or resign a client or end any significant partnership—I believe it’s something close to a Law of Communication that you should explain why you’ve done it. So the other person can learn something from hearing you say it, and so you can learn from hearing yourself say it—and so you don’t make another person more generally cynical and lonely and despairing in the reliability and goodness of other people, you nihilistic, cowardly, no-account creep.

Littering is against the law. Harassment is against the law. Reckless endangerment is against the law. Torture is against the law. Fraud is against the law. Ghosting should be against the law.

Communication folks will want to listen to the New York Times interview with Scott Pelley, about his firing from “60 Minutes.” The fairness of that decision aside, this is an executive communication disaster of Hindenburgian proportions. Pelley’s eloquent description of new “60 Minutes” producer Nick Bilton’s introduction to the staff—first a supremely insulting email, then an all-staff meeting at which Bilton read a statement *from his phone*—this is just brutal. Almost exquisitely so. And speaking of reading speeches off phones, here’s a Writing Boots encore … —DM

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My old pal Steve Crescenzo was on a Zoom call with a prospect the other day, a young woman. “About ten minutes into the 30-minute call, she appeared to wipe her mouth. But it LOOKED like she was hitting off a joint,” Steve wrote on LinkedIn. “I ALMOST made a joke. Something like: ‘Ha ha. For a second it looked like you were vaping or smoking a pot pen or something! Ha ha ha!’ Thank GOD that for once I kept my mouth shut (a rare occasion). Because about six minutes later, she did it again! She WAS vaping! I’ll be damned! I have read all the articles about how insidiously addicting these vape pens are. And just about EVERYONE of a certain age does it. But how do we feel about doing it on a business call?”

On behalf of exactly everyone over the age of that young woman I can say: We don’t dig it.

Nor, I’ll add while I have you here, do we dig people reading a speech off a cellular telephone. My wife and I found ourselves at Chicago’s great Gene Siskel Film Center one night last month, to see a documentary by Frederick Wiseman. As you might predict, our 55-year-old asses were among the youngest in the room—except for the stripling Siskel Center staffer, who introduced the film with a 10-minute lecture delivered with a series of frequent glances at his phone.

Young man, I know there’s nothing inherently wrong with reading from notes on your phone. And if you’re conservation-minded, a lot that’s right with it. Still, lad: Know that your audience cannot accept this. We have lived many long years in a world where, if you had something important to say to a large group of people, you either memorized it because you were a genius or you wrote it down on a piece of paper, and referred to that. None of us will live long enough to learn to happily receive a lecture that’s read off a phone.

Luckily, you and your generation will outlive us, and for the latter part of your professional careers you will be able to read speeches with a phone in one hand and a vape pen in another. But by then, you’ll have your own bugbears, and your own vague yet strong sense that no one takes anything seriously enough any goddamn more.