Forests are burning, the air is filthying, and Miley Cyrus has gone slutty. The world is changing, things are out of control. As a people, we stand at the ready: Conservation, Preservation – these are our civil duties. To support our mission, we have built something called the DAC: the Defense Against Change. The Defense Against Change focuses on the types of change that truly destroy the natural order and the kinds that just make us uncomfortable– cute tweeny Miley turning punk– just the same. Under the greater umbrella of the DAC, each one of us must carve out our niche: Some will take to fighting the wildfires or addressing the rising seas. The vast majority of us, though, will focus on the more human-oriented, hyper-local division – we will ensure that the individuals around us stay in their lane. 

The checkout aisle at Walmart is a mausoleum to our finest work: People magazine sits next to the 3Musketeers and Butterfingers. Here, a collection of vices that the Walton family knows will beat out our rotten, Tuesday evening, post-work, post-class instincts. 7pm arrives, by which point we have just enough energy left in the tank to go home and settle on the couch with some sugary peanuts and read hot gossip about people we have never met. 

Per the image on the left, Kylie Jenner walks across the stern of a yacht in a teeny weeny black bikini– Per the image on the right, Kylie Jenner walks across the stern of a yacht in a teeny weeny black bikini. The left side caption reads “2015”; the right, “2025.” Notably, Jenner’s ass is saggier on the left– fake, therefore, on the right. Plus her lips are plumped up in image B. Thanks to People magazine, and their noble service, we will not(!) let Kylie get away with the butt, nor the lips, nor whatever other sneaky alterations she has up her (metaphorical) sleeves (her lack of sleeves remains a point of consistency). We are the Defense Against Change, and this is our promise. 

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Two falls-ago I started college. That first fall, freshman year, everyone was at their scaredest, most defensive, and in turn, most vicious. 

There was this line I remember hearing all the time: “Apparently she was super weird in high school,” they’d say, as a cool-looking chick swaggered into the dining hall. “So and so knows him from the city, and everyone says he had no friends before coming here,” was the truth re: this boy who would be hosting the pregame that evening. When one girl organized a soirée for a carefully selected roster of female attendees, the consensus was that she was “trying to reinvent herself here or something…” It was deemed “whack,” the fact that another girl now smoked cigarettes outside the library like she was “all that” … Thanks to sources, we knew the truth: sixteen-year-old her had a bowl-cut, enjoyed soberly going on amusement park rides, spent Friday night with her parents, wore cardigans and velcro shoes, etc. (These are fictional examples.)

As for some others, they probably never even had a Fake ID before coming here. The fact that distance from parental helicoptering finally gave them the courage to buy the right jeans and lose their virginity, makes no nevermind. It’s too late to hold any significance, or maybe the lateness of it is the significant part. If you didn’t come out the womb smoking Marlboro reds and wearing vintage leather penny loafers -– or else keep yourself well hidden until you learned to — the Defense Against Change calls bullshit on cool, new, you. 

In many ways, I feel well positioned as an observer of this phenomenon. Lots of my classmates at Princeton spent their young lives — leading up to college — working hard in school and placing a lesser emphasis on hedonist debauchery than some others (me). When they finally made it here, many decided they wanted to see what this “experimenting” was all about. I feel like a parvenu sometimes, but differently. My archive — ethereal and also digital — attests to fifteen-year-old weekends spent in the company of white claws, a wonderful but undeniably homogenous girl-group, and a Brandy Melville closet. My hair was chemically straightened. I’m a rising junior at Princeton now, and things are different. I wear my hair curly and my mind is on fire in a new way. My friends are no longer all girls, and they sit around talking about Che Guevara. Sometimes. Other times about the things they’re making (shirts, sandwiches, piano compositions) and other times other things. 

Were I to allow myself to go down a particular road, I may well conclude that I am some creative farce, a basic sheep masquerading as some independent, fearless wolf. Wary of being called out for my own trajectory, I am likely to judge others who I perceive as having undergone a similar one. If I call out their change, maybe my own will remain unnoticed, or at least avoid being deemed inauthentic in the case that it is noticed.

Regardless of where the victim started out and ended up — and whatever the nature of their change — the framework for the Defense Against Change mission remains the same. I pledge, he pledge, she pledge, we all pledge — to keep you in yo lane. 

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On the one hand, this is profoundly confusing. As a society, we love to talk about progress and improvement. The beauty industry exists literally just so that our lips and butts will plump up and so that our manner of dress will never lag behind the avant-garde. Jeff Bezos shits on a gold-rimmed toilet because our compliance with trends sends us limping back to his website several times a week, sheepishly adding to our collection of plastic-wrapped, plastic-clothing. 

We are fascinated by “glow ups,” meaning sudden, dramatic improvements in people— theoretically. Kylie Jenner is worth hundreds of millions of dollars precisely because we, the masses, laud her for her looks, many of us aspiring to copy them. Nevertheless, we make sure to publicly note her change, mark it on the timeline, exposing the steps that went into it (cosmetic procedures, in this case). The market thrives on our wish for self-transformation, and yet we end up shocked and disturbed whenever we see it – this transformation – come to fruition in those around us.

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Furthermore, the time we’re in is a particular one: Digital archives exist. We are walking accumulations of everything we ever said and ever were. There is no shaking of past selves as there once may have been. Existing has, in turn, become a much heavier undertaking. And a much more self-conscious one, too. 

Identity politics – the matter of what kind of person we are, a question we are far too obsessed with – reign, and with that, myopia, inertia, and self-consciousness too. Malleability, inconsistency, and evolution are all a bit like spoiled yogurt. We can dig our spoons in, try a bite, riding on the fondness of the memory of a time when all of it was still good. But ultimately, the world will punish us, with diarrhea in the one case, and cruel skepticism, a “we see you and we know just what you’re doing” in the other. 

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I’ll tell you why (and where) I find hope. 

Ultimately, it is easier to defend our own inertia when we learn to dismiss the change we identify in others. This change – the kind we cannot figure out how, or muster the courage to make, in ourselves – disrupts our sense of stability. It makes us feel sidelined: When did this happen? How did they do it? Why did no one warn us?

In this state of terror, our worst Defense Against Change instincts kick in. A myth of authenticity becomes our greatest defense against our own quiescence and passivity. As Oscar Wilde put it, “consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.” We are mad at others’ change because we are not changing enough ourselves. And when we do, ourselves, change, we are scared of being called out for it, and so, in a fit of anxiety, we attack. We call the people around us “fakers,” hoping it’ll make us, by contrast, real. 

When we realize that this is all a myth, and figure out that change is so often a positive thing, life becomes a lot more exciting. For some purposes, it makes sense to say that life is short. For others, it works better to claim that life is long. Here, I pick the latter. Fingers crossed, we will live through decades and decades, endure dozens of presidential cabinets, witness hundreds of Olympic games, greet thousands of Tuesdays, and experience many distinct phases of our own beings. 

Through the long hours, days, and years of our lives, of course we will, and of course we should, change. As the British WW2 fighter pilot and writer Bernard Berenson wisely put it, “Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.” Hopefully, that will not be our fate. 

The Defense Against Change is real, but the fact that they victimize everyone should offer some semblance of relief. Up to this point, I have suggested that: everyone is watching, constantly. But they are watching a bit like you “watch” Great Barrier Reef after you’ve finished a spliff– Looking at the screen, but will forget in an instant what you just saw, plus are simultaneously shoving your face with popcorn. 

It is always better to live a life in accordance with what feels right. The Defense Against Change claims to fight on behalf of authenticity. The truth is, though, that personal evolution is often the manifestation of an authentically lived life. Adjusting one’s surroundings, company, behaviors, and preferences to adhere to a changing self is a much more surefire path to contentedment than continuing to conform blindly to what no longer suits or serves you. 

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson