Portrait of the Technocrat as a Stanford Man

Portrait of the Technocrat as a Stanford Man Shaan Sachdev (bio) The first time it snowed this year, I cried. Snow is one of my favorite things in the world—and it’s one of the Stanford man’s, too. He was surely trekking through it as well, somewhere in downtown Brooklyn. But unlike me, trudging mournfully to my office in the same pair of jeans I’d worn all week, the Stanford man would be crunching through the ice and salt in top-of-the-line hiking boots and a $1,900 jacket. He’d be filtering the flakes through fleece-lined leather gloves from Burberry and then returning to his glass apartment on the fortieth floor of a luxury building to shower with Molton Brown soaps. He’d greet the doorman on his way in, one of six, and it wouldn’t matter which was on duty, because he’d know all their names. He’d make cordial conversation with whomever was in the elevator, the trim blond pushing the stroller or the paunchy techie with the Labrador, because exchanging pleasantries is also one of his favorite things. When the Stanford man broke up with me, he told me it was because he needed to date someone more “average.” He told me that intellectualizing and reading tomes were for graduate school, not the stuff of romance. He told me that ordinary pleasures, like watching basketball and dancing to thumping techno, were to be savored, not scrutinized. He reminded me, I realized, of Jim Barnett, the subject of Mary McCarthy’s “Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale Man,” from her 1942 novel The Company She Keeps. “If other people on the left stood in superstitious awe of Jim,” McCarthy wrote: Jim also stood in awe of himself. It was not that he considered that he was especially brilliant or talented; his estimation of his qualities was both just and modest. What he reverenced in himself was his intelligent mediocrity. He knew that he was the Average Thinking Man to whom in the end all appeals are addressed. . . . He was a walking Gallup Poll, and he had only to leaf over his feelings to discover what America was thinking. Like Jim Barnett, who could have been a model if he’d fallen on hard times, the Stanford man is approached now and then by scouts and agents. He is tall, with [End Page 95] a bronze complexion, thick, curly hair, and lips like pillows. He is clean but not in the ordinary, courteous sort of way. He’s so clean that it’s the first thing one notices about him. His skin glows and his clothes are spotless and everything he wears looks new. One can’t possibly imagine any odor wafting from his person. Even after exercising, the fabric of his premium gym clothes seems to, as advertised, absorb all efflux. He brushes five, sometimes six times a day, always for twice as long as the American Dental Association recommends, erasing all evidence of delicately prepared breakfast smoothies, sumptuous tenderloin dinners, and eighteen-dollar craft cocktails. Most evenings, after the Stanford man finishes speaking on conference calls and making spreadsheets on his computer—the things that propel his six-figure salary—he eats dinner with friends. Sometimes with just one friend, sometimes with five. Sometimes he and his roommates prepare fresh poke bowls in their globule above the city, only faintly registering the puny, glittering Statue of Liberty out their living room windows as they chop and chatter. Sometimes he sits at a table in Chelsea with a horde of other twenty-somethings who have also attended Stanford—or Harvard, Princeton, or Yale. They wear silver TAG Heuer wristwatches and dark blue cashmere sweaters, and they mostly exchange anecdotes about things that happened to them in South America or about companies that mutual friends are starting. Serious moments might entail ruminations upon spin class, air miles, stock prices, or cryptocurrencies. None of them, it ought to be said, are unintelligent. In fact, their minds are put to regular labor. They can tell you which health insurance plans come with the best digital applications. They can tell you...

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