The children were gunned down in two places everyone should be safe: school and church.

Right away, we tried to find an angle. Was the Minneapolis school Mass shooter a white supremacist? Trans? An antisemite? Did he have something against the Catholic Church?

These are not the right questions, and our interest in seeking answers to them blinds us to the deeper sickness: We do not want to be who we are.

For most of my life, I have felt drawn to a public life. I don’t mean elected office, but performing work that includes becoming, to some degree, a known person in a community.

In college, I wrote a regular column and led organizations with public profiles, which meant I knew that I was seen and heard and talked about on the quad. Even as I worked in largely behind-the-scenes roles for several years after college, I continued to write for publications, and sometimes to speak in public.

Since fall 2021, I have been here at the Post-Gazette, which has become much more of a public role than I expected. At first, it was just knocking out editorials and sprucing up op-eds.

Yet this pull toward the public life has always existed in tension with a different conviction: that the most beautiful lives are ordinary and unknown ones, where the quiet heroism of generosity and patience and love plays out every day. The desire to be a known person can be one of the most poisonous obsessions of the human psyche, particularly in the age of the screen.

TICKET TO ETERNITY

The essayist Sam Kriss wrote for The Point magazine earlier this month that John Hinckley, Ronald Reagan’s would-be assassin, was the progenitor of today’s school shooters:

“John Hinckley spent the next 35 years in a secure psychiatric ward, but he was not anonymous anymore. Millions of people read his poetry; billions of people learned his name. The world couldn’t think about Jodie Foster without thinking about him. He was famous. It’s been nearly fifty years, and people are still talking about him. I’m one of them.”

There are many traits that are broadly shared among contemporary spree shooters, including drug use, broken families and obsessive internet usage. But the thread that runs through every case is the desire to be someone.

What Kriss observes is that this is never the desire to be content with oneself, but rather the desire to be someone in the eyes of others. The killer sees himself as worthless, repulsive, pathetic. But he can become an object of fascination to the world, a person with tremendous, horrendous worth. He can transcend himself and become immortal.

“Any talentless nobody really could break out of the world and live forever inside the screen,” he writes. “The way to do it was through spectacular acts of violence.”

Murder of innocents as the ticket to immortality. You don’t have to believe in demons to call it demonic.

DIGITAL OBJECTS

What is clearest of all from what the Minneapolis shooter left behind, as has been clear in every similar case, is that he found living as himself to be unbearable. There was no higher purpose behind what he did, no statement he was trying to make, no “motive” in any sense recognizable by the law, beyond the Hinckleyite dream “to walk right out of the world and into eternity.”

Yet this drive to step out of one’s own body and soul to become a timeless object isn’t just shared by school shooters. They are just the most terribly complete manifestations of the promise of the internet itself.

Every time we post a thought or a selfie online, we are presenting a version of ourselves to the world to be seen, to be adored, even to be hated, but most of all, to be known. “Being online means confronting a lifeless object that happens to be yourself,” Kriss writes.

When what we need, what every person needs in their bones and their soul, is to know that our lives are meaningful just as they are.

HIDDEN LIVES

I sometimes wonder if the pull I feel toward the public life is a gift, a test or a curse. One thing I know for sure is that leaving social media a few years ago was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. At least in this medium I can attempt to craft something that’s not just me for the world’s consumption, but an idea that can live without me.

And today’s idea is this: that you don’t have to be someone to have a life worth living, worth cherishing. The very best lives, no matter how they’re regarded by others, are those lived in faithful perseverance through this world’s troubles, buoyed by the unshakable confidence that being in this world is good in itself.

Their gift to the world is their real selves, not a digital simulacrum, not becoming an object of envy or hate or terror.

“For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts,” wrote George Eliot in the last words of “Middlemarch.” “And that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

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