Being an adult sucks. 20% of us do it anyways.

I was called for jury duty this past Wednesday.

The notice causes a kind of low-grade dread, the kind that makes you a little nauseous when you think of going. I automatically started thinking about how to get out of it, seems that has become the fashionable reflex regarding jury duty.

But I went anyway.

The judge was good. Better than good — he was trying, which in that room, with those people, felt almost heroic. He explained, in the way smart people explain things today (using single-syllable words, being funny, being self-deprecating) that the verdict in a trial in this country does not come from him. Does not come from the lawyers. Comes from us. From the people in that room. From citizens.

Twenty percent of whom, he said, are willing to serve.

Twenty percent.

Twenty percent show up. Twenty percent of the people called make the justice system work. Which means eighty percent get out of having to do the work of sustaining our legal system — while enjoying the benefits.

I was watching yet another manifestation of the Pareto Law: the proven principle that says twenty percent of the people are responsible for eighty percent of the work and the accomplishments. Ortega y Gasset had a name for the other eighty percent. He called them the mass man.

I think of Ortega y Gasset often when I'm faced with the 80/20 rule — which happens more frequently than I'd like, because it's depressing.

The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset wrote a book called The Revolt of the Masses. I've read it many times. It has not aged, which is either a credit to Ortega or an indictment of us — probably both. He described what he called “the mass man” — not a class, not an income bracket, not a political affiliation, a type.

Gasset's mass man is someone who moves through civilization the way a passenger rides a train. Consuming the view. Assuming the engine will keep running. Never once asking who makes it run, what it costs, or what happens when nobody wants to do that anymore.

The mass man wants the fruits without having planted or harvested anything.

He wants the respect without the work. The status without the sacrifice. The credit for what the twenty percent built.

And when he doesn't get it — when the twenty percent won't perform the ritual of false equality that would make him feel better about not having earned it — he doesn't just walk away.

He tries to destroy the very benefits the twenty percent gave him: a longer lifespan, medicine, science that produced the comforts he enjoys, education that makes all of it possible, and yes — democracy, and a justice system that protects his rights and protects him from being crushed by the rich and the powerful.

The mass 80 percent-man resents the people who actually work and produce results — and if the creators refuse to say that the mass man is just as good as them, the complaints start.

Some of my favorites are:

“they don't take my ideas seriously”

(ideas that came from politicians, Instagram, ChatGPT, YouTube, or a fast-learning certification course)

or

“they don't respect what I do”

— even when it continuously ends in failure, and is based on “street smarts” or “lived experience.”

However, the truth is that the mass man doesn't destroy out of evil.

This is the part Ortega understood that most people miss.

He did not think they were villains. He thought they were ignorant and entitled.

I add: they are permanent children.

Children who never got the news that adulthood was going to be required of them, and that adulthood is not fun all the time (who could be blamed for not wanting a life of “fun”?)

Children want all the rights and none of the responsibilities. Children want the adults to manage everything and then hand them the trophy.

And when the trophy doesn't come, when the adult says — quietly, without cruelty — that it has to be earned, the child doesn't hear a lesson.

The child hears a threat.

And children, when threatened, burn things down.

Because they want to feel, for one moment, like the most powerful person in the room.

Because destruction is the one thing that requires no skill, no patience, no commitment to anything.

Anyone can break what they couldn't build.

And there is, in the breaking, a feeling that gets mistaken for strength.

You see it at work.

You see it in institutions.

You see it in countries.

The pattern is always the same: the eighty percent mass man-child demand the credit, get told no, and destroy in a tantrum.

The problem for the mass man-child (and most of us) is that nature doesn't care what children want and doesn't yield to their tantrums. Neither does reality. Neither does democracy.

Democracy looks you in the eye and says:

you are that person. there is no one else.

You educate yourself as a citizen, or let others tell you who to vote for.

You vote, or you let others vote and take over.

You get the government that you deserve.

The judge does not decide.

The lawyers do not decide.

You decide.

And if you are not paying attention, if you are afraid, if you have handed your judgment to someone who told you what you wanted to hear — that is still a decision.

You made it.

You own it.

You whine about “the government”? You are the government.

There is no one else to blame.

You whine about corruption?

Corruption exists because when you hand power to corrupt people — because of how they look, or their ads, or how they make you feel — you are co-creating a corrupt society.

There is no one else to blame.

The twenty percent know this.

They show up.

They take the time to find out about the people they're going to vote for.

And they vote.

They sit in the hard chairs in the unnecessarily cold jury room.

They watch the insufferable movies on the TV in the corner.

They do not enjoy it — I did not enjoy it — but they do not confuse enjoyment with obligation, which is itself a form of maturity that is rarer than it should be.

They take on the burden of living like an adult.

I grew up in a dictatorship.

I say this not to win an argument (there is no argument), but because it changes what rooms like the jury room, or the voting booth, look like to me.

I have seen what happens when the eighty percent win. When the child gets the match and uses it.

It does not look like liberation.

It looks like the absence of that room — decisions made for you, about you, without you, by people who were not elected and cannot be removed and do not care what you think, because they don't have to.

The judge wasn't asking for heroes.

He was asking for adults.

I didn't like the early alarm or the hard chairs or the shitty movies they showed to keep us “entertained” (who the hell picks those movies?).

But I never lost the sense of what that room actually was:

The place where power is taken from the influential, the rich, the powerful, and handed to us — the people, the citizens of the United States of America.

Or more specifically, to the twenty percent of us who protect it and sustain it.

Who would want to opt out of that?

That is not nothing.

It is, in fact, everything.

It's what makes everything else possible.

It is worth showing up for.