A day off

 

I found out Osama bin Laden was dead the same way I found out about anything else that year: Late and in the newspaper. I was on hiatus from my graduate studies, so I had no use for the internet. And I only watched cable news at bars.

It was 10, maybe 11 o’clock in the morning. Before noon anyway. I was standing in line at a Walgreens in Knoxville, Tennessee. The one on N Northshore Dr. I was bleary-eyed and wearing a heavy spritzing of Acqua Di Giò to cover the tang of Jack Daniels which got through anyway, unmistakable as it is.

I dumped the eclectic mix I was cradling on the counter. Fold top sandwich bags, cashews, nail polish remover, NyQuil, several hundred dollars worth of prepaid wireless phone cards. And a 20 oz. Coke.

“This it hon’?” a kindly woman too old to be working the Walgreens checkout asked. “Yeah,” I said, pinching the bridge of my nose and squeezing my eyes shut to ward off headache pangs.

“Wait.” I squinted at the headlines shouting at me from the newspaper rack. I grabbed a copy of something — the News Sentinel maybe, I don’t remember — and put it on the counter. “This too. And a pack of Camel Turkish –” the pangs came back. I winced. “– Turkish Royals. Or Golds. Whichever. Either one.”

I made a right out of the parking lot and drove halfway up a steep hill. Then right again into Kingston Pointe apartments where I kept a one bedroom as a cheap contingency. I wound around the parking lot and pulled in a few spots down from a Lamborghini Gallardo. It was yellow and, as far as I knew, it was the only one in town. The owner didn’t live there. Obviously. His girlfriend did. A mistress I reckoned.

I got out, packed the Camels against my palm, unwound the cellophane band, took one out and lit it. I leaned against the side of my Acura, inhaled and sighed on the exhale. It’d been a long night. It was going to be a good day, though. Good days were increasingly rare, but I still had my fair complement. Life as I’d known it for nearly a decade was crumbling, present continuous tense, but it wasn’t yet crumbled, past tense. I was still me. 2011 was the last year of that. Of me.

I dragged the Camel down to the filter, flicked it and walked inside with the Walgreens bag and the paper, which I tucked under my left armpit. I walked up the stairs, knocked three times hard, once soft to let them know it was me, turned the key and went into the apartment where the two of them were sitting on the couch in the living room. G was watching my Aqua Teen Hunger Force DVDs. Her partner, Amanda, was asleep. Or pretending to be.

“What the actual fuck is this?” she giggled, gesturing at the show. “It’s just Aqua Teen,” I said. “I can’t explain it. You either get it or you don’t.” “Well I don’t.” “I know. Most people don’t.”

I tossed the Camels to her. She caught them and frowned when she saw they’d been opened. “I thought you quit.” “I did.” “Did you pack these?” “Yeah.”

I went into the kitchen, put the paper on the counter and fished the NyQuil out of the plastic Walgreens bag. I took some of that, ate a handful of cashews and washed it all down with a swig of Coke. I brought the rest of the Walgreens haul out into the living room and placed the items one by one on the coffee table. The sandwich bags, the acetone, the phone cards. “Let’s get this finished up and cleaned up. I’m takin’ the rest of the day off.”

Half an hour later they were on their way. G hugged me and gave me a kiss on the cheek. Her partner hated that. I don’t know why. G and I were strictly business. And strictly Platonic. Everyone knew that. I offered my hand to Amanda. She shook it. “Always a pleasure,” I said. The feeling wasn’t mutual.

“Whatcha got planned?” G chirped, on their way out the door. “Nothin’,” I said. “Absolutely nothin’.”

That wasn’t true. I did have plans, just not the kind anyone would’ve found compelling. I was going to read my paper, go to Fresh Market, buy some charcuterie, bring it back to the apartment and watch Archer, then maybe The Town for the hundredth time. Later, I’d head down to Aubrey’s off Papermill, sit on the patio, smoke a cigar and drink craft beer. I’d probably spend another night at the apartment. At least another night. Things weren’t great at the condo in Sequoyah Hills just then.

“Well you enjoy that nothin’,” G laughed. “Thanks. Y’all got everything you need, right?” “Yeah we’re good for the day,” she said. “Probably tomorrow too.” “Pass those phone cards out by this afternoon if you can,” I told her. “I gave you plenty of minutes for everybody and you’ve got enough–” She stopped me: “Babe, I got you. We’re good.” “Ok,” I said.

They went off down the stairs and I went back inside. I double bagged the trash, took it out to one of the neighborhood dumpsters, came back in and showered. I felt better. Then I remembered Osama. I got the paper out of the kitchen, took it out onto the porch and unfurled it on the bannister. A few birds chirped. It was a decent day.

I read about the raid in Abbottabad. It felt very far away and irrelevant. 9/11 and everything that came after shattered a lot of illusions in America, but even to me — an adult when the towers fell, an Iraq war critic from the beginning and someone who paid in countless thousands to university coffers trying to become worldly — it was hard to shake the mental framework that divided the world in two: Here and “over there.”

Things are different today. Everything’s proximate, relevant and urgent. And it’s driving us crazy. If, in sacrificing our sanity, we gained the sort of omnipotent perspicacity that might be expected from a society where everyone carries a supercomputer in their pocket, the tradeoff might be worth it. Probably not, but it’d at least be a fairer exchange. But ubiquitous connectivity hasn’t translated into anything like society-wide perspicacity. Quite the opposite, really.

“Crazy,” I said, or thought, when I finished reading some reporter’s account of bin Laden’s final moments. By then the acetaminophen in the NyQuil had mostly smothered my headache and the drowsiness from the antihistamine was a decent enough stand-in for a benzodiazepine. I still needed a shot, though. I went inside, found the Jack bottle, held it up and frowned. I remembered there being more left. Enough for a shot. No dice. There was a sip, maybe. “Fuuhhhck you,” I told the empty bottle. Then I laughed.

Fresh Market was crowded. I remember that. I bought an impressive spread. I remember that too. Prosciutto, soppressata. More prosciutto. Brie, camembert, mozzarella. The most expensive blue I could find. Figs, pears, pecans. Olives. Pepperoncini. Jam. Special mustard that sounded better than it ended up tasting. (The mustard sat in the refrigerator until I didn’t need the apartment anymore; an unopened 2-liter of Vernor’s ginger ale kept it company.) A container of that asiago angel hair pasta side dish anyone who shops at Fresh Market tried at least once. Gourmet crackers in needlessly ornate boxes. And some tiramisu.

The afternoon passed just as slowly as I wanted it to. I ate, laughed at Archer, ate and laughed some more. Neither of my burner phones rang and there was no computer in the apartment. I was hardly ever there, so I didn’t have cable hooked up either. Around 4:30 I put The Town in the DVD player and watched it until the the second heist. The one with the nun masks. Then I took another shower, put on a button down and drove the half mile down to Aubrey’s.

I sat on the patio and drank cold draught beer surrounded by people doing the same. There were no smartphones. Well, there were obviously smartphones. But not on tables. Rather, in pockets. And in pocket books. The world was just four years into the iPhone era and social media was only beginning to metamorphose into a societal bane. I stayed there on the patio for hours, content, unbothered and a little buzzed around dozens of people likewise untroubled and glad to be in each other’s company.

All one story

 

It’s not a coincidence that some of the more vexing societal trends we’re only now starting to grapple with in America can be traced to 2010. But it’s important to understand them in the broader context of a decades-long unraveling.

In his best-seller The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt dates the “new age of hyper-viralized social media” to 2009, when the introduction of “like” buttons “transformed the social dynamics of the online world.”

Prior to that, social media was less addictive and less insidious. There was a time, for example, when Facebook was just a sort of constantly-updating, interactive high school year book — “a useful way to keep up with your friends,” as Haidt put it, noting that “with fewer instant and reverberating feedback functions it generated much less of the toxicity we see today.”

The figure above plots data gathered for the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, a yearly poll which seeks to measure, among other things, the prevalence of mental disorders in America. The survey’s been conducted since 1971 under the direction of The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration within DHHS.

It’s no secret that mental health outcomes have deteriorated dramatically in America. Indeed, the country’s experiencing a rolling mental health crisis. The situation’s especially grave for young adults, teenagers and females. In March’s Monthly Letter, I documented the trends: Clinically diagnosable depression rates have never been higher, high schoolers consistently identify depression and anxiety as the top problem among their classmates, feelings of hopelessness and suicidal ideation are increasingly prevalent, the incidence of major depressive disorder is up dramatically and so on.

Although the pandemic’s blamed for making a bad situation worse by accentuating what then-US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy described in 2023 as an “epidemic” of loneliness and isolation in America, these trends were all readily observable before 2020. And the seeds were sown long before social media and smartphones.

In “The Loners,” I suggested any account of depression, loneliness and anxiety in America, and indeed any account of the country’s broader social crisis, is incomplete if it doesn’t mention Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, the definitive, canonical account of civic disengagement in America post-1970. That’s where all of this starts. Bowling Alone is, perhaps, the most prophetic work of nonfiction ever published in the English language.

It might seem a stretch to tie today’s depression and anxiety in America to, for example, the collapse of bowling league participation or Parent-Teacher Association membership, both of which peaked in or around 1960, especially considering the role of idiosyncratic factors in explaining the rise and fall of member groups organized around specific interests.

But as Putnam wrote 25 years ago, “Even after we had explored the details of each organization’s rise and decline, we would be left with the remarkable fact that each of these organizations, very different from one another in constituency, age and leadership,” traced more or less the same trajectory. Indeed, Putnam observed, the profile of “the long-run trend in league bowling in America precisely matches the trends in other forms of social capital” in exhibiting “steady growth from the beginning of [last] century, explosive growth between 1945 and 1965, stagnation until the late 1970s and then a precipitous plunge over the last two decades of the century.”

This is all one story, and if it isn’t recognized and treated as such, we’ll continually find ourselves back-footed by developments which might’ve otherwise been predictable and thereby preventable. Consider, for example, that Donald Trump’s nostalgia politics leans — ironically given how critical divisiveness is for his political movement — heavily on mid-20th century social capital motifs.

In their 2017 volume One Nation After Trump, E.J. Dionne, Jr., Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann mentioned Putnam’s analysis in just that context. “It is an irony of Trump’s appeal that while his combative rhetoric made him anything but a unifier, many rallied to him out of a yearning for forms of community and solidarity that they sense have been lost,” they wrote. “Economic change has ravaged not only individual living standards but also cities and towns that once created thriving forms of civil society through churches and labor unions, veterans’ organizations, service clubs and sports leagues.”

Dionne, Ornstein and Mann also mentioned Anne Case and Angus Deaton, whose 2020 study Deaths of Despair, reads in places like a kind of depressing epilogue to Bowling Alone — “This is how it ends,” so to speak. Case and Deaton’s work inspired me to begin writing the Monthly Letters in 2023. In the first letter, “Exiles On Main Street,” I tied all of this together.

Although the concept of social capital was hardly new when Putnam made it a national issue a quarter century ago, he’s generally considered the patron saint of social capital analysis. He defines social capital as “social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them.”

Putnam wrote those words before the dawn of the social media age. So by “social networks” he didn’t mean Facebook. As I put it in “Exiles,” The Social Network, proper noun, only served to worsen the cracks in America’s civic foundation.

For Putnam, what distinguishes social capital from the more nebulous concept of “civic virtue” is the former’s focus on reciprocity and connections. Real connections, not virtual friend requests. Real reciprocity, not the click of any “like” button.

Everything sucks

 

The debate around the recent deterioration in youth mental health outcomes in America is highly disputatious when it comes to tracing causality. Self-evident though the connection with social media may seem (and may be), there’s considerable disagreement about how much of the blame belongs at the feet of Facebook, Instagram, the platform formerly known as Twitter and the rest.

Six months ago, in “The Great Depression,” I wrote that, “tempting as it is to blame [social media], the truth is that no one really knows what’s behind the demonstrably deleterious trends in adolescent and young adult mental health.” In the same piece, I suggested an under-appreciated aspect of the phenomenon is the extent to which social media has “burst the bubble” for a lot of Westerners who, thanks in no small part to the apps on their smartphones, are compelled to grapple daily with what I called “the macabre joke that is the human condition.”

The world’s a very cruel place. The more you know about the world, the more depressing life can be. That’s one reason — the main reason — we shelter children from life’s harsher realities and indeed why adults in the developed Western world tend to avoid those realities too. No one wants to be depressed and anxious.

But in the 21st century, the media’s bad news bias (born more of competitive necessity than any sort of desire to make people sad), the proliferation of smartphones and social media’s business model, have conspired to create what Bloomberg’s Cameron Crise recently described as “a general sense that ‘everything sucks.'” I’d call it a “realization” more than a “sense” because on the whole, everything does suck. And when everyone’s suddenly aware of that, the mental health consequences can be quite dire. A society-wide mental health crisis is conducive to very bad outcomes, the steady accumulation of which makes things “suck” even more in a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In a September 12 column called “It’s Not Just You, Society Is Unhappier These Days,” Crise cited a 2024 NBER paper by Wharton’s Jules H. van Binsbergen, Indiana University’s Varun Sharma and two academics from London Business School. The study used machine learning to construct a news-based economic sentiment indicator. The metric, shown below, incorporates text from 200 million pages of news (a billion articles) published over 170 years across some 13,000 newspapers.

As the figure shows, and as the authors remarked, there’s “a notable downward trend in overall news sentiment since the 1970s.” Coincidentally or not, that’s around the same time social capital in America, as documented by Putnam, began its own precipitous decline.

Of course, the 1960s and 70s were a turbulent time for America both socially and economically. And you’d expect to see precipitous declines on news-based sentiment indicators around events like the dot-com crash and the financial crisis. But the authors were keen to emphasize that the downward trend isn’t explained by coverage of economic news. “Instead,” they wrote, “it relates to the general coverage of both economic and non-economic news.” (Emphasis mine.)

And in any case, news-based sentiment post-1970 is skewed asymmetrically towards pessimism even when controlling for current events. That is, even considering the prevailing circumstances at any given time, sentiment’s skewed negatively versus yesteryear. As Crise pointed out in his column, “peak optimism in news-based sentiment since 2008 was still more negative than that at the nadir of the Great Depression.” In other words: At its most chipper, the tone of news coverage post-Lehman was more gloomy than during the darkest days of the single worst economic calamity in modern human history.

There are two annotations on the second chart above: One for the moment when television ownership became more or less universal in American households, and another for the dawn of the social media age. In The Anxious Generation, Haidt notes that “children have been drawn powerfully to screens since the advent of TV,” but until the introduction of the iPhone “there was a limit to the amount of screen time a child could have, so there was still time for play and face-to-face conversation.” Kids couldn’t, he wrote, pick up the family television set and take it to school with them, or haul it out to the makeshift neighborhood baseball diamond.

The change, when it came, was as rapid as it turned out to be profound. The lines in the chart below illustrate adoption rates for communications technologies going back a century. It’s the smartphone rate that’s key, not so much the rate for social media (which is swift in its own right). Why? Because it wasn’t until the introduction of the iPhone that social media became something we could all carry around with us in our pockets.

The shaded area shows you the share of high school seniors who reported using social media “nearly every day” starting in 2008. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, that share was just half. By 2016, it was 82% and three-quarters of American teenagers owned a device with a touch screen, according to a contemporaneous Pew study.

The most recent Pew research shows that nearly half of today’s teens describe themselves as online pretty much all the time, which is to say every waking minute of every single day, even as site destination preferences have shifted (i.e., what’s “cool” today is different from what was en vogue a decade ago). The most important takeaway from the linked Pew study, conducted last year among teens aged 13 to 17, was this: A third of American teenagers said they use at least one of the top five destination sites (YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook) “almost constantly.”

A lot (I dare say most) of the research on social media addiction focuses on children and specifically teenagers. Haidt’s book certainly does. But if you read The Anxious Generation, you’ll find that a majority of his analysis regarding the deleterious effects of social media-enabled smartphones and the pathways through which those effects operate, applies almost as readily to adults — with important caveats to account for physiological differences that make adolescents uniquely vulnerable.

He might dispute this, preferring instead to focus on, for example, the stages of brain development, but when it comes to explaining why the alleged link between smartphones, social media and poor mental health outcomes appears plain as day in young adults and almost non-existent in people aged 50 and up, I’m inclined to Occam’s razor: The older you are, the more confusing new technology tends to be, and therefore the less likely you are to use it. If you don’t use something, whatever deleterious effects it has on users won’t apply to you.

My guess is that with one notable exception to account for the perpetually harried social media addict who occupies the Oval Office, the prevalence of anxiety linked to smartphones and social media among Americans aged 75 and up is negligible and nonexistent by comparison to the same rates for those 30 and under.

The fact is (and you don’t need to be a social psychologist, let alone a psychiatrist or a neurologist, to understand this), the feedback loops which transform heavy smartphone users into addicts work on all of us, regardless of age, no different than any other drug. In his book, Haidt describes how the loop works using the example of an eighth grader trying to study. To wit, from Chapter 5:

The loop starts with an external trigger, such as a notification that someone commented on one of her posts. That’s step 1 and [it] automatically triggers a desire to perform an action (step 2) that had previously been rewarded: Touching the notification to bring up the Instagram app. The action then leads to a pleasurable event, but only sometimes, and this is step 3: A variable reward. Maybe she’ll find some expression of praise or friendship, maybe not. These first three steps are classic behaviorism. They deploy operant conditioning as taught by B. F. Skinner in the 1940s. What the model adds for humans [is a] fourth step: Investment. Humans can be offered ways to put a bit of themselves into the app so that it matters more to them. At this point, the trigger for the next round of behavior may become internal. The girl no longer needs a push notification to call her over to Instagram. As she is rereading a difficult passage in her textbook, the thought pops up in her mind: “I wonder if anyone has liked the photo I posted 20 minutes ago?” She tries to resist temptation, but the mere thought of a possible reward triggers the release of a bit of dopamine, which makes her want to go to Instagram immediately. She goes and finds that nobody liked or commented on her post. She feels disappointment, but her dopamine-primed brain still craves a reward, so she starts looking through her other posts, or her direct messages, or anything that shows that she matters to someone else.

I’m not an eighth grader, I despise social media, I’ve never used Instagram and I consciously limit my interactions with the sort of algorithms which I know employ a similar modus operandi. And yet some version of that loop happens to me every, single day. I’ll bet it happens to a lot of you every day too, if not on social media “proper,” then on YouTube or in your email app.

Note that addiction in this case is synonymous with engagement. In the context of social media, and really in the context of our smart devices in general, addiction and engagement are the same thing. Social media companies use “every trick in the psychologists’ tool kit,” as Haidt put it, to create addicts because an addict is habitually engaged and engagement is the golden goose. Tech companies’ capacity to mint money in the age of the smartphone is a function of their adeptness at generating monetizable engagement. And that’s where the real, existential problem comes in for society.

In the NBER paper mentioned above, the researchers point out that given the media’s mandate to keep the public apprised of “important risks in society,” it makes sense that the news would exhibit “a certain level of general negative bias.” But we’re well beyond that. The news is a veritable highlight reel of horrors, and it’s no secret why. “The world of news… has become increasingly competitive over the years [so] it is natural to expect that to attract a larger audience, many outlets have been increasingly focusing on negative news,” the authors went on to say.

Because more and more people rely on social media for information about current events, that competition — in the world of news — is now inextricably bound up with social media’s addictive feedback loops. As Crise wrote, “angst fuels engagement, engagement sells papers and ads [and] social media has broadened the reach of this phenomenon to an almost unimaginable extent.” Simply put: The apparent correlation between social media use and increased anxiety is readily explained by the fact that social media’s business model is in many respects just the monetization of angst. And it takes place within an ecosystem that’s designed and built to foster addiction.

Affirmation-seeking on social networks — the quest for “digital dopamine,” to quote Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke — encompasses everything from counting “likes” on a selfie to counting retweets of an abrasive political message, with the latter sort of engagement becoming the dominant mode of social media interaction given higher virality for political content, especially that infused with normative language.

In a 2017 study, NYU researchers documented a process they called “moral contagion.” Not surprisingly, assertions of righteousness and normative assessments more generally are associated with higher rates of social media virality. Specifically, the authors found that the use of what they classified as “moral-emotional words” in social media messages increased the diffusion of those posts “by a factor of 20% for each additional word.”

There are any number of important ramifications from that finding, and also from a secondary finding: The use of the same “moral-emotional words” did much more to facilitate intra-group message diffusion than inter-group diffusion. That result, the authors remarked, “highlights one process that may partly explain increasing polarization between liberals and conservatives.” They elaborated: “To the extent the spread of online messages infused with moral-emotional contents is circumscribed by group boundaries, communications about morality are more likely to resemble echo chambers and may exacerbate ideological polarization.”

In other words: That study could be interpreted as evidence for the notion that social media is instrumental in fostering the sort of “biased informational environment,” to quote the authors, which has created an unbridgeable chasm between Americans on either side of the political spectrum.

On September 19, Ezra Klein interviewed Utah governor Spencer Cox who was on the front lines, figuratively and literally, when Charlie Kirk was assassinated a little over a week earlier. Cox is obviously a Republican and a conservative, but as Klein noted, he’s also a man genuinely concerned for the country’s future in the context of violent divisiveness.

In the interview, Klein mentions that while he was on tour promoting his first book — Why We’re Polarized — he worried aloud about a “nightmare scenario” wherein the socio-political environment began to look more the 1960s “but with today’s hyperpolarized parties [and] hyperpolarized social media.” In response, Cox delivered an incisive summary which hit on virtually all the points mentioned above.

“I think [it’s] so critical to understand the differences between then and now, and the way we get our information and consume our information and share our innermost thoughts and feelings with one another in such rapid succession,” he told Klein, on the way to lamenting “the way the algorithms, especially, steal our agency, addict us and show us the worst of humanity to get us that dopamine hit from outrage.”

Historical assassinations, Cox went on, “were not caught on tape.” “[They weren’t] being looped on social media in front of everybody over and over and over again,” Klein interjected. “You had to go turn on a television and watch breaking news,” Cox said, adding that “if you take that divisiveness and polarization of the ’60s and implant it into today’s different media culture, it’s a recipe for something, I believe, far worse.”

Cox’s remarks, I’d be remiss not to note, recall my own from March, when I wrote that “before social media, young adults in the West weren’t constantly exposed to the brutal realities of life outside the Western bubble.” “Before the internet,” I wrote, “a teenager would’ve needed to watch the evening news or, even less likely, read a newspaper, to be apprised of, say, a famine in Somalia. Or a mosque bombing in the Middle East. Or ethnic cleansing in Bosnia.”

Now, with smartphones and social media, the famines, the bombings and the ethnic cleansing are happening in pockets, just waiting to be viewed, shared and looped over and over and over again in high definition.

To reiterate, the deleterious (disastrous) effects of this are by no means confined to teenagers and young adults, although again, I understand the developmental psychology angle and I appreciate that physiological differences make adolescents uniquely vulnerable. In The Anxious Generation, Haidt doesn’t pretend age confers immunity. “Adults in Gen X and prior generations have not experienced much of a rise in clinical depression or anxiety disorders since 2010,” he writes. “But many of us have become more frazzled, scattered and exhausted by our new technologies and their incessant interruptions and distractions.”

No days off

 

It was eight in the morning. 8:01, actually. CVS still wasn’t open. 8:02. 8:03.

“What the fuck are y’all doin’ in there?” I groused out loud to nobody over the similarly impatient grumble of an AMG engine pissed at being forced to idle. I was parked right in front, in the space next to the handicap spot.

It was Friday. I wasn’t in a hurry, but I did have to be back at the house by 8:30 to cover macroeconomic data I didn’t care anything about.

At 8:04, someone inside motioned me in. I turned off the engine and opened the car door. “Excuse me,” the metallic Mercedes voice assistant said, through the car speakers. “You’ve forgotten your phone.” I shut the door and went inside the store.

The clerk had disappeared. I strode over to the supplements aisle and retrieved the only thing I came for: CoQ-10 gummies. Nature’s Bounty brand. Peach mango flavored. Usually they’re buy one, get one at CVS. And they were that day.

I took the gummies up to one of three self-checkouts. I could’ve just stolen them. Save someone milling around in the pharmacy, there wasn’t a human being in sight. No one would’ve noticed. And if they did, no one would’ve cared.

I paid, tapped “no receipt,” walked out and got back in the car. I had a text message. “Hey good morning! If you wanna chat, I’m just sitting here having my tea.”

I’d been sick. Or thought I’d been sick. G knew about it and she was right there. Not in person anymore, but ready to make the trip if it came to that. We’ve spoken maybe five times in 15 years and only seen each other once over the same stretch, but the dynamic’s no different now than it ever was. My problems are hers. It’s tradition. Some bonds don’t break. (“Hell or high water, babe.”) Some vows really are sacred. (“Till 25-to-life do us part.”)

We talked on my drive home. She asked about my health, laughed at my jokes, indulged my ego and entertained my absurdist nostalgia. “Want to go to Savannah?” I asked. There was no hesitation. “I’m down for a trip to Savannah!” she said. “Just say when.” “November.” “What’s in Savannah?” “I want to eat at The Grey,” I told her. “Maybe stay at the Perry Lane.”

I pulled in the garage and thanked her for the pep talk. Before we hung up, she asked what I had planned for the rest of the day. “Nothin’,” I said. “Fridays are kinda like my Saturdays.” “A day off?” “Not as such,” I said. “As close as I get to a day off, though.” “Well you enjoy that.” “I will. And I’ll call you about Savannah.” “Do!”

I went inside, did some writing and watched a man and his son finish installing matte black gutters around a section of my back deck. Once they left I figured I’d do a little reading. Real reading. A book. The physical kind. With real paper pages printed with real ink. Then I’d put on something from my closet I can’t pronounce (I still have trouble with “Margiela”) and go downtown. Maybe I’d have tapas, then dinner across the street at the steakhouse and dessert on the patio at the gelato shop.

The afternoon passed far quicker than I wanted it to. I drank coffee, frowned at headlines and drank more coffee. My phone dinged and chimed with notifications about this or that, all of it important according to someone. The emails didn’t stop. They never do. Around 1:30 I went into the living room and tried to read, but the noise from the gutter installation made it impossible, so I went outside to supervise despite knowing nothing about gutters other than that they channel water.

The gutter guy asked me about crypto, as people are wont to do when I tell them I write about “markets.” He showed me a chart on his phone. It was like all crypto charts people show other people: Shaped like a hockey stick. And like (almost) all crypto charts people show other people, it’ll look like a gutter downspout before too long. He asked if Kirk’s death was impacting the market. “Why would it?” “I don’t know.” “Me neither.”

When they were done I sat on the front porch steps and waited on a couple of shirt samples I ordered from Portugal (tariff $58). I refreshed the real-time delivery tracker on my phone over and over, watching the little truck icon get closer and closer to my street. After a while it pulled up by the curb but instead of getting out, the delivery guy pointed at me. “That a ‘Freedom shirt’?!” he shouted, flashing a thumbs up.

I looked down at my hoodie, a plain white piece with Helmut Lang’s iconic all-caps on the front in black. “No?” I half-said, half-asked. “Oh, ok,” he said. I tried to ask him about my package but he had AirPods in and didn’t hear me. He drove away. I sat back down on the front steps. A few minutes later he was back with my package. “Shit man, my bad. I didn’t even realize I had something for you,” he apologized, with a sheepish laugh. It wasn’t until days later that I figured out what a “Freedom shirt” is.

I went in and put the package on the coffee table in the living room next to the book I wanted to start but didn’t. By then it was 5:30 or so. Time to get ready if I really wanted to go for dinner. “Sorry,” I said to Branko Milanovic’s Visions Of Inequality. “Maybe tomorrow.”

I sat at the end of the tapas bar next to a wall and picked at some not-very-good chorizo hand pies and something that was supposed to be burrata but clearly wasn’t. I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of person-to-person socializing going on around me, but it was interrupted at regular intervals by the instinctual checking of phones. Everyone with the same muscle memory: Left hand pulls the phone toward the body on the table, thumb clicks the right-side iPhone button to wake up the screen. “Anything? Anybody?”

I wandered over to the steakhouse and took a seat at the bar beside Rose, a social butterfly in the Brett Ashley tradition, although she wouldn’t know it. If anybody’s going to read classic literature in 2025, it won’t be Rose. She was still mad at me from two months ago. “I’m trying to be more personable,” I told her. She scoffed. “Last time he gave me ‘fuck off’ vibes,” she told the bartender. (That wasn’t true. She’d asked me where she could find me on the internet, presumably meaning social media, and I told her “nowhere,” which she took as a personal slight.)

Rose was drunk and making a show of refreshing her Gmail inbox with exaggerated downward index finger swipes on one of the big iPhones. “I hear if you refresh it enough times, it’ll actually create new mail,” I joked. “Oh you’re so funny,” she slurred. “He’s so funny!” she sang out, to everyone within earshot. “I have to go across the street and look after the bookings,” she declared, with a melodramatic flourish. “Now?” the bartender, a Brad if ever there was one, wondered. “Yes, now,” she said. “Can you just keep this spot for me? And don’t take my drink. I’ll come back for it. Back to finish it I mean.”

Rose had only recently landed a real job in the hospitality industry having graduated from food and beverage to an administrative position at one of downtown’s only two decent hotels. Now she carries herself like Blythe Masters. She sashayed out the front door and we laughed, Brad and I. “You know that story she tells about me isn’t true,” I said. “We all love her, but Rose is full of shit,” he sighed. Then he asked about politics.

“What do you think about all this… stuff?” he enunciated. “You mean the–” He finished my sentence: “The Trump stuff and Charlie Kirk. Crazy, right? You’ve always got hot takes.” I cringed. I’d talked politics with him before, but on slow nights, when the bar was empty. This was a Friday night, the bar was full and suddenly I was “hot take” guy. “I think it’s driving us crazy,” I said. “You can’t get away from it. It’s all day, every day, and there’s no break.” He nodded gravely, oblivious to the implication (he was part of the problem).

I ordered dinner. About the time my black bass showed up, Rose was back. She hadn’t gone to the hotel office. She’d been off to another bar. She was even drunker than when she left. “Have an express–” she struggled, then tried again. “Have an espresso martini with me.” “I don’t drink,” I reminded her. “Oh, he doesn’t drink!” she waved her hand around. Back to the dramatics. “I’ll buy you one, though” I offered. “No. You gave me ‘fuck off’ vibes last time.” She was in the repeating yourself stage of Friday night drunkenness. That’s only two stages away from falling off the chair.

I humored her. “Well, let me make it up to you.” “No. I have to go anyway.” “To check on the bookings again?” She was far too drunk to recognize the sarcasm. “No, I have to go upstairs.” She meant the rooftop bar, which only has a few Fridays left before it closes for the season. She pulled on my arm: “Come on, you’re going.” I laughed and pointed to my food: “I haven’t even started dinner.” “Oh, never mind then,” she groaned. “You’re a liberal anyway.” I laughed again. “How can you tell?” “I just know these things,” she said, gathering herself up as best she could and tottering away to the stairs in the back.

I ate my bass and it was fine. It came with farro, dill butter and haricot vert. By the time I finished dinner the gelato shop was closed, so there’d be no dessert. That was ok. I was ready to call it a night. Nothing much happened that day and I saw plenty of people, most of them agreeable enough. But it all felt somehow demanding and unmistakably pressurized. In the end, I was exhausted, scattered and more than a little lonely.

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