As the World Cup romped across the country in the past month, troves of spirited spectators in tow, social media started to buzz with something interesting. First-person dispatches were popping up of international visitors enthralled by our sprawling supermarkets, our sociable citizens, our spacious gas stations, even our favorite salad dressings. Astonishment bled from a chorus of accented voices as they trawled our cities and chimed in with how charmed they were by our quirky conveniences, our unexpected hospitality, all our unsolicited smiles.

The storm of positive reviews from foreigners grew, the topic eventually landing on the evening news as bemused broadcasters took a stab at explaining this unusual bout of flattering commentary. Where had it come from and why? U.S. citizens couldn’t help but wonder, eyes squinted in disbelief, Did we deserve it? And yet, for many Americans, underneath this scoffing of our national merits was a rustling of hope, a pinch of pride. Maybe we aren’t so terrible after all, was the cheerful thought floating into our minds.

Subscribe now

The surprise embrace of American culture in the wake of the World Cup has been revealing on two levels. Not only did it expose the crusty, cynical criticism many of us live and breathe regarding our own country, but it uncovered all the ways the rest of the globe had felt deceived about the corruption and chaos said to be choking all our communities. It’s popular to snark on our shoddy safety set and chuckle about our abused tax dollars, to groan about urban decay and fulminate against our inept, obnoxious elites. These are legitimate resentments, mind you. But it’s a mistake to assume that these elements, however large and looming, are the whole picture, that our national character is exclusively defined by them, that we are irredeemably smeared by our incompetencies.

Hit pieces on our national flaws are so common and so eagerly gobbled up that we do not realize a diet of self-loathing is unsustainable, that in order to improve something we might have to actually appreciate something about it first. Enter: the World Cup congregants who inspired a pleasant perspective-shift that punctured the mirage of America’s inherent rottenness—a story that’s been peddled heavily in the past decade-plus, and pressed into the minds of schoolchildren. This brief blip of vertigo has made us stop and consider whether our national scorn is wholly justified and really worthwhile.

National denigration has thrived in the 21st-century and it’s been encouraged by the power dynamics popularized by postmodern theory just as much as it’s been goaded on by an unrelenting news cycle. The deconstruction of metanarratives might have first become fashionable in universities, but it didn’t take long to leak to public streets. While critique of national myths was a useful exercise, it became tough to know when to slow down and sniff the roses that did line the path of our supposedly sordid history. Everyone became an overnight expert at dismantling this or that “system of power” and proposing grand alternatives but simultaneously grew helpless in picking part the good from the bad, in holding flaws in one hand and talents in the other.

This slippery slope of ideological purity culminated in the years of “wokeness” from which sputtered hordes of aggrieved voices clutching dreary recitations of Critical Theory. We called this “Progress” but failed to realize that it is hard and unhealthy to exist in an environment where everything is terrible and nothing is good. When your peers take to social media to chatter on about colonialism and complain about “problematic” ads, you might do it too. Criticism is contagious, and in this environment pulling out the positives can look like a challenge, like opposition to the tradition of grievances that Progress is assumed to be precipitated by.

After all, social media is ruled by those who style themselves as either aspirational or miserable but those who have even-handed, contented musings to offer gain far less traction. To add to this, national news sensationalism has spent years eclipsing the low-drama, wholesome reporting of local journalists. Unhelpfully, many see the alternative to pillorying our national shortcomings as adopting a frenzied nationalism, which rightfully gives them the ick. But it is hardly the only choice and we’re beginning to see this with fresh eyes.

The World Cup coverage has helped to fish us out of our stew of resentments and to see the perks and peculiarities of our nation for what they are—just that. It is so easy to forget the liberties we do have and focus on those we do not. Schooled to never stop improving and to atone for our historical sins, we almost find something unrighteous about enjoying the small things that make America, America. Self-conscious about our brash, bumbling reputation on the world stage we were not prepared for Europeans to get misty-eyed about our menus, the marvels of our air-conditioning, our national parks, our friendly vibes.

Some will say that foreigners have been flocking to vacation in the U.S. for ages and scratch their heads over the authenticity of what smells suspiciously like a PR makeover. Certainly understandable. But the sheer scale of newcomers, all partaking in the communal experience of boots-on-the-ground immersion in American culture was simply a surefire recipe for a social media storm. Eager to capture their novel discoveries and chronicle their historic World Cup adventuring, it’s no surprise the globe started to tune in.

The World Cup is a spectacularly unifying event, a gorgeous global mash-up of cultures and lively competition that spans summer weeks. If you think about it, sporting events are one of the few nonpolitical arenas we allow ourselves to splash around in patriotism. It’s a bleakly common assumption that we can only explore feelings of patriotism where politics are involved—that politics precedes patriotism and is necessarily inseparable from it. Giant, collaborative, universal events like the World Cup remind us this is not the case. In our case, international visitors were reassured to see that Americans were awfully accepting and even celebratory about the cultures spectators carried with them overseas, finding that we weren’t exactly the weird, isolationist, xenophobic caricature the media and global elites had made us out to be.

In the afterglow of the World Cup lies three dichotomies and realizations worth reflecting on as they pertain to rehabilitating our national self-perception. The first is between individuals and institutions. We as domestic inhabitants, just as much as onlookers abroad, are guilty of pinning our nation purely on our flawed institutions and our bad policies, on our political headlines and our controversial laws. But we don’t deserve this. So much of this abstract machinery is beyond our daily control. In reality, we’re allowed to be defined by local “insignificances” like our social mannerisms and our tried-and-true recipes and our Sunday afternoon rituals. There is so much life outside the systems we seethe against. We needn’t think them untouchable and unchangeable, but we should recognize that there is so much vibrancy and authenticity that fills in the cracks beyond them.

The second of these dichotomies/realizations is similar and it is that of culture vs. politics. Infusing all of life with politics isn’t enjoyable and where we might have earlier sensed a moral negligence in preventing this takeover, I think we’re beginning to grasp the wonders of it. It’s a relief to imagine that all of life needn’t be irretrievably sullied by the chess moves of our errant politicians but that there are some corners where their names need not be uttered, nor their ideas conjured.

We are so accustomed to perceiving the Politics section of online newspapers as serious, meaty, and morally necessary and to see the Culture sections as trivial, frivolous, mere icing on the cake, something nutritionally void that we could scrape off if we wanted. But no, the local practices and viral trends, common fascinations and celebrity cults, the behavioral shifts and collective neuroses carry more weight than we think. This is hardly to say that one is better than the other, only that yet again, there is much life outside of our institutional failures and political circuses that give us personality and that onlookers might find interesting, even occasionally commendable.

The third of these dichotomies/realizations as it pertains to our post-World-Cup fandom is that of “great” vs. “good enough”. We could not have imagined how enamored our international guests would be by our strange, rowdy land, in part because we’ve been stuck in the punishing purgatory of judging our nation as either “great” or “terrible”. This dramatic language has been cooked into the presidential-campaign sloganeering of late (see: the last few elections) and it isn’t hard to see why we cling to such an unforgiving polarity.

In the end, even if you fall into the camp of mostly believing America to be “terrible,” you don’t want it to be. Secretly, everyone wants to be great (although we naturally differ on what that looks like). We are not as captivated by being “good-enough”—even the label seems to suggest apathy and giving up. But there is freedom in being “good-enough,” in striving not towards abstract notions of national perfection but aiming instead towards appreciation for the good that exists and exerting an honest effort in making one’s corner of the world a kinder, more interesting, more vibrant place. Individual efforts are bound to be imperfect, but that’s the inescapable nature of things.

After all, striving for “good” rather than “great” is so much more forgiving to the human spirit, healing to our communitarian instincts, and tempering to our political differences. We may have momentarily lost ourselves as Americans in the heat of our social crises and national scandals and global embarrassments galore, but the rest of the world who washed up on our shores this summer, bearing kind words and glowing reviews seemed to return our dignity just a bit, to remind us of our unique strengths, and to show us that our country is so much more than our floundering figureheads and our institutional failings and in that “so much more” lies freedom and fun and friendship and festivity that we forget is ours for the taking.

Share AMERICANA

Every once in a while, a YouTube thumbnail graces my screen, bearing the morose visage of some twentysomething slumped in the dim interior of their car with the title, rendered in *I give up* lowercase, “I have no friends”. These low-budget confessionals have seen a surprising surge in recent years. Comment sections are cluttered with the echos of those who find solace and solidarity in the creator’s disclosures, who are hungry for connection themselves but disillusioned by the process of finding it.

In a stroke of irony so befitting the internet age, the commiserating commenters succeed in finding a community of sorts—an enclave of mutual feeling and understanding. This looks wonderful at first glance, and indeed often is, but it’s an insufficient salve for the actual problems of companionship. Online solidarity doesn’t correct the common feeling of social loss we refer to when we talk about the peculiar pains of forming adult friendships, or the uncanny distance modern life seems to crater between us and others.

Subscribe now

These video dispatches, so often filmed by relative “nobodies” and launched with a shrug into the online ether are striking in that they look like a desperate bid for connection in apparently one of the only ways that feels viable. Solitary creation is followed by anonymous release into the internet wild, allowing the random and ruthless tumult of market forces to work their magic after which one either wilts into obscurity or rockets to virality.

It’s no secret that Americans are feeling lonelier than ever. This, despite the myriad of ways we’ve proferred to “digitally connect,” despite our relative proximity to our fellow humans, despite our confessional culture. Since survey data on the young generations has started to pour in, the collective feeling has taken on more drastic proportions, with many branding Gen Z the loneliest generation of them all.

Why is this? I’m not convinced we can pin the blame on the drying-up of third spaces, or even file it under the ironies of big-bad social media. One thing that can be observed: we seem to have experienced a cultural cheapening of friendship. There’s been a slow but palpable shrinking away from spontaneous connection and candid conversation, from friend groups and dinner parties, from casual invites and phone calls and handwritten letters, from all the secret-keeping and partner-in-crime adventure-seeking that one-on-one bonds are famous for. Modern life appears to have bequeathed a bleak transactional quality onto our relationships and a peculiar social exhaustion--born at least partly from overexposure to digital chatter and its mirage of connection.

It’s common to trawl for companionship on apps, drafting up personal advertisement blurbs and thinly-veiled divulgences of urban loneliness. We do not realize the extent to which this kind of aesthetic marketing is historically abnormal when it comes to forging human connection. W’re apt to call it efficient problem-solving, pleased with the powers of technology that can do the work of filtering and foraging for friends for us.

Social media has hardly proved the paradisal playground we once envisioned, but has become a bunch of lonely stages from which we toy with public perception, obscuring a bit here, fabricating a bit there, all to escape the horrors of being unmasked to who we really are by the sea of invisible onlookers we call our followers and friends.

So focused on the pressures of being perceived have we become, we’ve forgotten the pleasures of being truly known and understood. Instagram likes feel like a flash of recognition, a literal “I see you,” though hardly a figurative one. Our brains have a hard time sorting these signals—the friendly face-to-face of a mass-circulated “storytime” clip vs. a chatty friend’s real-time narrative as they sit across from you, the two of you suspended in social symbiosis. All this synthetic sociality stirred-in makes us lonely but exhausted. Plus, confused about why we’re so socially exhausted.

Many things have happened to make this so. Funnily enough, we’ve become so habituated to constant visuals of the human face, to faces talking at us but not with us, a strange problem short-form video content has undoubtedly worsened. It’s not hard to see how our brains code this one-sided chatter as social interaction when it is actually anything but. Grievously, we’ve also eroded the barrier between our public and private lives thanks to technology’s steady creep into the home, leading to the frustrated fatigue of being permanently available, the “corruption” of rest, and the tangled desires to both be left alone and to be seen, neither truly sated with much regularity.

We’ve also seen an interesting rise in recorded montages of the mundane, “tag along with me as I declutter my kitchen” content as a prime example. Perhaps it’s simply a new product serving an urge that has always been there—to watch another woman sort her silverware and scrub her countertops, but I’d guess it’s a newer fascination--both the sharing of such monotonies and the rabid viewing of them. It’s possible this domestic camaraderie is just a weird iteration of what previous generations of women had long participated in. Taking care of home and hearth was once, as we know, a far more collective endeavor.

Hungering for lost companionship, we end up forming parasocial relationships with these online figures whom we admire or identify with, and subconsciously consider a “friend”. Such one-sided relationships (dependent only on our digital engagement) are naturally, far simpler to keep up than the in-person, real-deal variety.

We see this acutely in Gen Z and Gen Alpha who spend more time trawling the internet and frequenting online personalities than they do having sleepovers with their own friends. The former is easy and safe, on-demand and predictable. The latter is emotionally risky, plagued by the chaotic rhythms of social coziness and random cold shoulders.

Steeped in the market logic of the personal brand, young people are also learning how to perfect their public perception but are flummoxed when this proficiency does not automatically generate a social circle. Driven to assume that friendship is something only authenticated if witnessed by others (say, by a post tag, a joint selfie, or public declarations of bestie-status) it’s forgotten that friendship is a private project and a confidential negotiation.

Most of true friendship-forging happens behind the scenes, in messy moments that go undocumented. Through struggles and joys shared and the necessary elixir of time, a comforting intimacy evolves that could not have been procured sans patience and proximity, vulnerability and effort. These are the kinds of “analog” attributes that we overlook in the digital age when so many of our relationships are fostered by technology and feel transactional and disposable as a result. The internet can “draw us together,” make it easy-peasy to slide into a DM or schedule a coffee date, but it can’t erase the labors needed to forge intimacy and create the camaraderie we so desire.

William Deresiewicz, the famed social critic and author of the essay collection, “The End of Solitude,” once wrote on the false promises of social media: “Friendship is devolving [. . .] from a relationship to a feeling, from something people share to something each of us hugs privately to ourselves in the loneliness of our electronic caves, rearranging the tokens of connection like a lonely child playing with dolls”.

And later on, “Instead of community, what we have now, if we’re lucky, is a “sense of community”—the feeling without the structure, a private emotion, not a collective experience”. No wonder we are confused by our loneliness in the face of our follower lists, social apps, overeager online creators clogging our daily feeds. It’s all the feeling of friendship, without the actual thing.

So we have to come back to our roots. Not by kicking technology to the curb, nor by grumbling about some imagined golden age of friendship, but by remembering that the tonic for loneliness lies in reaching-out, repetition, and hammering out real-life relationships.

It ought to be encouraging that despite every technological workaround and digital substitute that’s materialized, we remain stubbornly hungry for the real thing. Imperfect and occasionally inconvenient, friendship chafes against prevailing technocratic logic but in the end it is a very human thing to crave the experience of companionship, the comfort of feeling known, and the spark of being fully alive in the social web that spans our planet.

Have you ever spent an afternoon shopping, absentmindedly skimming your hands over shirt sleeves, and had the realization: yikes, it all feels the same: flimsy, filmy material that clings, proves infuriatingly see-through, and is but a few washes away from a rouge hole? Synthetic fabrics have been taking the world by storm for decades now, polyester the famed front-runner of a full arsenal that includes rayon, nylon, viscose, acrylic, spandex, and more. Our closets have become filled with fabrics that have been cooked up with harsh chemicals and plastic compounds and have had the life absolutely beaten out of them with caustic detergents and dyes.

Polyester production continues to steamroll its natural fiber competitors, but more and more Americans are starting to side-eye synthetic fabrics. Why? Headlines drop that laundering them releases millions of microplastics. Photos circulate that show fast-fashion waste clogging waterways and choking ocean life. Chatter heats up around the soup of endocrine-disrupting chemicals our clothes slosh around in before they are shipped overseas from faraway factories and land in our brightly-lit chain retailers.

Subscribe now

Clothes have largely been an overlooked health concern and environmental liability until recently. It is unnerving to consider that our bodies are not just sensitive to the foods we eat but permeable to the fabrics we wear too. Not very pleasant, either, to think about where our cast-off clothing ends up when we tire of last year’s trends and chuck them unceremoniously from our closets. Disturbingly, polyester and its sister fabrics take years to decompose compared to cotton’s impressive few months.

To have speed-run the adoption of synthetic fabrics and reached the saturation point we have in our stores, wardrobes, and landfills feels deeply American in all its unapologetic ambition and unchecked growth. But so too does its grassroots backlash smack of American values in all its entrepreneurial energy, its newly-appointed gurus, its political edge. How did we arrive at a place where most of our clothes are made of plastic and, at the same time, an increasingly noisy faction is clamoring to stem the tide of synthetics washing up on our shores? (Quite literally too, you might add.)

When polyester was first unleashed on the American public in the 1950s it gained star status as a miracle fabric that was cheap, wrinkle-resistant, and shockingly durable. Housewives were given a break from the daily drudgery of ironing and were spared some of the laundering hassles that came with clothes fading, shrinking, and stretching. Low-maintenance, functionally superior, and ripe for mass production, polyester garments began rolling off the assembly line, oftentimes in bright colors and fun prints.

Polyester suffered a blow by the time the ‘80s rolled around, having gained a reputation for being itchy, uncomfortable, and slightly tacky. Among its drawbacks, it wasn’t very breathable and tended to trap heat and perspiration. As comfort gained priority in consumer fashion, polyester’s comeback would arrive in the form of performance gear. Customers began snatching up activewear and outdoor garb marketed as “moisture-wicking” that utilized new-and-improved polyester fibers blended with old favorites like Spandex. This resurgence marked the shift of polyester from a novel textile that curbed common fabric frustrations to a performance-enhancing fabric that solved the bodily woes of friction, sweat, too hot and too cold.

Polyester proved rather democratizing; as a textile it was versatile and inexpensive and required little care and investment, a feature that also rendered it easier to psychologically dispose of it. Its midcentury popularity marked by cheap, mass-produced iterations set into motion the high-churn, fast-fashion cycle that was to come.

These days, the fast-fashion machine is lambasted for its wastefulness and exploitation, its egregious excesses, its environmental burden. But it is the result of a long feedback loop between customers and corporations rather than a more recent capitalist hunger. Generations of Americans were charmed by polyester’s perks and became hooked on its ease, its affordability, and its wardrobe-expanding potential. Companies followed this appetite, pounding out new designs, crunching production timelines, chemically cooking up new fabrics, and offshoring manufacturing.

It took a surprising number of decades before the full environmental impact of polyester’s takeover was discovered. Its production emitted toxic waste products and required a discouraging reliance on fossil fuels. Abandoned garments dumped in landfills carried a high pollution rate. When ‘microplastics’ first emerged as a health threat in the early aughts, synthetic fibers entered the crosshairs of the medical community.

Recycled polyester has become heralded as the industry’s saving grace in recent years, boasting lower carbon footprints and less petroleum reliance, but it doesn’t solve the microplastics problem. Slippery and weirdly waterproof, recycled polyester is essentially melted-down water bottles. Novel-sounding at first, it’s unnerving before too long, evidence of our national knack for replacing one blacklisted ingredient with another equally troubling one. Ingenious and imperfect though recycled polyester is, the challenge still remains: how to square our evolved appetites for new clothing with both the environmental impacts and health risks that large volumes of “plastic” clothing poses.

Key forces have shaped this counterculture movement. Small businesses have sprouted up catering to the clothing-conscious crowd. Influencers squawk about natural fibers. Linen pants have made a splashy summer comeback. Scrounging for fabric content tags has picked up. Thrifting has become a fashionable hobby, more a demonstration of one’s sustainability conscience than any penny-pinching flex. Studies drop daily with even more incriminating microplastic findings. Our current health secretary has even pilloried our national plastic dependency and plattered up programs to reduce it. Intriguingly, this backlash against synthetic fibers seems to pattern itself along the lines of the “slow living” movement, the de-consumption manifesto, the organic food revival and other such “against the grain” campaigns.

America has long been hobbled by a particular pattern of genius invention followed by insatiable urge to scale, followed by secret regret, followed by organized rebellion. The rush of ambition, speed, and convenience takes center stage in the beginning and are equipped to do so only because a deliberate detachment from consequences has been cultivated. The reinvention cycle is lithe and agile, but it must work against new grooves etched into the brains of the public, new expectations, new appetites. It’s worth remembering that polyester isn’t just in our garments either; it’s in our carpets and our bedding, our upholstery and our seatbelts. In fact, its sheer cultural suffusion is an indication of our national talent for solving problems faster than we can understand the consequences of our actual solutions.

Having found ourselves in a world swimming in plastics (and likely a closetful of them) we’re left to decide what to do our eventual disillusionment. Freak out or find a way forward? The latter, preferably. Trying to scrub our modern environments of impurities will have us breaking out in hives, for suddenly nothing seems “safe” and from a microscopic level we’re all being invisibly infiltrated.

But there’s plenty we can do. Opt for natural fibers. Check fabric tags more often. Buy less. Install microfiber filters. Tweak our clothes philosophy. Modern life is awash with the dilemmas of ease and its deterrents. Polyester may have delivered miracles, but it delivered us messes too. As is always the story, the burden of the 21st-century citizen is to decide how much convenience to keep and how much responsibility we’re ready to take back.

We lost something when we stopped fumbling around with paper money. Its crinkly feel under our thumbs, its tangible weight in our palms, its slight odor wafting up to our noses. We also lost something when we stopped swiping credit cards. Their plasticky heft, the familiar flick of our wrists, the motion of monetary exchange melted into our muscle memory. Far from extinct, payment cards are nevertheless leaving wallets less and less these days as their digital counterparts steal the spotlight. The digital wallet is less cumbersome, yes, and literally at your fingertips as the saying goes, but it’s not just an invention of convenience. It’s making spending itself feel more convenient. And that’s important. Because it means saving itself feels that much harder.

Official numbers appear to confirm this hunch. The American savings rate as a percentage of disposable income has hovered in the 3% range for the past few years, ticking up, to everyone’s surprise, to 4.5% at the start of this year. But even this rebound sits below historical norms of 8-10% and even an “encouraging” statistic like this one throws us off the scent of what precipitated our long-range downtrend in the first place.

High inflation rates and interest rates are only part of the story. For many Americans, money feels more slippery than it once did. It slithers out of bank accounts, sneaks off in the form of invisible mobile payments, slips through unsuspecting fingers. It’s easy to assume that we lack the moral scruples of our forebears who were seemingly hardy and disciplined—to quip that we are lazy and spineless in comparison. But moral explanations are too self-flagellating, and more to the point, incomplete. We forget that we are not just the sum of our internal decisions, but our external environments too—in this case, an external environment that is increasingly spend-happy and saver-averse.

Subscribe now

It starts with frictionless purchases. In the name of scrubbing consumer annoyance one-click checkouts emerged. In the name of bypassing penny-pinching woes, buy-now-pay-later options popped up. Credit card details automatically populate. Last-minute items are thrust onto the screen as “helpful” add-to-order suggestions. Subscriptions are innocently toggled on. These effects are a natural evolution of technology and capitalism, aiming always towards convenience and cash.

As consumers, it is easy to feel a bit charmed by these fun functionalities, even if the bitter aftertaste of their true motives lurks in the background. When spoken to in human language, “Hey, forgot this?” it’s easy to brand these intrusions as benevolent. Checkout conveniences likes these aren’t just smoothing wrinkles on what were previously clunkier monetary exchanges. Where they add ease, they subtract resistance. This may seem obvious when explained, but the shadow-side of modern improvements isn’t always immediately perceptible. Over the years, retailers and their technological trickery have been busy converting spending from an active pursuit to a passive one. Have you felt this?

On the flip side, canceling a subscription involves trudging through a forest of links. Removing a needless tacked-on gratuity requires a sheepish opting-out. Wriggling out of the free-trial before the charges hit entails a flurry of clicks and triggers a barrage of wheedling language (”you’re missing out. . . .”) That you feel pinpricked with more guilt for not spending the money is the point. When money was more tangible and when parting with it required more conscious choice, the subtle guilt was baked into the action of spending it. Only you alone could divest yourself of it, only you could really make value-calculations.

Modern advertising decided to get their hands messy with emotional appeals decades ago and later would use our personal data to forge intimate profiles of our needs and wants, sweet-talking their way into our wallets. Such conveniences famously masquerade as deliverers of more control and choice, but oftentimes they are silently doing just the opposite, and we are none the wiser.

One of the overlooked economic indicators of our age is spending velocity. Money switches hands far more rapidly than it once did. Economists like to call this “consumer confidence,” and flaunt inflated GDP figures as proof, but it’s also just an unavoidable byproduct of corporate strategy and contemporary technology. If a penniless college student avails herself of BNPL plans, are we so sure we’re to call that “positive economic growth”?

Our fast-money feel is surely also a sign of our shriveled strength in delayed gratification. Each generation becomes more itchy about waiting and twitchy with the pain of anticipation than the last. When the world has proven so adept at serving up instant replies, one-day delivery, and on-demand entertainment, waiting feels bizarrely like a crime. Not just a crime against oneself, but an affront to the “generosities” of modern technology itself.

Somewhat obviously, saving depends on waiting and resisting, the very things we’ve been expertly trained out of. Saving money also depends on surrounding ourselves with influences that promote it. Of the army of influencers that trawl the internet, it’s worth noting that few are financially frugal. The typical influencer is a product-pusher—a bug-eyed, fast-talking personality that blends and bends “content” and “ad” until they have become one and the same thing.

Chided for overconsumption, influencers nevertheless manage to normalize expensive taste to the masses. Being the social animals that we are, it is hard not to react to what everyone else appears to have. In their girl-next-door acts, influencers are fond of doubling down on their contrived relatability all the while they are swimming in PR packages, ad revenue, and sponsored vacations. Visual-heavy and viral, social media is predicated on the aesthetics of consumption and the mechanics of fast-turnover. It’s not an especially hospitable environment for hopeful savers to splash around in, to say the least.

Eager to keep pace with their peers, many individuals fall prey to the dreaded “lifestyle creep“ once they score a promotion or get a windfall. Instead of pocketing the excess, it’s all too effortless to upgrade and indulge under the short-sighted justification of “I can afford it now”. This self-imposed inflated cost-of-living becomes painful to scale back later, not just because it means “less nice things” but because it requires an identity-shift and a public whittling of one’s personal brand. Especially because so many of the things we buy can be personalized and experiential, and because we can dangerously lean on the articles of consumerism to define us and gives our lives meaning, we can end up with the perception that saving money = the dilution of our identity.

It is often remarked that savings have taken a tumble because young generations are cynical about the future, skeptical of long-term stability, and nonchalant about retirement payoffs. But there’s another reason worth looking at that’s less emotional and more structural. In the past, “growing up” was characterized by shared milestones and predictable rites-of-passage in a way that growing-up today just isn’t as much.

Buying a house isn’t the humdrum adult achievement that it once as. It’s in no way guaranteed or even expected in some circles. Birth rates are falling (with many citing economic concerns) and the voice of “childfree” evangelists is growing louder by the minute. Life trajectories have splintered and branched off into a multiplicity of conceivable paths. There’s many things to embrace about this new flexibility, but it doesn’t come without a vaguely distressing ambiguity. A future that feels hazy is a future that feels much harder to bother squirreling away for.

Harder still, you could say, to save for a future that social media, the slow death of delayed gratification, and frictionless spending makes you believe doesn’t really exist. This is an ironic reality during a cultural moment when self-professed rates of anxiety and rumination are sky-high. One would think such fretting would have us scrimping and scavenging, but it seems we’ve evolved to use spending as a salve more than anything else.

And it’s a salve that our modern ecosystem is none too happy to help deliver. In the end, the cost of making spending “easier” is that we as its “users” collect all its toxic byproducts. It’s we who must grapple with the contradictions of convenience and control. It’s we who must erect an internal resistance against the spend-happy ethos when external resistance has toppled and can no longer temper it. You’re not alone if saving feels harder now, we’re just living in an age that makes it feel less and less natural.

Wind the clock back a few decades and health-conscious women were sweating it out on lengthy treadmill sessions, stocking their fridges with low-fat yogurt, shying away from weights, and bleating their moral manifestos of “burning it off”. The aerobic craze of the '80s was followed by the waif-like aesthetics of the '90s which tumbled into the long-and-lean, low-rise glamor of the early aughts. Women learned to swallow the stress of smallness, to mince mealtimes, and to compute calories. Femininity became inseparable from a wafer-thin appetite, from a paper-thin physique—and also, it would appear, from brittle bones.

Researchers had begun sounding the alarm and tip-toeing into female physiology during this era but their scientific breakthroughs were ultimately no match for the strong cultural winds that brought skinny-chic, food restriction, and the cardio-bunny craze to the fore. Over time it became clear just how disproportionately the female frame suffered from crumbling bones and how scarily vulnerable the scaffolding of women’s bodies were to their past choices and personal histories.

Subscribe now

Nowadays, some 8 million women have osteoporosis, a figure that makes up 80% of the nation’s total, and countless more have its less-severe precursor osteopenia. Worryingly, it’s even been estimated that 50% of women over the age of 50 will sustain a fracture at some point in their lives. Throughout this awakening, an old myth was being overturned: Osteoporosis was not, in fact, an inevitability of advancing age but a consequence of bones left chronically unfortified and neglected. Unfortunately, it’s taken decades since these findings were first unearthed to gain serious cultural traction and scores of women have suffered from this lag and are shuffling around with shaky skeletons as a result.

Women are notoriously more prone to osteoporosis thanks to comparatively smaller bone mass and the sharp drop in estrogen that menopause occasions—a perilous period in which bone density plummets. Scientists had once speculated that women with fragile bones were to play it safe and avoid putting stress on their already-compromised frames. The opposite turned out to be true. Only through being brutalized by heavy strain would one’s bones strengthen themselves at all. This, in conjunction with consuming sufficient calcium and vitamin D, which the majority of Americans flounder in achieving.

In another new twist, it was discovered that bone mass peaked at around the time adolescence flipped into adulthood and that by age 30, bone formation could no longer outpace the natural bone breakdown of aging. This had startling implications, one of which was that shoring up healthy bones had a quasi-deadline. This was not a particularly encouraging find, given how malleable we would like to think our bodies can be.

Bones are a funny piece of our anatomy, a deceptively inert, visually-bland element of our inner mechanics. They’re just kind-of there, taken-for-granted, the stubborn detritus our bodies leave behind when everything else decays and dries up. In reality, they’re a living tissue with a long memory, soaking in our body’s biochemical signals like a sponge. And they’re cruelly asymptomatic until they’re suddenly not, splintering once they’ve finally had enough.

In the last decade or so, bone health has gained a foothold in the popular conversation thanks to the longevity movement’s come-up, a growing interest in preventative medicine, and the widespread availability of DEXA scans—the industry’s gold standard for calculating bone mineral density. The weightlifting wave that arrived in the 2010s and swept women into gyms has certainly helped too, popularizing becoming strong as an enviable goal. Female gym-goers soon joined the men stirring chalky powders into shaker bottles, with creatine use crossing gender lines, and protein supplement sales shooting through the roof.

At the same time, concerns have surfaced in recent years that an aesthetic correction is afoot, with skinniness once again taking center stage. The “pilates princess“ became an internet “it girl”, and “#SkinnyTok“ started serving up rehashed “thinspiration“. Shrunk-down celebrities started trotting out to shocked audiences with snatched waistlines and sunken cheeks, meanwhile GLP-1s with their easy-breezy injectables and nonstop ads effectively clobbered the body-positivity movement in its tracks.

If you know anything about the infamous fashion cycle and its predictable tendency to resurface body trends, this shift shouldn’t necessarily come as a surprise. Besieged by invisible tastemakers, cultures always make the ideal body a moving target. But there’s a distinction we have to make. Our bodies aren’t merely ornamental, a flippant aesthetic casing. They’re our lifelong infrastructure, a ledger of all that we have lived through.

The change that the 21st-century wrought was that science began to challenge the aesthetic imperative of the day, and even an older ethos that treated the body as happenstance—as an apathetic vehicle that the universe handed you. Suddenly, it did actually matter how you treated them over the lifespan, and it mattered deeper into your formative years than earlier expected, and tragically not all infractions were so easily correctable (as in the case of bones).

What was good for looks wasn’t always good for longevity. As health conversations have heated up, however, they’ve butted up against the equally powerful punch of a social media landscape that can—thanks to its arsenal of digital editing tools—slyly whittle women’s bodies under our unsuspecting eyes and crown aesthetics above all else.

Here’s the kicker: Even as health-consciousness has become more fashionable, knowledge can only sway culture so much. That’s how we can have raining accolades for osteopathic doctors and their bone-health PSAs at the very same time that we can have young women flocking back to exposed rib cages and protruding hip bones.

It’s a culturally confusing moment and one that has real consequences. It’s the perfect example of our health knowledge and our aesthetic obsessions moving at different speeds, exerting different influences, and not always syncing up. We know more about the urgency of women’s bone health than ever before, and while shapeshifting beauty ideals remain a formidable force, awareness at least gives us the chance to build stronger skeletons than our female predecessors. Women have long been told to shrink, but maybe strength finally does have a shot at coming out on top.

Known for its uncanny, vacant stares and fondness for doomscrolling, for slippery situationships and shoulder-shrugs towards debt, Gen Z has become the poster child for cultural checking-out. Is it any surprise, when generational guarantees have crumbled, the Singularity lurches ever closer, and our attention spans have been burnt to a crisp? Let it not be lost on us that the young generation has historically carried the torch of hope and revolution, of social change and new beginnings. While still alive, that flame has faltered. Neither hard-charging and optimistic, nor fuming and foaming-at-the-mouth, today’s twenty-somethings are stuck in a confusing middle-ground, paddling around in a purgatory of disillusionment and making-do, of social atomization and small pleasures.

It’s the perfect breeding ground for the “soft nihilism” that infuses contemporary society, sparking the stares, the sighs, and the shoulder-shrugs that have become the soundtrack of our age. Participation numbers still hold—we still go to work and to school, and consume the news and stock up on the latest gadgetry—but when it comes to our future, we’ve learned to have little faith and few expectations. What will come down the pipeline next? We ask. Who knows? We say, followed by the whisper of, but could anything surprise us anymore?

Subscribe now

Soft nihilism is best described as a cultural mood, not a conscious movement or a deliberate ideology, à la traditional nihilism with its hard edges and its amorality, its brutal fixation on meaninglessness and its friendship with futility. The former shows up in a plethora of ways, one of which is sarcasm and irony, as low-budget memes pasted together after social upsets, as fuzzy graphics that manage to both strike at truth and hit an emotional nerve. Memes turn viral because they say what everyone is thinking but not saying and they do it in a way that feels palatable and comfortably cloaked in humor. Meme-making skirts the emotional investment and social risk wrapped up in posting earnest public commentary, its comical cover protecting us from the sting of betrayal, fear, grievance.

Along with our soft spot for grim memes, we’ve expanded our palate for dark humor, dabbled in the therapeutic resignation of Stoicism, and found ourselves drawn like bees to honey to psychodramas like Black Mirror—productions that lay bare our drooling dependence on digital devices, expose the hidden, sinister cost of modern conveniences, and reveal the logical outcomes of technocratic domination. We squirm in our seats about all of this—don’t get me wrong—but what do we ultimately do? Allow a wry chuckle to escape our lips; shrug.

And what of our cultural aversion to commitment? Whether in the realm of romance or vocation, personal identity or geographic home, we’re increasingly loath to pin our hopes and stake our investment, to presume stability and believe in permanence. We take shelter in the temporary relationship and the experimental side hustle instead, if not out of necessity, then out of a disgruntlement with the new flexibilities that modern life demands of us.

As the job market becomes more topsy-turvy, teeming with fake positions and bizarre recruiter requests, squawking new skill sets and technological competencies, it’s only natural we find ourselves feeling a bit more anxious, a bit more disposable, a bit more averse to putting all our eggs in one basket.

As the “mating” market (as the dating sphere is affectionately known by social scientists) heaves with the problems of male invisibility, red-flag lingo, app fatigue, misaligned expectations, snarled gender scripts, and stunted communication, partner-scrounging is no longer the straightforward undertaking it once was. To commit to one person is to turn the valve of deceptively limitless optionality off, to invest (scary!) in viability and durability, and to play the long game of compatibility (instead of, perhaps, hopping to the next person the second an oddly specific “ick” crops up).

We’ve hardly divested ourselves of our hunger for romantic love or killed off the idealism of “finding the one”. Nevertheless, the data show record numbers are sitting out the mating-and-dating game, or, for that matter, never getting off the bench to begin with. Social media feeds come littered with “these are my standards” declarations and “men these days/women these days” diatribes—an odd mix of confidence and complaint. Hardly a surprise, then, when this mismatch between hope and reality curdles into quiet quitting and defeated hiatuses.

The joyless market logic that increasingly suffuses the ubiquitous partner-prowl (thanks to dating apps and social media sprawl) only exacerbates this most painstaking of processes. We might not have morphed into celibate, cloistered creatures à la “hard nihilism,” but many have lost faith and tested out the sidelines, felt the rules of the game slipping and taken solace in ranting against the opposite gender who appears so maddeningly indecipherable and uncooperative.

Beyond the relationship rodeo, soft nihilism wafts up from the stupefying infinite scroll that plagues us all. Tragedy and comedy parade after each other in our online feeds, a jarring proximity that when coupled with our fast fingers, results in our shrunken capacities to encode new information, filter out nonsense, and sort the serious from the unserious (treating them accordingly).

This is not a snarky, silly observation but a sinister side effect. Our technologies affect us behaviorally, and then they affect us philosophically. The infinite scroll anesthetizes us, drugging us on visuals, flattening each message into an identical weight, and slickly discouraging us from making value judgements and separating the good from bad, the real from fake, the informed from the embellished, the intelligent from the crude. The infinite scroll is modern-day “bread and circuses”—the perfect vehicle of diversion and detachment that makes us crave being entertained, or as the writer Aldous Huxley was fond of saying, “loving our servitude.” It is an expert at both heightening our emotions and blunting them, never allowing us to fully integrate or feel the content we consume.

Some will say soft nihilism sprung first from crumbling metanarratives, from the disintegration of common beliefs that formed a national glue. Jostling for a shared history and basic doctrine that felt true and meaningful but that fewer and fewer people actually subscribed to was bound to feel destabilizing and demoralizing. During this shift, meaning ceased to feel inherited and instead became something each person was expected to build alone, from scratch—a bleak, confusing, and hard task.

Along with the burden of self-constructed meaning, we became overexposed to contradiction online, bombarded with claims that canceled each other out, research studies that negated each other, and hot takes that made us second-guess our intuitions. Hand-wringing about echo chambers misses a bigger picture—that an equal proportion of people don’t believe in anything at all because they’re not only too fatigued by competing assertions, but they lack the skills or resolve to make authentic personal determinations.

Notice that soft nihilism’s lack of belief because of fatigue, is very different from hard nihilism’s militant renunciations. And since no one particularly likes feeling powerless, adopting an attitude of cynicism is an easy solution—cool and uncaring, it can be crouched behind when the world feels too incoherent to go to battle with.

Further cementing this elephant-in-the-room of felt powerlessness is the rapid ascendance of AI, outpacing human skill and knowledge with a vigor that leaves us breathless. Dislodged by our large-language-model “friends,” we’re not so sure what our humanness is good for anymore. Uncomfortably de-centered, we’re not so confident we even have our fingers on the reins of progress. Maybe we’re just along for the ride—hurtling into a future where the cheapening of our humanity feels logical and inevitable.

Soft nihilism emerges as a coping mechanism then, as emotional detachment that protects us from that prowling sense of powerlessness. If nothing matters too deeply and we could hardly effect change even if we tried, then nothing can devastate us, right? We humans are nothing if not adaptable. We take a hit of fatalism, imbibe in some apathy, and reinvigorate ourselves at the altar of consumerism. Here too we are plied with absurd promises, but we take solace in the empowerment of turning our cash into tangible wins.

Gen Z embodies precisely this defeatism spiked with happy-go-lucky resolve; shoulder-shrugging exits come paired with a charming soft spot for collectibles, for instance. Small pleasures can be had irrespective of grand narratives, as it turns out.

We’re still out there searching for love and meaning and fulfillment, but we’re doing it cautiously (and sometimes half-ironically). Pearl-clutching about our “nihilistic” youth is reductive and inaccurate. In truth, although we’ve lost faith in what we can hope for, we’ve managed to at least temper some of that disenchantment with humor, tepid experimentation, mutual grousing and unapologetic consumption rather than extinguishing our hope altogether, going full dark-mode, and lunging into anarchic disarray.

After decades of institutional disappointment, technological upheaval, and cultural contradiction, the rise of soft nihilism is, in fact, a logical vibe-shift. It’s not a particularly robust or ideal one, but it’s a sign that we’re surviving, schlepping along, suspending our hopes and certainties but mercifully not scrapping them altogether.

Some Americans are banishing their phones from their bedrooms. Others are swirling together sleepytime mocktails, skipping late-night festivities, popping magnesium pills, buying blackout curtains, and taping their slumbering mouths—all in a fevered quest for the best night’s sleep. Sleep scores trickle into our everyday conversations. We wade through an influencer sea of nighttime routines proudly posted on the internet. Established bestsellers like Why we Sleep and The Sleep Revolution make their rounds—shut-eye manuals replete with alarming statistics and rousing manifestos.

All this maximizing and moralizing has yet to result in particularly encouraging public health statistics, however. A Gallup poll from 2024 found that 57% of Americans reported they needed more sleep than what they got—a startling reversal of its earlier findings a decade prior (in which roughly the same percentage reported being satisfied with the amount they clocked).

We are probably carrying greater cultural anxiety surrounding poor sleep than previous generations did, but we’re also carrying higher levels of stress, which can only exacerbate the search for restorative sleep. Besides coming to rank as one of our biggest health preoccupations, sleep has undergone a wholesale rebrand in the past decade. It’s become a status symbol, a technological playground, a challenge to the time-is-money gospel of American labor, and an indicator of our existential exhaustion.

Before the science of sleep splashed onto the scene, Americans were fond of side-eying sleep as unproductive downtime. Collective chortling abounded with the “early bird gets the worm” cliché, which often came paired with with the darkly humorous (and especially cringy) “I’ll sleep when I’m dead”. Claiming you were surviving on a measly four hours packed an ego-boosting punch. Sleep amounted to a pesky inevitability—certainly enjoyed by many, but trash-talked by countless others. And no one gave much thought to whatever the heck was happening (or not happening) during our dream-spiked, unconscious hours.

Much has changed since then. Researchers have reemerged from their labs and libraries with hair-raising conclusions: Lack of sleep cripples your immune system, turns your brain into an incubator for dementia, makes you fatter, ages your heart, and gets you into car crashes more frequently—to name just a few of the dire warnings passed out to the public. Concerns about sleep quantity became matched by hand-wringing about sleep quality. The market for fitness trackers exploded, turning our once mysterious nightly slumber into data-drenched performance reviews. While we’ve made excellent inroads on recognizing sleep as a crucial biological need, its climb to popularity has a forgotten cultural backstory that’s worth cataloguing.

Sleep has become such a hotbed of personal control partly because we have never before been quite so beleaguered by sleep-threats. Between blue light and the temptations of late-night scrolling, 24/7 reachability and endless notifications, our phones have become the most obvious, obnoxious culprits. But others exist too, though they’re less apparent. Irregular work schedules, rampant loneliness, high stress levels, and noise pollution chip away at both our calm and our commitment to getting solid rest. With these heightened obstacles, a good night’s sleep has proved harder to achieve, but in some ways it’s more satisfying when successfully snagged.

Those busy rehabilitating their sleep schedules are doing so not just out of a motivation for a pep in one’s step come sunup, but because they are tired of feeling like they don’t own and control their time—a widespread feeling, though an underexpressed complaint of modernity. There’s a hunger for enforced boundaries in our age of digital burnout where it is so easy to feel scatterbrained and swamped by excess stimulation. There’s pleasure and power to be found in turning into bed at an appointed time, clearing one’s mind, and exiling devices.

But it’s the kind of lifestyle tweak that takes practice and patience and swimming against the current. Those lonely, dark hours are so easily medicated by digital diversions when we find the possibility of quiet, solitary contemplation too unnerving. And whatever novelty we once experienced by the internet and its circus of byproducts has dulled with time. Members of Gen Alpha are practically pleading for restraints, wistful for a bygone era and a peace-of-mind they never really knew.

With disorganized, distracted bedtimes the default mode, it’s no surprise that it’s opposite—the thoughtful, time-conscious, tranquil sleep routine—has attracted attention, envy, and glamor. Notching up eight hours of uninterrupted, deep slumber and doing so consistently and at regular time intervals is no small feat. For many, it’s nearly impossible, and for others it’s a commitment that carries the costs of sabotaged incomes and sacrificed socializing.

The ingredients for the hallowed eight-hour rest include, of course, approximately one-third of one’s day, but also a certain mental zen. After all, the butterfly of sleep cannot alight for very long if one is a bundle of nerves and worst-case scenarios and half-baked to-do lists. This is why the eight-hour sleep has morphed into a luxury commodity. It demands the physical resources of guilt-free time and a safe haven of a sleeping environment coupled with the mental resources of a calmed-down, chilled-out brain. And how often do we beat ourselves up for not getting enough sleep? Not realizing that there are plenty of forces conspiring against us—not least the universal pull of the midnight phone-scroll.

Because it has entered luxury territory, sleep has also acquired a competitive energy. Pricey sleep-trackers slipped on the wrist before slipping under the sheets have long been de rigueur for the health-conscious crowd that drinks microgreens and hits the sauna every week, but they’re increasingly showing up on the arms of the hoi polloi. In the great age of data, we are told information is king and that more metrics are always good. This is believable, to a point.

Coinciding with advent of sleep science manifestos and the rise of health trackers, a new condition entered the lexicon. Orthosomnia was coined in 2017 to describe sleep performance neuroticism, fueled unmistakably by the new gadgets that coughed up such unforgiving, granular assessments. The perfect storm of perfectionistic and health nut tendencies, the orthosomniac despaired over his less-than-stellar sleep graphs and took this anxiety back to bed with him.

This new wave of personal gadgetry has dovetailed with the rise of the supplement stash. Online and off, people are constantly sharing their two cents on homeopathic pills, eager to hype their favorite natural remedies. When it comes to sleep aids, melatonin is its famous front-runner, with reported usage skyrocketing to over 400% of what it was two decades ago. Magnesium supplement sales are close on its heels.

This fascination with herbal fixes says something about our desperation for a good night’s sleep, yes, but it also speaks to our cultural craving for optimization, and our urge to participate in the delusion that adding things will always generate positive progress (when sometimes what we really need to do is subtract things). Humming alongside the health hacks stands the longevity influencers—iconoclastic individuals hawking blue light glasses and cryotherapy and sleep hygiene and playing the long game when it comes to life. And yes, stocking up the sleep bank is a nonnegotiable part of their project.

So not only has sleep become a fashionable arena for personal improvement, but it’s also become a status symbol, and one undeniably shaped by the thriving counterculture of “slow life” aesthetics. Haven’t you heard? Girlbosses have yielded to soft girls. And aspirational gurus have back-burnered their productivity hacks in favor of trendy wind-down rituals. Exhaustion has lost a sliver of its former glamor in our caffeine-fueled culture and it’s palpable. Societal guilt for not hustling hard enough can only smolder for so long before our collective self-respect reasserts itself and we reclaim our rights to check out and rest up, thank you very much. Cultural side-projects like quiet quitting, lazy girl jobs, slow living, and deconsumption are a testament to this underlying vibe shift.

Believe it or not, but our much-mourned late-stage capitalism is even responsible for reworking our relationship to sleep. Tumbling into the second decade of the 21st-century, it became clear that America’s industrial heyday was in the rearview mirror. Jobs had morphed and molded to the demands of a rapidly changing technological landscape. The infamous gig economy erupted, passive income enthusiasts were popping up left and right, and labor became untethered from traditional work shifts with a patchwork of odd jobs, second jobs, temp jobs, and online gigs clumsily gluing together personal livelihoods for many.

Far removed from the simple, straightforward sunup/sundown rhythms that marked agrarian eras, and slipping away from the standardized, clock-governed workday of our industrialized peak, it’s no surprise that our collective sleep schedules fell into a disarray that eventually demanded rectification—consciousness-raising and all. The monetization of time that our country had so proudly incubated for centuries would eventually reach a boiling point, where we would start to resist, to pull back, to accept defeat and to go to bed dammit—to thoroughly enjoy it and even take pleasure in the rebellion of shameless rest.

In the end, the resurgence of a good night’s sleep is an optimistic indicator that we’re keen to reorient ourselves away from blind “progress” and towards conscious self-preservation instead. Exhaustion is not quite so cozy with virtue anymore and opting-out has gained a subversive allure. If you want my advice, jump on sleep’s moment in the spotlight and jump into bed. Who knows, maybe you’ll love it so much, doomscrolling into the wee hours of the morning will lose its magic. If so, thank God for that, right?

When a new year arrives, we nervously chirp to each other wow, time seems to be flying by! Where did the last year go? It’s an innocent platitude, but it’s one that’s also sweating and searching, timidly squeaking, do you feel what I feel too? We chalk this blink-and-you-missed-it quality up to the drudgery and dreariness of adulthood, but we do not question whether it’s truly the eternal inevitability we think it is. Do our weeks disappear and our months blur purely because we’re oh-so-busy and cursed by advancing age, or is there something else afoot? Is it perhaps possible that the technologies that have hammered themselves into our daily rhythms are an overlooked culprit?

Over the years, we’ve watched ourselves sinking into overstimulated stupors and becoming desensitized by fake novelties. We’ve chuckled with friends about our phone addictions, lamented our cute powerlessness before the “next episode” button, and wistfully wiled away our evenings stockpiling reels and screenshots, social media posts and video clips under the cheerful, well-meaning guise of personal betterment and “leveling-up”.

Our lives have become more and more weighted towards screens instead of real-life and geared towards passive consumption instead of thoughtful creation. Every day, within our first habitual hop onto the internet we’re thrown into an absolute stew of opinions, advertisements, news, memes, and random information that we’re then just helplessly swimming in for the remainder of our waking hours.

Chaotic and disorienting, the high-culture of NPR broadcasts swirls freely with the low-culture of tabloid-esque media gossip. And with each twitch of the thumb, we’ve spawned a fresh batch of visual stimuli. Our brains are forever lagging behind, sluggish participants in this technologically-slick debacle—wait, do I want to be doing this right now? Oh, too late, guess I do. And, what was it I was supposed to remember from that video clip? Oh you’re too slow, it’s gone now.

Subscribe now

Despite the laughs and the “likes” and the learnings we’ve collected over the course of a day, too many of us lurch to our bedtimes groggy with all that we’ve digitally consumed and bereft of surefire ways to parse the important from the unimportant, remember the relevant, siphon the utilizable, and remedy the jarring incoherence of it all.

We’ve consumed so much color, so much hype, so much sensation, but why then, do we feel so. . . gray? Years ago, I illustrated this contradiction by likening it to the child’s greedy urge to stir all the watercolor paints together, turning the bright, beautiful hues of different colors into one depressing, muddy shade. As kids we no doubt dabbled in this ill-fated gamble, spurred on by our curiosity and natural hunger for more, more, more! In the end, it clocked a sobering lesson in the limits of more, but whatever wisdom it imparted later croaked before the almighty ascendance of the algorithm.

Thanks to the algorithm’s forward march, we’re lumped at a unique crossroads where we find ourselves both overwhelmed and numb. Our human eyes have never seen such splash and clash—have never been witness to this much overflowing novelty. And yet we’re starving for genuine fun, growth, and newness, of the sort that our screens simply can’t supply us. The more our senses are spooned the digital stuff, the more we’re spiritually hungry for the IRL stuff.

At the heart of the modern novelty paradox lies our clumsiness in conflating digital stimulation with what I’ll call “embodied novelty”. Modernity is guilty of collapsing the distinctions between real-life and online life, and of suggesting that digital proxies are fine replacements for their physical counterparts.

For instance, we want to think that the brief thrill of watching someone make a homemade pie is roughly equivalent to the temporary boost what we’d get from being elbow-deep in flour and making the pie ourselves—especially when you factor in that the first option is so much more messy, time-consuming, and potentially ego-bruising, right? Wrong. They are completely different things and one is objectively more rewarding than the other.

But our algorithmic overlords do not really want us out there banging around in the kitchen, whisking up culinary creations, do they? They’d prefer we lie perfectly still and keep that scrolling going at a steady clip, thank you very much. Conditioned to crave the stimulation that the slot-machine-esque infinite scroll provides, its randomness, refresh, and rapidity renders us enthralled.

After we’ve gorged our eyeballs, we’re cognitively convinced that we’ve sated our appetites for new, interesting things. This is, of course, false. But we do not always register it in the moment. And when we’re famished for more novelty not too long after, we do not stop to realize that our phones provide the equivalent of a sugar rush and that other options really are available. This is, admittedly, an uphill battle to fight because “analog” novelty requires energy that our salvation-seeking scrolling leaves us sapped of.

On the other hand, embodied novelty is what we experience when we attempt a new route on an evening stroll. It’s having a meaningful sit-down conversation with someone new in real-life. It’s trying to learn a new skill like playing the guitar, in all its brain-bending blundering. If it’s not obvious, these sources tend to be activities that engage our full body and etch new grooves in our brain. There’s effort, risk, and adaption involved that digital competitors can’t replicate.

Big Tech’s stimulation sculpts our brains into sieves where information comes and goes but ultimately doesn’t stick, leaving us essentially unchanged. Embodied novelties are far stickier and almost always result in subtle changes to our self. Scrolling might toggle our moods from happy to sad, to anxious to excited, but does it change our very selves?

And even though our daily internet jaunts serve us up content that feels delightfully unexpected and fresh, in reality, algorithmic “newness” is actually quite predictable by design. When our feeds refresh, algorithms surface content that contains a base familiarity sufficient to ply us with information that already checks at least some of our preferences, limiting the full scope of what could conceivably pique our interest and spark healthy change.

In the frictionless world we’ve fashioned, our motivations have withered when it comes to willingly enduring discomfort, investing time, and devoting effort to projects with uncertain outcomes. This is understandable given how expertly the gospel of convenience has overtaken modern societies. If so much of the entrepreneurial exploits of the past century have solved for friction, why would be keen to strip those away? Inspiringly, counterrevolutions of sorts have sprouted up to revive “dumb” phones, homesteading, letter-writing, and in-person dating, to name just a few. But such efforts swim against the powerful currents of a dominant culture of frictionless ease, distractability, and dull detachment.

I suspect we’ve also exacerbated an almost-infantile dependence on good outcomes, such that we’re afraid to experiment with in-person novelties because we can’t we certain how they’ll pan out. This ambiguity reads as disfigured to us when the digital dreamscape is so reliably poised to entertain, placate, and rescue us. Newborns have historically been forced to “cry it out” in small doses in order to learn patience, restraint, and autonomy. We’ve become very much like the spoiled infants who cannot tolerate the fundamental chafing of life in all its uncertainties, small sufferings, and delayed payoffs.

It is somewhat ironic that our frictionless world emerged in large part by the hands of American ambition—a quality that is now arguably suppressed by products formerly facilitated by it. Both the entrepreneurial enthusiasm and self-sufficient spirit that are twin features of America’s unique frontier-energy are somewhat muffled due to the dominance of these false novelties.

We enjoy contemplating reinvention, fine-tuning its aesthetic, and evangelizing it to others, but seem less likely to genuinely give it a go ourselves. This makes sense when we consider that there are simply more opportunities to dabble in the former pursuits which, in effect, naturally dials down the urgency of the in-person grind.

Risk-aversion is also climbing in younger generations, a clear sign that the digital sidekicks today’s kids, teens, and young adults have grown up with are fostering greater insularity, social comparison, and neuroticism that is preventing them from embracing the challenges of the “real world,” which has increasingly taken on a bogeyman-like vibe in the 21st-century.

Despite the technological forces conspiring against us, embodied forms of novelty are worth fighting for and wresting into our schedules regardless. If our days feel interchangeable and our memories feel blunted, we can change that. We can enrich our evening leisure time, make concerted efforts to stick with new hobbies, intentionally develop new friendships, and prioritize creating with our own two hands, vague productivity pressures be damned. (It begs the question: When did we start valorizing what’s “most productive” over what’s “most rewarding”?)

A spate of studies even shows that novel experiences push our brains to create new proteins which are instrumental in strengthening neural connections and shoring up our long-term memory storage. Fail to introduce genuine novelties into your day-to-day and your brain has little incentive to mark your days as memorable. Repetitive, predictable environments reduce new memory encoding and time feels funereally flattened as a result.

If it’s not obvious, digital stimulation, aka false novelties, aren’t exactly prompting the brain to encode new memories because of that sieve-effect referenced earlier. You aren’t moving, changing, stretching, or really availing the physical and cognitive muscles you were put on this earth with. That’s not to say that you cannot be changed by an excellent movie or inspired by an educational reel, but most of us, if we’re honest, are floundering in a pathetic passivity a lot of the time we’re grazing online.

In any case, the embodied novelties we should be searching for and carving out time for don’t come without costs. But they’re worth it. We have to learn to embrace friction and to understand that our devices’ gluttonous amusements are causing serious deprivations we haven’t accounted for.

We have to overcome our programmed passivity, reclaim our birthright as humans to be weird, wonderful works-in-progress, and rejoice in our abilities as adaptable animals who crave meaning in our lives, and not just endless diversions and distractions from our passing pains.

Until we recover the difference between digital stimulation and embodied novelty, no amount of “new” coughed up by our devices will feel like enough. It may keep us awake and our eyes peeled, but it’s slowly killing us inside and enfeebling us as a culture.

Having grown suspicious of anything that’s not instant-gratification and on-demand, we don’t realize that some of the best things in life do cost us something in life (and are expressly meant to!)—our time, our pride, our former clung-to identities, the comfort of the familiar, our old beliefs—but they give us something back that’s worth far more than the false, infinite online utopia. The experience of feeling truly alive, is what.

Debt exists as background noise for many Americans. It’s an unsteady hum made up of half-paid credit cards, deferred student loans, and buy-now-pay-later installments stretched to the brink. Lenders are experts in peddling their come-hither offers burbling with easy, bright language that paints debt as something strangely both inevitable and invisible. See, everyone’s doing it, and it’s a piece of cake too!

Consequently, a large segment of the population sails through their day-to-day seduced by these claims and their predatory paternalism. Wading deeper and deeper into the swamp of interest rates and missed payments and crumbling credit scores, something soon snaps. Maybe a bank statement is finally ventured a peek. Or some postponed payments come home to roost. Or a car is repossessed. Suddenly, debt is no longer this ambient, abstract thing. It has weight and consequences that hit like a brutal splash of cold water.

This is where the proverbial fork in the path surfaces. Ignore or confront? If ignored, one’s debt dalliances will undoubtedly be swallowed up and spurred on by the national economic engine, coolly indifferent to the pains and pinches of fumbled payments. But if confronted, entry into the financial-conversion-pipeline can be impressively swift. This is where the Dave-Ramsey-types sit, with their cash envelope systems, curmudgeonly callouts, and moralizing money manifestos, ready to rescue the hapless risk-takers with their tough-love and baby-step rehabilitation models.

Effective for many? Absolutely, and those success stories are nothing to sneeze at. But, zoom out for a second. Why exactly is there such a morally-imbued redemption arc around debt that’s so popular in American culture? We don’t often ask this question. In this arc, the blasé, fast-and-loose debt-slinger is humbled and reformed into the repentant, risk-averse responsible citizen. It’s exactly the type of before-and-after transformation our country loves, complete with the rock-bottom, come-to-Jesus moment, the gritty, gutsy, in-the-trenches, “doing the work” trek, and the final ecstatic moment of victory and deliverance to “debt-free” status.

Subscribe now

Fleshed out a bit more, it’s ultimately a three-step process that begins with the blissful, unaware, credit-happy individual who starts to stumble and suddenly finds themselves aghast, I’m out of control! and starts scrambling. If they land on the no-nonsense frugality influencers then they may hit the ah-ha conversion moment.

Financial “guru” and YouTube star Caleb Hammer is emblematic of just this brutal reality-check, with his quasi-abusive guest interviews fast-tracking him to Internet stardom in recent years. Over his hour-plus interventions, he shrieks and slanders, supplicates and shames his guests for their foolish financial choices in such an unflinchingly savage manner that many are reduced to tears.

Despite this merciless style and accusations of rage-bait (or perhaps, precisely because of them), he’s a hugely popular podcaster. A scroll through Caleb’s comment sections will reveal many listeners who turn towards his content to soothe their own fears of mediocrity. “Every time I listen to one of these, I instantly feel better about myself,” is an oft-repeated sentiment, and a disquieting nod to how cutting-down others is cheap fuel for boosting one’s self-esteem. But for others battling similar dicey financial situations, the show functions as a wake-up call, as righteous condemnation, and sometimes even as full-blown self-flagellation.

There are, perhaps, kinder, more civilized avenues to helping you get your financial ship in order, after all. But the sheer popularity of the Financial Audit show is proof that there is a collective appetite for self-flagellation—for the kind of moral excoriation that our Puritan ancestors instilled in us, for turning what could amount to bland re-budgeting exercises into visceral personal reckonings. The unsavory truth is that one’s money-management mastery doubles as a character assessment in America, with an intensity rarely matched elsewhere in the world.

From the conversion moment follows the rituals of repentance—submitting to the snowball method, to the aforementioned cash envelope system, to a pleasurably rigid set of off-limits purchases, and occasionally even to public confessionals. Make no mistake, these aren’t merely dispassionate techniques, they’re rituals. And as such, they come unavoidably freighted with the conversion story, a hunger for personal atonement, a quasi-religious zeal, and the secret burning desire for a good solid comeback.

If this period of deprivation and discipline is indeed slogged through (itself accorded a certain glamorous sheen in our bootstrapping American ethos) then the metamorphosis concludes with a new moral identity, with the proclamation of “debt-free” signaling a religious rebirth of sorts. It is easy for the successful convert to then become an outspoken evangelist for the virtues of frugality, delayed gratification, and ruthless self-examination—the very things that carried them over the finish line and absolved them of their former pecuniary “sins”.

Even after transcendence has been achieved, the game isn’t over though. Personal surveillance must be engaged in, old urges resisted, and the new frugal personality legitimized and kept alive. Fears of backsliding or “relapsing” lurk ominously in the background. It’s not as simple as balancing the balance sheet. It’s also the anxious maintenance of a new kind of identity.

None of this is inherently troubling, let me be clear. Financial autonomy ought to be a celebrated threshold, and criticizing the means by which it is achieved feels a bit impolite and futile. What is striking is how naturally financial competence slides into moral authority in the American imagination. And that raises the more interesting question: Why does this redemption arc feel so distinctly American in the first place?

Let’s start with the wildly aggressive consumerist culture our nation is so notorious for. A culture where credit flows on-tap 24/7, excess spending comes brilliantly branded as self-care or investment-in-self, and where zero-down offers are brightly extolled on primetime TV. It’s hard to escape this high-churn, fast-paced, spending spree action—even more so due to the unnerving cheer of social media, with its constant hurrah for consumption and knack for monetizing everything.

Known for our big appetites and ambition, is it any surprise our very strengths can also be the source of our social problems? In our industrial heyday, more creation led to more consumption. And even when our powers of creation slipped, we didn’t seem keen to scale back our consumption instincts. As financialization exploded towards the latter decades of the 20th century, borrowing morphed into something casual and normalized. Even something encouraged, aestheticized, and stripped of consequence—well, right up until the first bill comes due, that is.

So, at the same time that our culture sells “indulgence,” whether that’s via a keep-up-appearances logic, self-investment rationale, or a vaguely nihilistic, anything-goes self-gratification, it also tends to brusquely individualize the failures that can then result. This whiplash is not uncommon.

Chunky car loans are handed out by sympathetic salesmen to struggling members of the working-class. Bright-eyed eighteen-year-olds get suckered into monstrously large student loans, believing them to be smart, reasonable expenditures with surefire payoffs. Families get ushered into sketchy home loans before their finances go splat after a year of surprise expenses and crushing monthly mortgage payments. Buy-now-pay-later buttons beckon young adults into a confusing tangle of bank-account siphoning wherein an earlier triumphant wash of empowerment yields to a yucky feeling of entrapment.

The common theme throughout these tragically everyday scenarios is that, on some level, snowballing indebtedness is marketed as a rite-of-passage. It’s framed as a shrugged-off means-to-an-end rather than a bona fide liability complete with its associated financial obligations clearly spelled out. (It’s important to distinguish snowballing indebtedness from ordinary indebtedness, however, which is unavoidable for most if starting a business or owning a home is in the cards.)

And because so many forms of debt do snowball if one is on shaky footing to begin with, once the cascade starts, the shame can start to amplify, the denial to kick in, the late payments to be scuttled under the rug. Credit only extends the average person so far. American culture treats having things as empowering, the means be damned. And so, it is quite disempowering and disorienting when the arbitrary wall is hit in which you can go no more.

In essence, when you start to slip, the system that hand-held you to that point vanishes. No wonder it feels a bit purgatorial to claw your way out of it. But what’s fascinating here is the odd contrast of this rah-rah, go-get-your-piece-of-the-pie energy with our old American, priggish emphasis on self-denial, restraint, and repayment-as-purification.

Our Protestant forebears who washed ashore centuries ago were strict and industrious—busy-bee types, yes, but deeply moralistic too. They hated indulgence, equated restraint with righteousness, and left behind a cultural inheritance that still skews the American interpretation of financial failure towards that of a moral lapse instead of that of a miscalculation. From this, another juxtaposition emerged: Our modern consumer culture urges excess but later demands repentance once excess inevitably occurs. I cannot help but think that our 17th-century origins bear some responsibility for this awkward mash-up.

Successful and elated though many that travel the American road to freedom-from-debt are, there are some ugly consequences to this debt-as-sin thinking. Because it twists the screws on individual responsibility, it obscures the structural realities that oiled-up the road to debt in the first place.

Why are student loans so indispensable in the first place for the average student, and so often come packaged with predatory interest rates? Why is it that an emergency surgery can so easily bankrupt someone in our nation? Why are subprime mortgages handed out like candy to those most unlikely to benefit? By keeping the conversation confined to the personal, we do not lob some of the blame to the faceless foes propagating and normalizing these conditions. (And some blame is their due.)

What the American paradigm for moralizing debt also does is decrease the empathy accorded to those financially floundering. When debt vs. no debt is so unthinkingly translated to irresponsible vs. responsible, we are making the choice to cast moral judgement from the outset when we have no other information or insight into the unique circumstances of that individual.

And where compassion narrows, shame increases, and more people become stuck in the shadows, dominated by debt, and susceptible to the narrative themselves that they are morally questionable. Do you see now how the financial-conversion-pipeline is so well-positioned to snatch them up?

The vaguely sin-stained, shame-shame dominant approach that rescues some can suppress and condemn others. America is anomalous in that we cultivate a flashy, splashy indifference towards debt before flipping to a remorse, ritual repentance, and redemption arc. Surprise, surprise, in the land of both excess and atonement, debt is not just financial fact, but moral theater too.

Our moralistic spin on debt has old roots, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth examining instead of blindly accepting, or that our current beliefs aren’t worth questioning and tweaking. We have that power as individual citizens, the power to glamorize thoughtfulness and balance in how we handle money instead of the push-pull dichotomy of indulgence and punishment our culture is so hopelessly attached to.

More and more refrigerators are brimming with matchy-matchy stacks of Tupperware, with shelves revealing tidy container armies not of random leftovers, oh no, but the proud labors of Meal Prep Sunday, of course! With online communities popping up to share tips and tricks, influencers oohing and ahhing over their weekly bounty, and entire shopping subcategories of culinary gadgetry sprouting up to support its growing popularity, meal-prepping is fast inching towards the mainstream.

It’s not hard to see the appeal of mass-produced kitchen creations. For some Americans, pinched for time in the shrinking after-work hours, battling money woes at the supermarket, and feeling newly compelled to dabble in macro-tracking, meal-prepping has surfaced as a no-brainer solution.

Beyond its pros and cons, however, is the intriguing observation that there is just something distinctly American about it, isn’t there? From cavernous refrigerators to big-box retailers, habit-tracking apps to harried lunch breaks, buried in meal-prepping’s hustle-and-bustle is a lot of cultural baggage. Given a poke, it reveals our nation’s productivity itch, fear of scarcity, hyper-individualism, and even the rustlings of our Puritan past.

Subscribe now

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of meal prep, it goes like this: Do a grocery store haul, collect your containers, pick a few recipes, and spend a few hours slicing and dicing and boiling and broiling before rationing out your chicken and rice (someone is always making chicken and rice) into seven different containers and volià, you have lunch for a week! (And then you repeat the process with however many containers you’ve got left because stockpiling food gets a little contagious, and besides, you’re on a roll! What’s some more dirty dishes?)

Jokes aside, it’s a time-saving hack for many and a valiant solution to the decision-fatigue and daily drudgery of fussing around with food. For others, it’s a hedge against the siren call of takeout. But its appeal glimmers with more than practicality. It’s one ritualistic physical act we’ve taken a liking to that tempers the existential anxiety of living in a chaotic, nonstop world. Who knows what the future will bring, but there’s some small comfort to be had in knowing at least future lunch is accounted for, right?

Because of course there’s something self-soothing about the standardization and forethought implicit in meal-prep. One corner of life is whipped into shape, suddenly made predictable and manageable. Choice overload and evening exhaustion are punted to the curb as homemade pre-made dinner is plattered up with a self-satisfied flourish.

Fidgety about finances, many Americans lean in to meal-prep because it simplifies the spend. Plus, doing a fridge drive-by and seeing your stored sustenance says to the caveman brain, yep, no going hungry for me, no matter how real a threat that actually is. Battered by digital distractions all day and playing the tug-of-war between real-world and screen-world, it’s also a relief to transmit that passive, eyes-glazed energy we’re so tragically familiar with into the passive acquisition of dinner instead—yanking out Tuesday’s Tupperware from the fridge, only to be wolf it down while hunched over our phone screen.

Afraid as we are to admit it, there’s just a bit more friction embedded in coming home to rattle out the pots and pans these days than there was a few decades ago—and, at the risk of sounding reductive, our phones have a lot to do with it. They have sneakily played a hand in draining our willpower for the domestic, Sisyphean tasks that our ancestors used to do without much fuss or fanfare. And while meal-prepping can satisfy a healthy desire for hands-on creation, it often does so by siphoning the play and spontaneity out of cooking and injecting a brute efficiency instead. A fitting dinner-table antidote to our overstimulated brains, wouldn’t you say?

Leave it to the Americans to see food through the paradigms of either speed vs. slowness or indulgence vs. restraint, skilled as we are in injecting a subtle moralism into even the mundanities of eating. After all, in this country the whir of productivity is celebrated, but so too is the glug of gluttony, and we’re culturally clumsy when it comes to prioritizing the pleasure in cooking and eating, to enjoying the semi-sacred ritualism of it, and even to achieving an attitude of moderation—so primed are we to veer from monkish discipline to county-fair excess, or alternatively, from over-engineered, assembly-line meal-prep to greasy, I-give-up drive-thru dinners.

All this to say, meal-prep is thriving at a time when the tentacles of technology are reaching deeper and deeper into our everyday lives, and when we are tussling to wrest back some power and to feel in-control of our lives, which is more visceral a human feeling and hair-raising a political grievance than we realize. Meal-preppers are being sensible and smart in their proactive planning, sure, but folded within is often a vague urge to systematize the turbulence of modern life and to conquer its ambient anxiety with the help of a label maker and a Costco haul.

It’s no surprise that meal-prepping has also become a way to aestheticize order, with social media feeds dotted with smiley subjects slotting color-coordinated pans into refrigerators. Despite its homespun, self-sufficient, value-conscious vibes, its community is far from anti-consumerist. An entire micro-economy of storage vessels, influencer guides, pre-portioned ingredients, and aspirational online content has been carved out to cater to its new adherents.

What no one seems to mention (or even really notice) in these industrious montages is the loneliness that permeates it all. The skated-over truth is that for many, meal-prepping is a logical solution to the single-person’s dinnertime dilemma. More Americans now than ever before eat their meals alone, with one study finding there’s been a 53% increase in solo-dining over the past twenty years. Certainly, fragmented schedules and a go-go-go culture do not help to dampen such striking figures.

On American soil, food has become so freighted with good/bad, virtue/vice utilitarian/“sinful” dualities that there is less simply less emphasis placed on communal eating and the camaraderie of shared meals. So accustomed to a binary composed of the private particularities of individualized diets vs. the humiliations of the solitary late-night snack-fest, we have a tricky time grasping that eating is not just about content and calories, but also about company and social context.

Meal-prepping became a way to turn the magic of making food into a personal project. It’s a way of making food that’s purely pragmatic and stripped of spontaneity and shared experience. Online onlookers, enviously watching the busy bee covering her countertops in next week’s provisions also don’t stop to consider what isn’t being shown—namely, what it actually looks like to eat the batch-prepared dinner in question.

Because you know what? Sometimes it looks like being slumped over the TV table, alone, distractedly spooning microwaved slop out of a container that has none of the civilized feel of an actual plate, and wishing you could eat anything else but the fridge-air-infused repeats of yesterday’s menu.

The rise of solo-dining is not a universal trend, however. In other parts of the world (Southern Europe, Latin America, and parts of Asia come to mind) eating three square meals alone is greeted with less nonchalance and might even earn a quirked eyebrow or two. In these corners of the globe, meals are often social rituals before they are solo tasks and eating a meal is less a personal necessity to be dispassionately sated, and more a natural opportunity for community and connection.

Modern meal-prepping is a bubbly, all-American concoction, although it’s one wearing a perma-grin of proud productivity that cleverly masks the social snags scurrying beneath it. Because the reality is, we just don’t sit at tables in chatty groups forking food into our mouths quite as much as we did before, and we haven’t stopped to fully register the consequences of that.

And how could we? If what we give the cultural clap on the back is the discipline of churning out and then chowing down on our “mass-produced,” macros-optimized rations? The person that meal-preps is viewed at as “having it all together,” an envied, ultra-competent productivity-aficionado who’s winning at life. Even the visual aesthetic of digitally-captured meal-prepping upholds this idea.

Videos capture set-ups that are spick and spam, countertops that are clinically organized and immaculately clean—a nod to the moralism baked into the notion that meal-prepping isn’t just something some people choose to do, but rather, it’s the type of thing “good, responsible” people choose to do.

Like many things that American culture lunges earnestly at, meal-prep is but a tool and not a religion. We should be wary of the ways in which we mobilize our instincts towards control and careful to balance this well-intentioned rigidity with enough spontaneity, flexibility, and sociability, even when it comes to how we eat—especially when it comes to how we eat.

The Tupperware mountain in the fridge with next week’s meal-prep is certainly a sign of our industrious problem-solving and productive instincts. But inevitably, it’s also a cultural product of our anxieties about an uncertain future and an overwhelming, choice-addled day-to-day; about lonely lunch-breaks and the joyless creep of a life neurotically obsessed with minutes, macros, and matching meals. Our “inventions” are solutions, but they’re also symptoms. And modern meal-prep is nothing if not both.

Once considered an ordinary companion to the misfortunes and maladies of life, sadness is fast morphing into a strange, suspect, second-rate emotional state. Have you noticed this? Over-medicalization creeps in from one corner while the frantic American fear of unhappiness presses in from another. The parental safetyism, digital isolation, and therapeutic overexposure that has marked the developmental years of so many Gen Zers (and their descendants Gen Alpha) arguably leave them the most ill-equipped to accept and cope with this ancient emotion. What happened?

Somewhere in the well-intentioned tangle of social media therapyspeak, pop psychology mantras, and the cultural obsession with mental health awareness, the urge to reclassify emotional discomfort as disorder intensified. Sadness became increasingly catalogued as depression. Diagnoses climbed, and while often legitimate clinical determinations, this shift into the world of pathologization left individuals deprived of both a language that was sympathetic to ordinary gloom and a life philosophy to weather it.

It’s ironic, of course, that up-and-coming generations have achieved astonishing fluency in dissecting their emotions but seem so pathetically unsure about how to actually feel them. While older Americans lurched through adolescence tormented by the expectations of emotional repression, contemporary efforts to slough this suffocating stuffiness off may have swung too far.

The compulsion to over-intellectualize and pathologize feelings still skirts the tragedy wrapped up in the human experience. It still avoids the reality that sadness can be elusive and unconquerable (which is not particularly comforting given our national pragmatism). And it still wants to strip sadness down to nothing but a setback and a scourge.

These cultural call-outs are necessary in a moment when young generations are more emotionally disoriented than ever and feeling roadblocked from life experiences because they haven’t learned how to comfortably coexist with the misadventures of melancholy. So how did we get here in the first place?

Subscribe now

By now, it shouldn’t be breaking news to anyone that social media is a swamp of mental health manifestos. Some educational, some confessional, all come peppered with zingy buzzwords like “codependent,” or “trauma response” which help to boost traffic, aid in creator branding, and commodify the unruly frontier of human emotion (admittedly something of an American irresistibility). Algorithms reward this diagnostic language and consequently, our everyday conversations become inundated with it.

It isn’t hard to see the draw of a psychological label, however. It is something to point at, something concrete and nameable. It comes furnished with a clinical breakdown of symptoms and traits. It totes along with its linguistic identifiers entire communities of those who share the same afflictions. It also serves as a protective presence, as a way to ward off others from muddying the discussion as supposed “non-belongers” and non-believers.

When it comes to the economics of social media, success famously hinges on one presenting as either aspirational or miserable. Followers either follow because they are envious and inspired, or because they commiserate. Contrary to popular belief, one does not need to be a glammed-up girlboss to grab attention. A sob-wracked, sweatshirt-clad soliloquy can rocket one to fame just fine.

In any case, this either/or polarity craters an unnatural gap between those on social media to show their highlight reel and hide their glum moments, and those on social media to do the opposite—to expose the full brunt of their angst, failures, and lovable impediments. If vulnerability was once shamed, it is now frequently lauded, but because it so often happens in self-promoting, commodified ways online, it erodes a middle ground where sadness isn’t a kind of sickness and is instead regarded as an unthreatening, temporary emotional visitor.

Teenagers and young adults, susceptible to extremes and seduced by slick marketing on social media are the most impressionable when it comes to the silent campaign to erase sadness. But this schooling started early, with many Gen Zers raised under constant adult supervision, whisked from risks, and alternately fretted over and mollified with distractions whenever sulky and sad.

An outbreak of gentle parenting in Gen Alpha has drilled kids in “I feel” statements but has turned sour moods into overcomplicated crises. For either generation, a lack of opportunities to experience personal discomfort did not preserve their petals, so to speak, but wilted them instead. For others, parental omissions of candid conversations surrounding sadness, coupled with a blustery disregard when it reared its head in the family home, made it feel foreign and alarming.

Caught between numbing sadness with digital entertainment and gruelingly hashing it out with therapy homework and self-awareness strategizing, is it any surprise the inheritors of tomorrow’s world are more clinically depressed than ever? Wholesale dependence on external soothing is no more the magic answer than internal self-regulation tactics are. The mysterious missing puzzle piece is the lack of a philosophical acceptance of sadness. It’s an overlooked reality, but sadness has little cultural dignity to it and American pragmatism succumbs to viewing it as sterile and stagnant, as a net negative.

In contrast, the Old World does not worship happiness as the ultimate ideal, and has historically proved far more adept in finding beauty and meaning in ennui. Americans have long been fascinated by the French, for instance, and their worldly, chic joie de vivre, but cannot seem to master the existential surrender at the heart of it. American sensibilities seem to insist that happy and sad are mutually exclusive emotions—if one feels sadness in an otherwise happy moment, then that glee is somehow invalid, or less than.

After all, the U.S. is famous for its go-getter optimism and death grip on growth narratives and can seem oppressively smiley to outsiders. What this gung-ho good cheer obscures, however, is our discomfort with ambiguity, mystery, and the light/dark messiness of human experience. Far from making global happiness headlines, Americans can feel trapped by the unseen pressure to be all-happy or all-sad and end up exacerbating their sorrow as a result. This is particularly pronounced in young people for whom the gray-area of life is an acquired taste and a learned skill.

Further impeding the compassionate integration of normal sadness into our lives is what I’ll dub the “externalizing instinct”—the impulse to scuttle our feelings of doom and gloom under a therapyspeak label instead of simply identifying with feeling momentarily sad. Decades-long efforts to peel away mental health stigma were successful, but in achieving dignity for medical labels, they also encouraged overidentification with them. In an ironic twist of events, “I have depression” now seems more emotionally legitimate than “I feel inexplicably sad”. Why is that?

Well, we are fond of what can be traced and diagnosed, reduced to a tidy list of DSM symptoms, and have grown increasingly uncomfortable with ambiguous, mysterious, universal sadness that aches to be consciously felt and gently probed. The penchant to label all sadness as depression has the effect of distancing ourselves from our sticky emotional states, and in so doing, supports the notion that periodic gloom is a condition that hijacks our true self rather than an intrinsic part of being human and something we’re just willy-nilly sloshing around in sometimes. The former has become bizarrely more comforting, whereas the latter feels unpredictable and untamable.

From here, it’s easier for sadness to feel more like a sabotaging and sullying intruder than a sympathetic teacher. After all, that’s what sadness often is—a teacher. And in making the cultural jump from “suck it up” to “talk it out,” in crude terms we’ve swung from a policy of repression to one of intellectualism without considering that sometimes what sadness most needs is respect, contextualizing, and patience to flush itself out—for the time being, at least. It is this understanding that our culture is stripped of. Squirmy parents ship their teens off to therapists after bouts of unexplained moodiness, (here we see that leap from repression into intellectualism once again,) and those adolescents can sometimes end up swamped in more intense introspection than they can reasonably benefit from.

In the end, if Gen Z has lost touch with what normal sadness feels like, it’s the culture that its forebears have contributed to that has caused it. Shunning, compartmentalizing, and pathologizing sadness has not made that easy-breezy, oh-so-American happiness ideal any more attainable. The experience of sadness needn’t be taught to our children as a soppy, pathetic, private humiliation. When it surfaces, it’s a sign that care, attachment, and meaning are present in our lives. It’s precisely this bittersweet emotion that great art from time immemorial has captured and onlookers have flocked to feel.

It’s healthy, normal, and the expression of it can help us integrate life experiences, dole out empathy, and restore our emotional equilibrium. But in expressing it, we often have to experience solitude, weather boredom, endure disappointment, and allow mourning. Uncomfortable tasks, sure, but ones today’s younger generations have worryingly been ill-prepared for.

But in an age rife with self-soothing technological diversions and over-commodified diagnostic language, restoring the cultural dignity of sadness is more important than ever. Because if Gen Z is to build a more resilient emotional world than the one they have inherited, they’ll need to learn that sadness is not a personal defect to cure or a sensation to escape, but a feeling as old as the human experience itself, and one to tolerate, embrace, and ultimately grow through.

The drumbeat of sneakers hitting the sidewalks is crescendoing by the month. The nation has become gripped by a running craze, with Strava signups hitting all-time highs and half marathons tallying record attendance and run clubs cluttering the weekday calendar.

While hardly the first time running has become the foremost fitness darling, (recall the aerobic boom of the ‘70s and the trendiness of road races in the late ‘90s) its newest rebirth has arrived powered by the new, novel forces of online aestheticization and social media showmanship.

Fitness crazes follow the same unforgiving cyclical patterns of fashion fads, achieving cool kid status before lapsing into dorky and boring territory once again. The *now it’s hot, now it’s not* pipeline is nothing new under the sun. And it’s only natural that these swings come exacerbated by a consumerist racket, with brands piling on to fresh cash grabs, eager to capitalize on consumer urges to acquire the newest athletic paraphernalia, stat.

What’s interesting, perhaps, is why these trends return. After all, their contemporary iterations never manifest as pure carbon copies of the ones from decades past. Recurring fitness trends emerge from obviously different societal brews and come outfitted with new motivations, manifestos, and accouterments.

Most importantly, they’re never about just the activity itself. The running boom of the 2020s is about more than clocking miles. Given a deeper look, it’s about challenging the forces of social atomization and stratification, about a hunger to get back in touch with the earth and our bodies, and even about relegitimizing that uniquely human superpower of endurance.

Subscribe now

Wind the clock back a few years and running was fast becoming a lifeline during lockdown-era for gym-deprived thousands. I was one of them, pounding the pavement on empty afternoons, tracing longer and longer routes in an attempt to replicate the high that weightlifting provided. The tangibility and freedom of crossing physical distance was therapeutic amidst the turbulence of a worldwide medical mystery.

As indoor gathering spaces gained a reputation as cesspools of pathogens, the Great Outdoors presented itself as a safe alternative. That “going on a run” was a solitary venture requiring little physical equipment certainly helped to quell germ anxieties. And so, a new population of runners was born that boosted the community’s ranks—say hello to the Covid converts.

Even today, the spirit of that fashionable simplicity lives on— just lace up those sneakers and get out the door. Colliding with the economic grievances of posh fitness classes and the overwrought bickering surrounding the scientifically optimal way to exercise, running presents itself as alternative that feels vaguely counterculture. Reassuringly, despite its popular obsession with route-tracking apps, biometric data, and its subculture of competitive performativity, running still has—and will always have—egalitarian roots.

Attempts to overcomplicate and overdramatize it are expected as its popularity climbs, but don’t be fooled. Most anyone can run and needn’t require an arsenal of trackers and a closetful of Hoka sneakers to do so. It’s this refreshingly democratic feel of running that I suspect appeals to many of its newer adoptees.

At certain historical junctures we grow tired of the pretentious and the superfluous and the urge to “go back to the basics” mounts. This often occurs when inflation woes have peaked and once cultural optimism has burned off of a bit. Consider also the trendy appetite for the analog, and the relief of returning to the original, simpler versions of things in our digital-drenched times. See how the running boom might have some parallels?

Running has become more than a favorite exercise checkbox, however. It has become a star social scene too. Run clubs boast boisterous group photos and motivational cheer and all-inclusive events. They carve up fast-growing social media presences. They promote post-run chatter and fitness friendships. With a staggering participation surge in recent years, they’re clearly scratching an itch. And with a reputation for romantic link-ups, they’re offering those dating app refugees a second chance at love, who knew?

Mercifully, the run club hinges on inclusivity. The emphasis is on participation and social comradery rather than speed and intensity. Modest distances are trekked by foot, but no midweek half marathons attempted. Elitist expectations are scrubbed away and mile paces treated as a free-for-all, as an enjoyable irrelevance. This is a positive, prosocial shift that has helped to democratize the definition of who a “runner” really is.

Earlier dissuaded from slipping on the sneakers because “I just don’t have the runner’s build” or, “I have bad knees,” many are now eager to give the after-work run an honest try after the stakes have been lowered and the dull monotony of solitary sidewalk-pounding has been lightened by optional socializing. Bolstering its newfound accessibility is the growing scientific conviction that Zone 2 training really isn’t pointless after all, and might actually be the sweet spot.

Where before the clock-crushing, out-of-breath runner was championed, newer research was compounding a discovery that moderate paces might be hitting the optimal aerobic efficiency everyone was pining after. Sustainability began to usurp intensity as the glamorized goal. This new “science of slowness” reshaped what a successful runner looked like, giving way to a much more elastic definition.

For some, running is a mental salve amid the cushiness of the too-comfortable life. In modern times we’ve become so accustomed to the convenient, the colorful, and the climate-controlled. We’ve become so conditioned to never-ending entertainment and on-demand everything. Our patience and imaginations decay en masse in this environment.

It wasn’t for nothing that journalist Michael Easter dubbed modernity a “comfort crisis”. Because far from becoming blissfully happy, we’ve found ourselves frequently aggravated, burned-out, and lethargic instead. We didn’t actually want all the spoils of our screen-saturated culture, as it turned out. No surprise, then, that we see many sinking their teeth into the love/hate, feels so bad/feels so good, quietly grueling recreation of running to fix the unease.

In the run’s prolonged discomfort one is forced into presentness. Into feeling forehead sweat trickling and thighs chafing and breath shuddering, in a way that few other activities force us to do. There are no distractions, no new tricks, just pure propelled motion.

Running is having a popularity moment because it’s free, communal, and getting a social-media makeover, sure, but it’s also reacquainting us with overlooked necessities of the human spirit—the power of being present, of doing uncomfortable things, and of putting one foot in the front of the other.

American cities are dropping copy-and-paste apartment buildings onto the urban blueprint left and right these days. Have you noticed this? They come with floors stacked in fives, tin can exteriors, ground-level retail jungles, and cold, weirdly decorated lobbies. And somehow, whether they’ve sprouted up on the beachy boulevards of southern California or the snowy suburbs of Philadelphia, they all look and feel nearly identical. (Save, perhaps, for some variety in those garishly colored siding panels.)

It’s nothing new that every historical time period deals with housing homogenization. Think of the bungalows pre-Great Depression or the ranchers that swarmed the nation mid-century. Five-over-one’s (the name dubbed for these basic, boxy apartment complexes) just so happen to be the construction darling of the 2020s.

They’re cheap and efficient to make and have admirably conquered the byzantine regulations of zoning commissions. Despite their practical motivations, something about their sterile, nondescript aesthetic coupled with the sheer sameness of their national infestation make them appear both architecturally lazy and domestically soulless. They’re a symbol of mass-produced modernity that retains only a slippery grasp on character and beauty, on form over function, and that abstract notion of ‘place’.

Subscribe now

Take a good look at one and you get the impression that these blocky edifices jutting into the skyline aren’t being built to last centuries but rather to exist just long enough to turn a profit before fading into irrelevance and disrepair. You get the impression that they’re there to gobble up transient populations for the time being, but not necessarily to forge communities.

You might think architecture has nothing to say about society, but I’d argue the opposite. The disposability, blandness, and gentrification that our modern-day urban housing developments invoke are indications of what matters (and doesn’t matter) to us as a society. The facades and paper-thin walls of our dwellings do indeed bear hazy proof of our collective restlessness and spiritual malaise.

The five-over-one gets its name from stacking five stories of wood construction over one story of concrete. Typically, this lower floor is home to shops and restaurants, while the remaining floors house residents in units cleverly marketed as “luxury”. Wood framing is favored for its cost-cutting perks, and blueprints are sketched to maximize the amount of units that can be packed into each floor.

Bureaucratic nitpicking and zoning constraints make it increasingly difficult to churn out construction projects that aren’t cookie-cutter. This encourages the large firms that have already mastered these pesky particularities to scoop up additional market share, driving more and more local developers into obscurity as a consequence.

What the real estate heavy-hitters are most interested in is scalable prototypes and commodified finished products. And thanks to the overwhelming popularity of computer-aided design, the role of the architect has become tragically marginalized. Creativity has been back-burnered and calculator-logic has taken center stage.

As a result, contemporary apartments are optimized for uniformity and profit and the speed with which they can be tossed together. They aren’t as optimized for life itself. It’s common for buildings to lack any distinguishable local character or sensible climate adaptions. Most come outfitted with trendy gyms and cavernous foyers but these amenities are oftentimes glittery and cheap and merely tacked-on to drive up perceived value. Everyone’s gunning for that ‘luxury’ label, after all.

Since the cost difference between decking out buildings in standard vs. luxury finishes in small and the long-term upside in the form of jacked-up rents is high, developers ultimately have an incentive to churn out overpriced apartments. This, of course, only feeds the displacement of lower-income individuals who don’t really care about having dog-washing stations and on-demand ellipticals, and who would rather just have a cozy space with a rent that’s not back-breaking, thank you very much.

Despite its laundry list of amenities and copious collection of lounge furniture and preening about its cosmopolitan community, the luxury apartment complex hardly generates the sociability it thinks it might. At a moment when people complain about the lonesome drudgery of work-from-home gigs and media outlets sound the alarm over our thirst for third spaces, capitalism responds by coughing up a simulacrum of community—that is, something that tries very hard to look like it but doesn’t really feel like it.

Few really hang out in those echoey lobbies with their artificial plants and plasticky pillows, after all. And the maximum security tech with its army of cameras, smart locks, keypads, and access control sensors designed to feel protective and reassuring can end up creating a suspicious, insular vibe instead, one that subtly encourages residents to hunker down and hollow out those well-intentioned gathering spaces.

In the end, they say that our built environments shape our inner ones. But our inner environments can also mold what we seek in our external environment. Who really knows what comes first? At the very least, it poses an interesting question that I will leave purposely open-ended: what, do you think, might the optimized sameness of the modern complex with its synthetic luxury veneer tell us about ourselves?

We live in an age where nothing escapes the threat of being labeled “cringe”. Entire corners of the internet are devoted to cataloguing awkward videos, blundering speeches, overeager auditions, marriage proposals gone wrong, and motley displays of earnestness that fall flat among the ruthless, anonymous masses of online spectators. You’ve no doubt seen these chuckle-worthy compilations, or shared a viral clip of someone showing off only to spectacularly fail seconds later.

Troublingly, what began as a slang term for second-hand embarrassment has morphed into a cultural reflex: a way of mocking, dismissing, and distancing ourselves from those we’ve stamped as try-hard’s, pick-me’s, or simply “too-much”. But while “cringe” is everywhere, we’re not as used to considering its costs. How it limits our own desire for self-experimentation and heightens our risk aversion, how it blunts the empathy we feel towards others, and even how it exposes the ugly underside of all that we disown and avoid in the privacy of our own psyches.

More than just comic relief, cringe content acts a behavioral nudge, drip-feeding us social dread and rearing younger generations in the subtle art of shunning those that overreach and overstep (and while we’re at it, scoffing at our own inelegant labors and work-in-progress-chronicles).

Subscribe now

An inescapable part of attending elementary school used to be that you were subjected to an anti-bullying curriculum at least once a year and gravely finger-wagged about tossing insults to your fellow students on the playground. But as the 2010s approached, a new beast “cyber-bullying” began to dominate the conversation, accompanied by its documentaries of tearful teens and mean-spirited text messages and ominous-sounding narrators.

As we all know, children now enter the online jungle at squeamishly young ages which many fret is exposing their vulnerable little Rousseauian minds to its barbaric dialogue and thereby corrupting their inherent innocence. In reality, all kids harbor cruel, cold-hearted impulses and while online scampering-about can inflame these instincts, it certainly does not create them from scratch.

Many adults panicked when they realized the sinister potential the anonymous comment section, unsolicited direct messaging, blackmailing, and leaking all had. But what breezily sailed under the radar was the cultivation of cringe content which looked far more innocuous by contrast, and rightfully so. It shouldn’t be surprising that much of that poking-fun was disseminated by teenagers, whose coming-of-age journeys historically contain initiations into progressively sophisticated ways of jockeying for favorable social status.

In this respect, cringe content is the perfect match for the appetites of adolescent mockery. It’s quietly damning, often backhanded, and vaguely blasé. Devoid of overt threats or jabs, it maintains an air of plausible deniability and it manifests as a slippery “attack,” if it looks like an attack at all.

Often, cringe content is as simple as cutting clips out of context, attaching the label “cringe,” and waiting for the audience to emerge and pile on to this appraisal in the comment section by way of nauseated emojis and snarky commentary. No one can comfortably call it bullying, especially when everything on the Internet is “fair game,” lives forever, and is owned by no one, as the usual sayings go.

Not only can someone’s few minutes or seconds of cringe be snatched up and immortalized against their will, it can be multiplied across media platforms, squashing all hope that one’s ill-timed moment could be tolerably bandied about for a bit before decomposing into digital irrelevance on some corner of the Web. All this to say, the stakes of social risk have climbed to new heights and in this light it would be somewhat rude to rebuff today’s adolescents for their telltale risk-aversion.

While their parents might have romped around on a primitive version of the Internet that felt fun, lawless, and anonymous in decades past, we inhabit this quaint fantasyland no longer. If today’s teens and young adults are cagey in public, at least some of their blank stares and and wallflower moments can be chalked up to a subconscious fear of “doing something stupid” and waking up to find it plastered online for all eternity.

Some wonder whether the awkward tween years are vanishing and if so, that this is partly due to online exposure, parasocial relationships with digital creators, and subsequent attempts to imitate these personal-brand-minded heroes of theirs. Is it possible older children are being robbed of an essential transition period? After all, clumsily dabbling in new activities and identities while simultaneously being allowed to cling to some of the comforts of childhood is one of the great pleasures of that curiously liminal space between childhood and teenagehood.

But when this prepubescent floundering so often gets tagged online as “cringe,” and so much of the lives of tweens are spent absorbing the the polished personal dispatches of individuals older than they and obviously more savvy, it’s no wonder they’re eager to lay low, study “cool,” and grow up as fast as possible.

It is easy to file cringe content under the category of humor, as harmless poking fun. And without a doubt, societies need the relief of collective laughter and free license to point out the amusing and the absurd. But cringe content is also a subtle form of social control, a way to shut someone down with a single snide condemnation.

We have always sought to establish normative behaviors and to quietly punish those that don’t keep in step. This is nothing particularly new, but what is new is that an entire genre of it has been created, entire online communities centered around it, it has no definitive life-cycle, and it is composed almost entirely of real-life slip-ups and embarrassing fails of our fellow flawed humans—in short, people just like us.

The looming threat of it can certainly make us more inclined towards conformism and passivity and dissuade us from risking the humiliations of being seen trying, of creating something new and experimental, and of exposing our passions to the world. If you’re petrified of being inducted into the Cringe Hall of Fame then you will turn your self-consciousness into self-censorship. You will subdue your ambition and cloak your sincerity.

After all, much of what is labeled “cringe” is simply earnestness that doesn’t pan out in the end. Western culture loves to push the value of “authenticity” but doesn’t realize the extent to which it’s secretly stipulating that this authenticity have both a kind of aesthetic sensibility to it and a solid success story.

It’s here that we run into a common trip-up of our essentialist age. One awkward, ill-fated blunder can become the defining characteristic of someone, a stubborn stain difficult to scrub away. We have a tendency to lapse into the crude judgements of all good or all bad, to take one chunk of evidence and use it to inform the totality of a person’s worth, character, and yes, even their coolness. This brutal logic treats sins as unforgivable, present opinions as unmalleable, and mistakes as irrelevant indulgences.

This philosophical bent we’ve acquired is one key to the mystery of why we’ve grown so bizarrely fond of diagnosing, pathologizing, and oversimplifying our fellow humans nowadays. It’s an impulse born of a need to reduce a person to a black-and-white formulation, to a static entity stripped of the ambivalences of growth and change and ordinary fluctuation. In this context, I find cringe content to be a weird mash-up of medieval-style essentialism and Victorian-esque moral judgement that we seem to have proudly cooked up with chaos of the Internet Age.

One of the overlooked aspects of “cringe” is its function as a projection device. Carl Jung, one of the forefathers of projection as a psychological concept once said, “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding about ourselves,” which is to say that what we find most cringeworthy in others can actually be a reflection of our own gnawing insecurities and unrealized ambitions. We can grow to resent the sincerity and naive ambition of others because it cannot help but remind us of our own self-censorship, our own clipped creativity, and our own cowardliness before the great bogeyman of being “cringe”.

It is, of course, not entirely an objective category, so what we toss in there is revelatory of our own discomforts. And how often have we used cringe content for purposes other than some afternoon giggles? How often have we watched a mortifying clip unfold and shuddered, “I’m so glad that’s not me” and used it to secretly bolster our self-esteem? The classic putting-yourself-in-their-shoes can look vaguely empathetic at first glance but really it’s just providing self-reassurance after that initial uncomfy second-hand embarrassment burns off. Oof, at least I haven’t done x embarrassing thing, we think to ourselves, lying comatose behind the protective buffer of our digital screens.

Ultimately, while cringe content may be categorized as comic relief, its effects go beyond generating laughs. It has a sneaky way of discouraging playful experimentation and of condemning our inevitable blips of awkwardness. It can convince us that sarcasm is superior to sincerity. It can make us fearful to try and scared to act sans crippling preoccupations with our self-presentation.

Skittish about our blunders being captured and immortalized online, we may rein our ambitions and hungers in, and snicker at those that push past this opposition and plow ahead anyway. In the end, to be human is to be “cringe” every now and then.

And it’s not a moral failing or a permanent label, as our worst fears would have us believe. It’s just a sign that we’re alive, learning and growing, fumbling and tumbling our way through life. So I end with: Long Live Cringe.

Leave a comment

Singles mixers and speed dating extravaganzas are popping up in cities coast to coast. Under the mandatory glow of string lights and the jingle of cocktail glasses, nervous twenty and thirysomethings gather to bust out the sugary small talk and old-fashioned name tags in the hopes of landing “the one”. Having enjoyed a decade-long hiatus thanks to the almighty reign of the dating app, if there’s one thing everyone stuck in singledom these days seems to agree on, it’s this: They’re “sick of the apps” and are desperate for an alternative.

It would seem that alternative arrived in the form of a revived relic of the analog days—the structured, in-person local meetup. Disenchantment with dating apps and post-Covid blues have made many young people hungry for the glamorous ease of the “organic” IRL encounter.

One wonders, has the quest for romantic partnership really become trickier as the 21st century wears on? If the proliferation of dating shows and online commiseration isn’t enough of an indication, perhaps the gloomy statistics are. According to a recent study done by the popular app Tinder, 91% of male respondents and 94% of female respondents described the current dating environment as more difficult than ever.

Subscribe now

As it turns out, the swipe era promised efficiency but delivered burnout instead, subjecting all its starry-eyed signups to a deluge of ghosting, endless texting, and algorithmic annoyance. The novelty of the apps with their easy-breezy preformulated pickup lines and “specially-selected” suitors has ceased to charm beleaguered singles. Yet again, if the numbers are any indication, the stock of Match Group (who owns both Hinge and Tinder) has declined 69% in the past five years, and Bumble’s has suffered a 93% drop, which can only mean the disillusionment is widespread.

Beyond the obvious app fatigue, I wonder whether there are other reasons singles events are staging a resurgence. In the past half decade we’ve seen a wave of ‘2000s nostalgia wash over younger generations. Flip phones have become cool. Velour tracksuits are returning to closets. Pop-punk and Eurodance are back dominating the charts. Girls are streaking their hair with chunky highlights again, and busting out the butterfly clips for good measure. Teens are falling for digital cameras once more, their visual imperfections and technological clunkiness an ironic selling point rather than a deterrence. Is it any surprise we might find dating trends themselves whipped into this whirlwind? That “analog romance” might be making a comeback?

The very real pining for in-person connection aside, I wonder whether some of the singles event’s growing popularity can be chalked up to its endearing nostalgia, and by the same token, also its relative novelty as a dating solution that weirdly feels fresh-on-the-scene, but is really an old mainstay of a bygone, seemingly “simpler” time.

The singles willing to cough up their weeknight evening free time for such events usually gesture towards the aforementioned app exhaustion, a desire for face-to-face interactions, and the “authenticity” of in-person chemistry as motivators. Well, this, and they’re perhaps not having better luck elsewhere.

Bars and clubs have notoriously dried-up as shoot-your-shot zones. What was once a quintessential arena for spontaneous flirting now feels like merely a glamorous backdrop from which to post Instagram Stories, and afterwards huddle with your girlfriends, stiff and beady-eyed, in fight-or-flight mode at the possibility of male interruption.

For Gen Z especially, the idea of approaching strangers cold can have too much of a “creep” factor. Raised on egalitarian manifestos and drilled in the language of consent and boundaries, younger generations have become hypersensitive to social risk and increasingly uncomfortable with the fluid, fluctuating rhythms of flirtation in-the-wild.

Taking this into account, the singles event may be regaining cultural relevance for yet another reason beyond the depressing isolation of the apps. It’s a structured and sanitized solution to both the sweaty uncertainty of bars and the fraught gender dynamics on the sidewalks of everyday life. Men are emboldened by the knowledge that the women at singles events have opted-in to being approached and women are comforted by the predetermined rules of engagement, the time limits, and the paternal, protective, hand-holdy vibe of these evening escapades.

Despite cropping up more often on the city calendar, singles mixers and the like are not without their myriad challenges. Many event organizers struggle to attain a balanced male-to-female ratio and end up canceling their events last-minute, or, should the show go on, having this unfortunate mismatch exposed in tell-alls online.

While some attendees complain they feel they’re stepping into the proverbial sausage fest, it is much more common to hear the incredulous realizations of women that the men are “nowhere to be found”. That they’ve have turned up to a sea of females. That they’ve made a new bestie but came away empty-handed when it came to a romantic prospect. Cue the where are the good men at? inquiry.

Understandably, many men are wary of giving the Fun and Fresh! Singles Mixer Near You! a try. Asked to shell out somewhere in the ballpark of a nice restaurant entree for a ticket inside, only to potentially face date rejection x20 and it’s no wonder men aren’t biting. Online dating has taken a toll on both genders, but it has hit the male camp that hardest who have historically been the ones to garner fewer interested swipers and who must deal with the statistically tougher standards set by the opposite gender.

While some singles are loving this “breath of fresh air” in the surge of local dating events, for others these events just seem to replicate the same tired dynamics they’ve been trying hard to escape by ditching the apps.

First impressions can still be just as superficial, rejection fatigue just as demoralizing, and despite the IRL setting, the transactional taste can be difficult to rinse away. Women can still be ruthlessly selective and men still baffled about what they ought to initiate. To top it all off, both genders have spent years honing their optionality mindsets—the idea that the “best option” is still out there and one must keep sifting and searching and sampling to land on their soulmate.

In this way, our modern-day countermeasures to the dating app dilemma can only do so much when what’s really generating so much romantic despair is not just the fast-and-furious mechanics of digital swiping but the underlying relational frustrations affecting men and women on the partner-prowl. There is no agreed-upon courtship script between the genders anymore, where once we did possess a semblance of one. And as time goes on, what’s left of those scripts only becomes more blurry and confusing.

In our postfeminist age we have heralded this dilution of gendered expectations as a cultural win and yet, it leaves behind a trail of tiny contradictions that must be dealt with. Is approaching women in the wild okay or a no-go? Some females will be livid at such an intrusion while just as many will be offended that men seem to “lack assertion these days”.

Perhaps in the end, this is why singles events feel at once promising and doomed. They’re a nostalgic experiment of sorts, gamely trying to re-inject our dating landscape with romantic aesthetics and in-person spontaneity (however contrived). But they can’t rewrite the ambivalence, miscommunication, and algorithmic competition baked into modern courtship.

While we may go ahead and toss string lights over the awkwardness, charge an entry fee, and hand out name tags, when it comes down to it, we cannot restore the old scripts that once made dating feel at least legible. But the hunger for connection is real and the return of mixers proves we are at least willing to try. But unless we figure out how to untangle the deeper conflicts we have around gender expectations, initiative, and intimacy, we may find ourselves just as frustrated in a room full of strangers as we are scowling behind the sunshine-y glow of the Bumble app.

When our cars loop home in the evenings, too many of us disappear behind automatic garage doors, draw the curtains, and wile away our nights immobilized behind the cold gleam of our digital screens. There was once a time when summer dusk called for a ritual shuffling out the front door to the porch, backdropped by the creak of rocking chairs, the clink of ice cubes in glasses of lemonade, and the pleasant, unhurried murmur of end-of-day conversation.

One of those funny bits of domestic architecture that has waxed and waned over the past century and a half, the front porch appears to have enjoyed a steady upswing over recent decades. According to the National Association of Home Builders, the number of new, single-family American homes equipped with porches has risen from 42 percent in 1994 to 52 percent in 2004 and 66 percent in 2022.

Reassuring statistics if you’re a fan of outdoor lounging, but what these percentages don’t capture is what these spaces look and feel like to us, whether they accommodate and encourage the kind of social leisure we’re nostalgic for, and whether substantial numbers of us are even sitting on our porches at all!

Subscribe now

Although they may not be tangibly vanishing, their cultural weight is trickling away. Dig a little deeper and where’s the leak coming from? A combined clog of social isolation, community distrust, digital burnout, fear of boredom, and segregation from the natural world, for starters.

Porches were first stitched on to the front of American homes in the 1880s just as well-to-do Victorians were developing a taste for conspicuous leisure and the aesthetic frivolity of fancy millwork and ornamented exteriors. As urban hubs whirred with industrialization and working-class labor, others found themselves twiddling their thumbs, faced with newfound opportunities to loaf about. Porches emerged as appealing escapes to cool off and converse.

These domestic add-ons became a signaling device for prosperity and an advertisement for a life decoupled from the primitivism of mere survival. They became popular places for social calls, courtships, and genteel companionship—the latter of which the Victorians charmingly insisted was both healthful and morality-boosting (the twin preoccupations of the age, after all).

Fond of fresh-air cures, these 19th-century porch-pioneers also developed screened, second-story “sleeping porches” to ward off both tuberculosis and summer heatwaves. Despite their stuffy, excessive getups and their painfully rigid etiquette, the Victorians possessed both an admiration for nature and a stalwart belief in the benefits of staying socially-connected that we ought to give them credit for.

By midcentury, cars were rumbling down streets in record numbers, spoiling the sedentary stillness of evening porch hangouts. Air conditioning units were being hefted into home windows. Televisions were becoming the focal point of family rooms. Radio broadcasts were crackling during nighttime leisure hours.

Modernist architecture became popular with its sleek, flat-fronted, minimalist designs (and with it, an inevitable decline in the seemingly fussy, unnecessary front porch). Suburban privacy gripped middle-class populations who became increasingly content to huddle in fenced backyards. The stranger-danger campaigns of the ’80s only deepened the slow tide of neighbor-suspicion already washing over residential communities.

By the time the Internet boom rolled around, the front porch was up against stiff competition. The warm hum of the computer monitor with its blinking, glinting pixels and gleeful, exploratory energy beckoned and evenings could easily slither away under its spell—after-dinner air be damned.

Share

Since the dawn of the 21st-century, we’ve seen a healthy diversity of home styles hit the market. Some come decked out with the functional, sprawling front-lawn escape. Others come with a tiny, performative postage-stamp of a porch scarcely big enough to fit a chair and devoid of practical protection from the elements. To no one’s surprise, these concrete slabs end up doing little else but acting as landing pads for delivery boxes. These sterile, stripped-down designs are porches in name only—really only there to satisfy a realtor’s checkbox, and certainly don’t convince anyone they’re spaces to “do life” on.

Despite these disheartening models, we have hardly abandoned the idea of an outdoor oasis. We’ve taken to gussying up our backyards instead, pinning elaborate decks onto the rear of the house, plunging chlorinated pools into the turf, trundling expensive grills onto patios, and hedging the whole thing in dense, boxy shrubs. If the Victorians treated the front porch as the status symbol, we’ve almost certainly flip-flopped this arrangement.

That’s not to say this shift swallowed up everyone, however. Older neighborhoods, particularly in the South and Midwest, have hung on to their bungalows and community block parties. That doesn’t change the fact that overall cultural sentiment has soured on idle, fresh-air sit-downs that invite spontaneous brushes and breezy greetings with neighbors, drifting instead toward indoor entertainment, backyard retreats, and digital socializing.

With the deep, usable, and public-facing porch less prevalent, neighborhoods are sapped of a general invitation-to-connect that helps local communities thrive, trust one another, and forge friendship. Research over whether our casual social bonds are diminishing is mixed, with the ubiquity of follower counts and online chats inevitably complicating this inquiry. Yet some studies show that the number of “fringe friends” Americans have are indeed drying up.

We’ve had a long time to mire in the disillusionment of the social connectivity paradox, i.e. more [digital] interaction ≠ feeling more connected. Yet we’re struggling to reclaim some of the natural gathering spaces we used to have, and all this amid a mighty technological current carrying everything from wireless headphones, smart doorbells, and home delivery apps that, for better or worse, all shut us off from the world and bubble-wrap us from unwelcome interruptions.

Thanks to these and other innovations, we clock fewer informal conversations per day compared to our predecessors and have weaker local networks as a result. We like to think our home-security cameras and shut-in lifestyles are justified thanks to “the crazies” out there, but lurking underneath these rationalizations is often a wish that things could be different. Lamentably, when we don’t stop to get to know each other, we risk treating the supposed “stranger” as threatening or adversarial when he needn’t be either of these things at all.

One theory I have for our cultural losing-touch with the front porch is that we have become so adapted to hyper-exposure online and so tormented by 24/7 reachability that we want, even need, the walled-off safety that the shuttered home provides. In some feat of psychic balance, we counter the vulnerability and availability we feel in our vaporous digital engagements with reclaiming our space, literally and concretely.

How do we do this? By choosing to lounge in the sequestered environs of the backyard instead. By screening who’s at the doorbell without ever opening it—not today, Mr. Salesman. By keeping our windows bolted and cranking the AC all summer. By skipping the weekly grocery run and opting for door-delivery instead. The list goes on.

But protective paranoia and good old-fashioned urges to rot in bed aside, some of us just wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves if plopped on a front porch, sans digital device. Some of the front porch’s nostalgic feel comes from the fact that it characterized a time when we were comparatively more at ease with passive observation and solitary reflection, simply by virtue of having less infectious distractions to hinder it.

But, as you have probably witnessed, many of us squirm like a child stuffed into a snowsuit when faced with the suggestion to sit alone in contemplation, drinking in our surroundings. It sounds nice in theory, but can feel scary in reality, so offended by boredom and habituated to the self-soothing infinite scroll are we. What I find particularly ironic about this state of affairs, however, is that we have essentially exchanged passive experience of our own thoughts and physical surroundings for passive consumption of digital media.

In making this swap, we’ve atrophied our abilities to simply sit, watch, and take in both the natural world and the neighborhood theater. Quick to label such aimless leisure as unproductive when compared against the tap dance we play with our phones—those 30-second videos may be “informative” but will you remember them? Did you need it in the first place? Are you so sure that’s the best way to spend your time?—we forget that in the deceptive stillness of “doing nothing” on the front porch we have the sun and the sky and breezes and real smiles and the silence of growing things and the endearing rhythms of daily life, all of which we simply just don’t get from being shut-in and shackled to the synthetic versions we see playing out on our screens.

In the end, the front porch won’t save us, but it can inspire us to live our lives differently. Fix social media’s grip or dismantle suburban sprawl it cannot, but what it can do is remind us that community starts with humble invitations and small openings. A chair scraped out onto the stoop, a wave to someone on an afternoon stroll, a respite before hustling indoors.

I doubt we will fully return to the porch culture of the past, but I’m confident we can choose to make our homes a little more porous, our evenings a little more permeable, and our lives a little more interruptible by the good things, and that we’ll be better off for it.

You can tell a lot about an economy from the smallest, strangest details. Forget Wall Street reports or Jerome Powell’s pronouncements, we find today’s economic omens in restaurants yanking those complimentary bread baskets off the table and in the surge of at-home nail kits knocking biweekly manicures off the calendar. For a century, people have hunted for “recession indicators” in everyday life, eager to cobble together a haphazard science for when the economy was most likely to take a tumble.

Thanks to shaky supply chains, political bombshells, and creeping inflation, the hunt is once again in full swing. When the creaky statistics and feeble reassurances from the bureaucrats start to feel false, it makes sense we shift our focus to vibes instead—to feelings things out ourselves when the official numbers feel too abstract and out-of-touch to trust.

Subscribe now

The “hemline index” remains one of the most historically well-known of these mythical harbingers. First proposed in the 1920s by the economist George Taylor, it speculated that when times were good, hemlines crept up to reflect the breezy, happy energy of the age and when times were bad they dropped again to match the impending economic blues.

The Roaring Twenties had delighted in showing female calves galore, but by the Depression-era ’30s, Flapper-esque fashion risk had retreated and traditional cuts and modest hemlines had resurfaced in their wake. Decades later, the same pattern prevailed when the sizzling ‘60s debuted the miniskirt and the ‘70s sided with looser, longer silhouettes as the economy slumped and slogged through a withering bout of inflation.

Other makeshift barometers of money woes have long lingered in our cultural lore. Frozen pizzas are a favorite. Many believe that Americans stock up on their thin-crust Totino’s right before times get tough. Cheap, comforting, and can live in the freezer long enough to weather the apocalypse, or so goes the thought. The “Lipstick Index” also endures—the idea that women won’t eliminate luxury purchases in bad times, but will simply vent their cash to smaller, less wallet-hungry items instead.

And we can’t forget the predictive powers of men’s underwear sales, now can we? One of Alan (former Federal Reserve chairman) Greenspan’s pet theories was that men slacked off on replacing their worn undergarments when recessions reared their heads. (The man has been wrong on a lot of things, but spoiler alert: maybe not this one.)

There’s other signs of course. Bartenders grimace over dwindling take-home tips. Strippers dance in emptier clubs. Coworkers start packing sad-looking sandwiches for lunch. We clock these tiny, unsettling shifts and turn on the news to see what the experts strutting around in front of their touchscreens have to say. They babble on about inverted yield curves and volatility indexes and GDP-this-or-that. We squint and try to make sense of it all. But the movement of treasury bonds and updated unemployment rates only mean so much. More to the point, they only feel like so much.

They are numbers unceremoniously spat out from mathematical models that are fast-tracked to the airwaves and disseminated to the people who are never quite sure what to do with them. They are faceless abstractions, often hobbled by the fact that they are too large and composite to hold individual stories, and too man-made and theoretical to capture the emotional weather we humans are inseparable from.

This is why we go searching for clues ourselves. Why we dabble in the bottom-up enterprise of scouring our local environments and querying our friends, cataloguing the menu manipulations at our favorite cafes and eyeing the promotional emails landing in our inbox. It is not that the technical labors of the economist are not worthwhile, but that they provide only one sort of garbled, lifeless picture that may be too little, too late.

Mismatch between markets and reality happens more than we think, after all. The statistical analyses whirring across Wall Street do not always hold pace with the vicissitudes felt on Main Street. Stock tickers can get pummeled into the red all-at-once after feigning smooth sailing for months (*cough cough* 2008).

Foraging for recession indicators is not a paranoid endeavor when we take these rude historical surprises into account. If the markets put on a performance that everything is fine-and-dandy but the tangible, on-the-ground evidence is that people feel economically squeezed and shaky, then it’s those vibes we’d best be listening to.

The tricky thing about the recession-indicator hunt is that it’s not a perfect science. Not all “clues” sprout from the soil of economic doubt. The rumored return of skinny jeans have some teens fretting this can only mean millennial impoverishment is coming to sabotage their best years. Good chance this might be granting our garments too much clairvoyance though. The fashion cycle has, and will, churn with its nostalgia comebacks until the end of time.

And yet, if believed, such superstitions can amplify recessionary forces already at play in the same way that behavioral mirroring can, when individuals start to pattern their fearful behavior along that of others whom they believe might have more information or trustworthy judgement. Consider that it is hard to say whether people pocket the extra dollar they would otherwise tip because they’re currently feeling an economic pinch themselves, or because they’re watching others experience it and are worrying that they might feel the same way in the future.

Among the raise-your-hand-if-you’re-feeling-the-pain crowd, hair salons stepped up and confessed they were raking in less cash in the past year and customers were picking out low-maintenance colors and skimping on their haircuts. “Recession-blonde” was coined, with bleach-blonde girls doing the unthinkable and letting their roots grow in, opting for blended, browner hues, and spacing out pricey touch-ups.

Chatter is also trending on “Recession-pop,” a supposed resurgence of escapist, uber-catchy dance floor bangers that some speculate marks gloomy, let’s-forget-about-our-problems eras. Campbell’s Soup sales are even soaring. Law school applications are up. And Americans are buying up trinkets (see: Labubu dolls) instead of bothering to brave the home-buying rat race.

And throughout it all, the memes abound. Humor is a coping mechanism, as they say. It’s hardly surprising the ‘recession indicator’ conversation comes packaged with equal doses wit and worry. Staying aware can be an empowering position, but it’s one that entails being on the lookout for things we might not want to see.

Converting some of these unsettling observations into comedy instead of funneling all of them into full-fledged dread is a wise choice, and one that preserves our sanity and gives us agency. From naming absurd, ultra-specific “signals of doom” to poking fun at wry, millennial “been there, done that”-ism’s, a new generation is battling their way through the brush of an uncertain economic future, memeification helping to blaze the way.

Despite what it may look like, recession indicator talk in popular culture seems to me less preoccupied with forecasting than it does storytelling. Uncertainty is unbearable for humans without a narrative to hold onto. It’s how we make peace with the fact that we cannot, in fact, predict what is to come.

Sometimes we invent recession indicators because they offer us a way to reconcile dodgy publicized statistics and bureaucratic denial with our lived reality. Sometimes they take the economic unease we feel and validate it, giving form to its flux.

And when we blurt our theories to the next person who feels the exact same thing, we end up feeling less alone treading the waters of economic survival that our forebears have done since the dawn of time.

And that’s no small thing. So whether it’s hemlines, hair dye, or frozen pizza, let recession indicator lore live on.

I know I’m not the only one that has amassed a countertop clutter of canisters and capsules, a motley assortment of vitamins and supplements that seems to expand by the month as new hygienically-sealed bottles tumble out of Amazon boxes plastered with vague promises to “boost brain health”. Give my neurotransmitters a boost? I think to myself. How could I say no?

At a time when so many other industries are faltering, supplements are booming, enticing entrepreneurial newcomers, and ballooning by the billions. With a global market last valued at an eye-popping $192.65 billion, Americans are found responsible for powering well over a third of it, helping to give our national reputation as enthusiastic pill-poppers a makeover.

Long laughed about on the world stage for overeager prescription drug commercials that clogged up our primetime TV, these days the pharmaceutical fix is no longer the only remedy being aggressively peddled through our screens. Stumbling around online will get you face-to-face with peppy ads on vegetable powders, probiotic gummies, mushroom concoctions, energy elixirs, herbal tonics, and every variety of personalized immune-boosting and hormone-balancing capsules you can imagine.

While you’re slumped in bed, finger hovering and ready to pounce on that YouTube skip button, some fresh-faced, manically-grinning twenty-something is rattling a container of multivitamins in front of you and prattling on about its life-changing magic. It begs the question, what happened? What’s exactly behind this surge of pills and potions? How did America become so obsessed with supplements?

Subscribe now

Distrust

It’s no secret that the bleak trenches of Covid-19 with its flurry of starched face masks and flip-flopping rules and finger-wagging authorities sparked a new wave of medical skepticism within the American population. As if the backtracking and arbitrary leaps of new guidelines weren’t enough, every so often citizen onlookers would get a flash of yikes, they don’t seem to know what they’re doing.

Certainly, no one really did at the time, but the commissioners exhibited such a fierce distaste for experimental remedies that it galvanized many individuals who did not want to be told they could not do their own research, explore the preventative, or shore up their vulnerability to the virus with the humble means they had at their disposal.

In retrospect, these are understandable human impulses amid the chaotic throes of a pandemic. While for some, the psychological remedy was to lean in to the parental instructions of officials, for others it was to the take the reins into their own hands. The medical establishment issued blistering chastisements of the latter, which unsurprisingly did nothing to help boost their credibility.

In the years since, distrust of Big Pharma has deepened, and the industry frequently pilloried by the public as greedy and nontransparent. Couple this outrage with the installation of the eccentric RFK Jr. to the helm of the Department of Health—a man who swooped into Capitol Hill on a platform of attacking the three-letter government agencies, fulminating against food dyes, and singing the praises of natural immunity. His appointment seemed to validate a percolating unease with institutional medicine and further embed the punchy popularity of I’m going to take control of my health into American culture.

Deficiencies

One depressing observation that starts to dawn on you about the modern world is that in the name of progress, we have slaughtered so many of the things that keep us healthy and flourishing. We’ve depleted our soils of microscopic nutrients that keep our gut biomes healthy, we shy away from sunlight, we live sedentary lives bowed over blue-lit screens, and we pretend typing out comments online functions as our social fix.

In essence, we’ve stripped so many of the health necessities we once had built-in and are now tasked with working against the grain to rehabilitate them. In the same way that we can’t rely on back-breaking manual labor to give us the accidental muscles of our ancestors, we can’t rely on our nation’s tomatoes to give us anything close to the iron and magnesium content they did only a few short decades ago.

It’s a lot harder to tackle acres of impoverished farm fields with their snarl of profit motives and political entanglements than it is to pop a magnesium supplement. And in this way, supplements are a logical solution to a genuine problem. They’re a buzzy iteration of that stripping-out-and-adding-back-in pattern that does seem so tragically American.

While we can lament our hasty plundering in the name of economic advancement all we want, fatalism is not the national vice we’re known for. If anything, our saving grace has always been a talent for making do. For patching together solutions, for turning scarcity into ingenuity, and (perhaps controversially), turning our problems into products.

Self-Mastery

For many Americans, the cynicism they rightly accord our bumbling, crumbling medical system does not compel them to wallow in resignation but rather, fuels their determination to take matters into their own hands instead. Our self-reliant inheritance cannot help but clash with the bureaucratic lethargy of our institutions, leading to the dozens of alternative health offshoots we see today.

Often overlooked is the proliferation of online health content that feeds this democratic endeavor of self-research. The reams of blog posts and podcasts, the nootropics discussion boards, even the tell-all, “here’s my supplement stack” day-in-the-life content. We are lured by the claims of increased energy and focus (raise your hand if you’re one of the lucky ones not sleep-deprived and easily-distractible, because go you). We are eager as always to optimize. To check off a good-for-you action from the to-do list and to participate in something reassuringly measurable and blessedly simple.

The daily swallow of supplements is an attempt to cut through the powerlessness and ambiguity of that common groan, why do I feel so run-down? Even if the supplements seem to do nothing at all (or you fret that you’re gaslighting yourself into thinking they are doing something—just me?) their administration at least feels like self-care. There’s intention to filling the weekly pill box, a wholesome hope of bridging the nutrient gaps the 21st-century has so charitably saddled us with, a fervor in fending off modern-day sluggishness.

In the end, those bottles lining our countertops are evidence of a growing distrust in medical institutions that have fumbled our faith, of decades-long deficiencies baked into a modern world that has drained nutrition out of daily life, and a stubborn American optimism to take charge and make do anyway.

It’s true that supplements may be a flimsy fix, but they are also a reminder that, when faced with uncertainty and environmental hurdles, Americans would rather do something rather than nothing. That instinct, for better or worse, is what keeps supplement sales soaring off the charts. I don’t suspect they’ll be going down anytime soon.

Share

In his day, Marcus Aurelius was a very popular emperor. Looked upon as the prototypical philosopher-king, he was a man with a rare combination of political skill, life wisdom to rival the sages, and no power-hungry plots to his name. Hard to top that legacy, right? Down-to-earth and cool as a cucumber, he had every reason to be beloved from the Roman citizens of his day.

What’s impressive is that nearly two thousand years later, he’s outselling modern gurus with his cult paperback Meditations and his one-liners are popping up everywhere, from social media bios to tattoos, from gym walls to startup mission statements. It’s safe to say the man’s ideas have stood the test of time.

In the past decade, his ageless teachings and that of other Stoic heroes (do Seneca or Epictetus ring a bell?) have seen quite the revival. Suddenly, it seemed every podcaster was warbling on about memento mori and every friend group had someone proselytizing the living-in-the-present dictums of some berobed Roman legend.

Subscribe now

Stoicism sits at an interesting cultural crossroads where the smiley softness of the mindfulness resurgence collides with the hard-edged, no-excuses ethos championed by tech CEOs and internet alpha-bros. It functions as both a clapback to our old Puritan residue of wholesale emotional repression, at the same time that it reorients our locus of control from the external to the internal. This is a refreshing shift at a time when therapyspeak saturates conversations and treating people as inherently breakable with identities cobbled together by little more than wounds, triggers, and pathologies has become squeamishly normalized.

Stoicism’s present popularity is a cultural stab at merging our desperate desires to make honest contact with our inner selves and also reject the reactivity that we are practically pied in the face with everyday at the hands of 24/7 media churn and the addictive technologies we tote around.

But if you break apart Stoicism’s cool-kid factor, what is it that you find? Three intangible human needs of dwindling supply in today’s world: control, simplicity, and meaning.

Control

Pandemics and political pandemonium have existed since the dawn of time, yet these foes are frequently given the finger-point when the rise of the nation’s collective jitters is brought up. It’s easy to forget that our parents and grandparents waded through periods of existential doom, tsk-tsked about moral degeneration, and thought acid rain and overpopulation would be very the death of us. Which is to say, they’re not that unlike us.

Of course, what has been an evolutionary challenge to grapple with is our exposure to crisis, and not necessarily the content of such crises (which has always been constantly shifting). Our knowledge of catastrophe used to be far more localized, but within a few generations we’ve exchanged this quaint catalog-of-threats for the eagle’s-eye view where we can see everything going wrong in the world all at once, in exhaustive detail, and decked out in the most anxiety-ratcheting language to get our monetized eyeballs to pay attention.

Problematically, we are no more equipped as singular humans to swoop down and sweep up wars, humanitarian disasters, and medical mysteries. Powerless and overexposed, we’re stuck. Knowledge is power! We hear our third-grade teacher trill. Ah, a truism that was no match for the mushrooming, metastasizing information tsunami that would reach our shores. Being informed did not seamlessly translate to being empowered, it turned out. And as the imbalances cratered between our finite human capacities and the technologies that had outpaced us, too much information we learned was a legitimate thing.

With our hands tied when it came to putting the genie back in the bottle, the only solution leftover became to internally make peace with the powerlessness modernity had wrought. How does one do that? Stoicism’s concept of the dichotomy of control stands out: The idea that one should delineate between what is within their control and what is not, and focus their mental efforts on how to respond with calm and composure to unpredictable events.

If it’s not obvious, shrinking-down the circle of potential worries conserves mental energy and shifting to an internal locus of control has both an empowering and comforting effect. Small wonder we’re drawn to it during a time when we’re mass unsubscribing from promo emails, outfitting our devices with app-blockers, and breathing a sigh of relief post-iPhone Focus Mode-tap.

And what of amor fati (Latin for “love of fate”)? Another ancient Stoic proverb that encourages acceptance of what is, it holds appeal amid our millennium’s Outrage Olympics which seem bent on persuading us that the utility of venting our emotional insult is greater than freedom of enduring the inevitable peaceably. Our tendencies for outrage come curiously paired with tendencies towards escapism. This is, in some ways, a deliberate commercial stunt (and yikes, maybe a political one too).

Our anger is kindled, lit, and inflamed and at just the right moments, proffered mollification and self-soothing dopamine hits. Watch these 30 second videos on an infinite loop; gamble from the comfort of your home with this convenient (read: addictive) app; shop these never-ending sales from products picked just for you!

Even the negative visualization exercises central to the practice of Stoicism (care to contemplate your death, anyone?) seem to our 21st-century minds distressingly fatalistic, raised as many of us were in cheery, pull-up-those-bootstraps environments. Rather than inuring us against the bad things that would happen in life, this relentless positivity has only made us more fearful of life’s trials and misfortunes—not resistant to them. This is hardly an empowering state of affairs, and one Stoicism tries to make amends to.

A palpable lack of control has become a default setting of our modern environment and it’s clear we’re looking for ways to wrest that back. Stoicism emerges as a grounded and sober alternative, and an appealing exit from the fast, flashy feedback loops of outrage and escapism that leave us emotionally exhausted.

Simplicity

Having a reputation for hailing from a bunch of bearded, wrinkled men (read: wise, sophisticated) from those long-ago golden empires sloshed by the Mediterranean Sea and smiled upon by the gods certainly helps. But so too does being able to fit all your philosophical principles onto a notecard. The masses have always craved simplicity, but these days, there’s an urgency to that craving. And no, it’s not just because *short attention spans*.

Everyday we’re mucking around in bits of everyone’s creator-economy tips-and-tricks, commodified ten-step systems, and latest-and-greatest personal growth routines, and getting bogged down by the congestion and contradiction of it all. Stoicism waltzes in as both an extremely simple and relatively comprehensive antidote. Its prescriptions are both delightfully disinclined towards the esoteric (which cannot be said of most schools of philosophy) and are broad enough that they are applicable towards nearly everything under the sun.

This is quite relieving to us as modern individuals. Scooped up out of an endless sea of sifting through scattered self-help advice and delivered onto the shores of a coherent life-blueprint that not only isn’t trying to sell us anything, but is free from dogmatic rules, and to top it off, has been burnished and time-tested by, oh, I don’t know, two millennia?! is a godsend. And deep down its ideas just make sense, surely a quiet comfort as we crawl our way back to the wisdom of our intuitions after the ideological havoc of the 20th-century.

Meaning

Suspicious as many are of the inflexible rules and authoritarian reek of traditional religion, yet disillusioned by the navel-gazing ruts therapy culture is prone to, it should come as no surprise we might seek something in-between. A something that respects the inner self without overindulging it, and that negotiates with the outside world sans all that encrusted fear and icy dogma.

A something that bridges the gap between the secular and sacred, spooning up self-regulation tactics simultaneously with moral aims (wisdom, courage, justice, etc.) What sets Stoicism apart is that it posits inner calm as just as important as outer character. Such a holistic and reasonable balance is seldom found within the countless doctrines and philosophies littering history.

And with exit-aesthetics on the rise (see: quiet quitting, digital detoxing, de-influencing) Stoicism’s placid rejection of the excess, the unhelpful, and the irrelevant finds a fitting audience, in addition to coming in handy for braving the capitalist jungle and its inevitable burnout of competitive consumption.

When it comes down to it, people are en masse tired of the noise. Of the overstimulation, the content circus, the rage bait, and the existential amnesia that so characterizes modernity. Stoicism skates in with its uncomplicated realism, its forgiving instructions, and its gentle self-discipline and lands like a spiritual lifeline for many. As it turns out, it’s for good reason that Meditations is still flying off the shelves.

📌 Thank you so much for reading! If you found this post interesting or valuable, I’d love it if you would consider restacking it or sharing it with someone you know 😊

Share

In 2019, Jia Tolentino’s essay “The Age of Instagram Face” hit the pages of The New Yorker, kicking off a much-needed public dialogue on the unnerving proliferation of expressionless, airbrushed female selfies online.

Of this “single, cyborgian face” that tends to be “distinctly white but ambiguously ethnic” she writes:

“It’s a young face, of course, with poreless skin and plump, high cheekbones. It has catlike eyes and long, cartoonish lashes; it has a small, neat nose and full, lush lips. It looks at you coyly but blankly, as if its owner has taken half a Klonopin and is considering asking you for a private-jet ride to Coachella.”

Six years later, her diagnosis still rings uncomfortably true. But things have arguably worsened. Filters have become more advanced and undetectable, med spas have mushroomed across the country, and the rollout of artificial intelligence has turned the Internet into a twilight zone.

Not only are we narrowing our eyes and fighting to distinguish the edited from the IRL, we’re now battling to parse the corporeal from the counterfeit. What’s real and what’s not? has become Who’s real and who’s not?

While the chunky eyebrows and sculpted eyeshadow of years past have been usurped by dewy skin, feathery lashes, and glossy lips, there’s nothing new about the evolution of beauty ideals over time. What is new is the degree to which these ideals are authored by technological algorithms rather than by human society. And they’re more powerfully-pushed too, on account of the algorithm’s cozy relationship with dopamine—that infamous “wanting” brain chemical that identifies rewards and thirsts to go after them.

One of our modern ironies is that we’re bombarded with claims of “celebrating uniqueness” at the same time that we’re encouraged to relentlessly chase conformity through algorithmically-rewarded aesthetics. One is expected to devote themselves to the ruthless, solitary quest of self-improvement while paradoxically, staking their beauty ambition as a final dissolution into a sea of identical faces. The end goal is ultimately to blend in, to dissolve into optimized sameness, and to become simultaneously unremarkable and flawless.

For all the homage that we pay “self-expression,” some of this is pure talk. We may think that we are more liberated than we once were, but look around! We have exchanged community conformism for the commodification pressures of styling the personal brand.

Gone are the mid-century days where rebellion against decorum would’ve earned you side-eyes from the neighborhood housewives. Where before the motivation was to “fit in” and “not rock the boat,” these days it is to transcend our “mid” appearances to look like a computerized ideal. In other words, it’s old-style conformism mixed with the newfangled language of self-optimization, the naked quest to be the best, and the heady powers of technological tweaking.

This imperative is strongest among the influencer class, whose virality on the interweb depends on their embodying the beauty ideal and therefore, currying favor with the algorithm. It’s worth noting that the Instagram Face of our present-day is not necessarily the most “beautiful,” but it is the most engineered-to-be-desired, and it’s this, in our era of digital validation, that ultimately counts.

One wonders, have we forgotten the value of natural faces? Have we atrophied our appreciation for human beauty? Have we allowed the siren calls of digital perfection and surgical confection to muddy what we think we “should” look like?

Natural faces are expressive and disproportionate and dotted with skin imperfections. This is easy to forget when our days are spent swiping through digital feeds of women with eerily poreless faces who look movie-star glam while performing the most pedestrian excursions.

Slapping on a filter to your digital mementos has become a no-brainer. These beautifying pick-me-ups have become increasingly sophisticated and have mastered toeing the line of believability. But that’s not the only image upkeep that’s been getting more easy-breezy.

Injectables like the OG wrinkle-fighter Botox, and Juvederm, the golden child of lip fillers, are being syringed into women’s faces in record volumes. These cosmetic enhancements have remade their reputations as tools of tasteful refinement rather than dramatic, botch-prone transformation. They conveniently pitch themselves as innocuous helpers in the self-love journey, and less as indulgences rooted in vanity. They’re also touted as “reversible,” a word that does more than ease cosmetic anxieties, but calms moral ones too.

In recent years, a new crop of med spas has sprouted up to cater to this new, injectable-happy sensibility. These spaces are usually bright, fashionable havens infused with just the right touch of clinical respectability. Their very name conjures up something like, wellness sanctuary meets medical authority. Which, it turns out, is just the right tone to set. Not only does one get to frame their cosmetic escapades as self-care, but they also get to legitimize the whole thing with a medical stamp of approval.

As the menu of lunch-break procedures expands and continues to drop in price, altered facial features become more and more common, further cementing the cultural chokehold of Instagram Face and converting it from digital fairy-tale land to the sidewalks of real-life. Going unmentioned is that this only ratchets up beauty pressure even more by artificially elevating the baseline of “I woke up like this.”

One of the snags of getting your face (or your body, for that matter) toyed with is that what feels like a hotness upgrade now may be tomorrow’s cringe. Take, for example, the cartoonishly overfilled lips that rose to fame a decade ago and our cultural tiptoeing away from them since, with many celebrities confessing they’ve opted to get them dissolved. What we assume objective beauty is in the moment can later reveal itself to be merely a passing trend. Historically, this is nothing new. Yet with needles, knives, and implants involved, the stakes are undeniably higher.

And although cosmetic tinkering has become more affordable, its sticker price often obscures the true cost of maintenance and the ongoing commitment one often must make to keep one’s forehead smooth or jawline contoured. The industry glibly peddles the illusion of attainability at the same time that they’re reinforcing the pressure to keep up.

At the end of the day, chasing “effortless” beauty (that is, our biased, trend-derived current conception of it) has an economic burden associated with it. And even if med spas are erasing class hurdles to enter the appearance-upgrade arena, the females still positioned to win are the ones with enough cash to maintain the illusion, replenish the dermal fillers, and keep those appointments recurring.

It’s reassuring that just as flocks of women are signing on for med spa memberships and filtering their faces online until they’ve achieved plastic-y, Barbie-like perfection, just as many are spurning these compulsions—whether publicly, in the form of deinfluencing and filter callout, or privately, by eschewing Botox peer-pressure and making peace with features they were earlier convinced needed to be “fixed”.

Whether it’s through powders and paste, syringes and needles, or digital magic, women of all types seek beautification. These impulses are age-old. And there is no feasible binary of right or wrong, enough or not-enough. Such decisions are personal, but in their aggregate, they are undeniably political too. This is why it’s interesting to ponder how our algorithmic times may be driving homogenization and the quest for perfection, and distorting our self-perceptions and aesthetic aspirations in the process.

If you think about it, the real danger of Instagram Face isn’t just that it’s everywhere. It’s that it’s nowhere. No one really looks like that—not even the women who are trying to! And yet somehow, we all believe we should. Let that give you pause the next time you’ve spent too long beauty-doomscrolling, your eyes have overdosed on luminescent, doctored influencer selfies and you’re tempted to, once again, feel bad about your face.

📌 P.S. If you enjoyed this article, you might also enjoy my essay “The Curious Resurgence of the Digital Camera”.