Most liberals hate Trump. Most Democrats hate Trump. They vote against him. They complain about him. They think he is dangerous, corrupt, grotesque, embarrassing, whatever adjective you want to use. But Trump has not affected everybody equally. His policies have not reached into everybody’s house. There are millions of comfortable liberals who hate Trump and still wake up every morning in basically the same life they had before he came back into office. Their job is fine. Their money is fine. Their family is fine. Their house is fine. Their retirement account is fine. Trump is something happening in the news. For me, Trump stopped being something happening in the news a long time ago.

I had a conversation recently with one of my oldest friends from college, somebody I love like a brother. I remember when he decided to apply to medical school. Now he is a surgeon and has done extremely well. We agree on most things politically. He hates Trump. He votes Democratic. He is not remotely MAGA. And we got into an argument about politics. At one point he told me he was disappointed in both sides. He said extremism on both sides was dangerous. He was mostly disappointed all around. That was where I lost it. Because “both sides” sounds very reasonable when your own life is largely insulated from the consequences. You can stand ten thousand feet above everything and say everyone should calm down, everyone is too extreme, everyone should listen to each other more. Politics remains an argument. A discussion. Something you can move around intellectually.

I told him that Trump has wrecked my actual life. He has damaged my business. He has put me in oceans of debt. He has wrecked relationships inside my family. He has cost me friendships. Politics is not abstract to me anymore. It has not been abstract for years. Then we started talking about MAGA people. I told him I am done making room in my personal life for them. I will never knowingly have MAGA people close to me again. I am not interested. I do not want to have dinner with them. I do not want to debate them. I do not want to hear how they got there. Trumpism has done too much damage to my life for me to pretend this is a normal political disagreement. He said he could be disgusted by somebody and still include them in his life. He worried that cutting people off creates an echo chamber. Of course he can. His position in life protects him from almost all of this. That is the difference. He can encounter a Trump voter as an interesting problem. I encounter the political movement that has materially damaged my life. Those are not the same experience.

I had lunch scheduled with him and canceled it. I canceled another lunch too. I started asking myself a question I never thought I would be asking at fifty-one years old: what do I actually have in common with some of these people anymore? Going into this Trump era, I knew I would have nothing to do with MAGA. That part was easy. I did not expect to lose three quarters of my liberal friends. But I have. And there is one thing almost all of those friendships have in common. Their lives have not been materially affected by Trump. Mine has. That dissonance turns out to be much harder for a friendship to survive than I ever understood.

What has shocked me most is the lack of empathy. These are quote-unquote good people. Successful people. Educated people. People who vote correctly. People who would recoil if you called them indifferent to suffering. But when somebody they actually know says, this administration is destroying me, something very strange happens. The suffering becomes uncomfortable. They knew me in a certain box. I was Lyle. Wine guy. Funny guy. Argumentative guy. The guy who knows about Burgundy and politics and movies and whatever else. Then suddenly I was standing outside that box saying, no, I am actually being hurt by this. This is not theoretical for me. I am scared. I am in debt. My family has been ripped apart. My business has taken damage that may follow me for years. And that makes people uncomfortable. The response is not always cruelty. In some ways that would be easier to understand. It is distance, moderation and abstraction. A subtle pressure to put everything back into the realm of political discussion, where everybody can have an opinion and nobody has to confront the fact that one person in the conversation is actually bleeding.

I kept thinking about Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail and his description of the white moderate. I am not saying my friends are segregationists. I am saying there is a recognizable moral failure in preferring moderation, comfort and distance to the urgency felt by the person who is actually suffering. You do not have to be cruel to become insulated from cruelty. And I know this is not simply a story about money, because I have another friend from college who has become extraordinarily wealthy. He works in tech. He is probably wealthier than almost anyone else I know. And he has never lost his empathy. We talk whenever we can, and talking to him feels completely normal. Money has not separated him from the world. He does not live inside some hermetically sealed bubble where suffering becomes an abstraction. He looks at what is happening and says basically the same things I do. That matters to me because it means wealth itself is not the excuse. Insulation may make empathy harder. It does not make empathy impossible. You still have a choice.

I had another lunch with another friend, also someone whose life has not been materially affected by Trump. He told me he was a centrist. I asked him what that meant. He said he had some very liberal views and some very conservative views. Fine. What are the conservative views? Immigration. The border. Okay. What about immigration and the border? “We need border control. We can’t have open borders.” And I stopped him. There are no open borders. That phrase itself is Republican propaganda. You have absorbed a Republican framing and mistaken it for a political philosophy. So we moved on. What else? He said people receiving SNAP benefits should be drug tested. That was where I really lost my shit. Why? Fraud. He does not want his tax dollars wasted.

Okay. How much fraud are we talking about? How much money? Who are the people you are worried about? Why is this the government spending that has lodged itself in your brain? There is staggering waste all over the federal government. There are wars, vanity projects, enormous contracts, political patronage, absurd expenditures, corruption, all kinds of places where vastly larger amounts of money disappear. But somehow the person receiving food assistance becomes the symbol of government waste. And who are the people Americans picture when somebody says SNAP? Poor people. Black people. Brown people. So I kept asking why. That is something I have done since I was a kid. Somebody tells me something with enormous confidence and I ask why. I want to know how they got there. Why should somebody receiving food assistance be drug tested? Why is that your concern? How does this affect your life? What evidence are you relying on? Why is this particular form of government spending the one that bothers you? He said it sets a precedent. A precedent? We are living through a period in which legal and constitutional precedents are being destroyed constantly, and this is the precedent that concerns you?

Eventually I realized we were back in exactly the same place. Republican propaganda. Not because he watches Fox News. He does not. Not because he is secretly MAGA. He is not. He probably thinks Republicans are insane. That is what makes this so important. Republican propaganda does not always arrive wearing a red hat. Most people do not live the way political obsessives live. They do not watch the press conference, then watch the lie get fact-checked, then read the court ruling, then see the correction, then watch the next lie appear. They read a few headlines. Maybe an article. They catch ten minutes of news. Then they go to work, pick up their kids, run errands, eat dinner and live their lives. By the time a Republican talking point reaches them, it may have traveled through cable news, newspapers, social media and ordinary conversation until the partisan label has disappeared. “Open borders.” “Both sides are extreme.” “People on welfare are committing fraud.” It no longer sounds Republican. It just sounds like common sense. That is how propaganda enters the bloodstream.

And I think this is a much bigger problem inside the Democratic coalition than people want to admit. You can hate Trump and still absorb the political world he created. You can vote Democratic every election and still repeat Republican framing. You can despise MAGA and still be insulated enough from the consequences of MAGA politics that you begin treating everything as one big unfortunate argument between equally unreasonable tribes. Hatred of Trump is not the same thing as understanding what Trumpism is doing. Voting against Trump is not the same thing as feeling urgency. And being a good person is not the same thing as having empathy. That last one has probably been the hardest lesson for me.

If I were doing fantastically right now, I would still be posting. I would still be protesting. I would still be donating what I could to candidates around the country. I would still be furious about what is happening to people whose lives are being destroyed even if mine were completely untouched. At least I believe I would. Maybe that is the difference. The danger for comfortable people during authoritarian periods is that by the time the system finally reaches them, it is often too late. Until then, everything remains negotiable. Everything can be discussed calmly. Everything can be balanced against the other side. Someone else is losing their business. Someone else is losing health insurance. Someone else is losing their family. Someone else is being deported. Someone else is being crushed by a policy you barely noticed. You can remain above the fight for a very long time when the fight never enters your house.

To my friend’s enormous credit, he eventually caught himself. He said, “I am above the fight for now.” He admitted that his comfort was affecting the way he saw everything. He called it the upper-middle-class trap. That landed with me. Because how many decent Democratic voters are living inside that trap right now? They hate Trump. They vote against Trump. They probably donate money. They may complain about him constantly. But their lives remain intact enough that the damage stays political and abstract. My friend at least recognized it. A lot of people never do. Trump hits differently when he has wrecked your actual life. I wish more people could understand that before he wrecks theirs.

The wine had everything. Outrageous energy. Unfathomable clarity. Ridiculous perfume. You could stand across the table and still smell everything. All the things I love in iconic red Burgundy and, most importantly, all the things the best 2021s possess in great abundance. I think it may be my favorite modern vintage. Classical wine from a classical vintage in the deepest, purest sense.

Let me tell you something. The worst people on the internet are male millennial and boomer wine hobbyists, and I will die on that hill. A man calling himself DC Hawkeye, who was shaking hands with Barack Obama in his profile picture, appeared to correct me. Because the well-actually guy, I truly believe, has his origin story in the wine world. He said the wine might be “good,” which he graciously allowed, but glorious required something more. In his opinion, which he holds very highly, glorious Burgundy could only emerge from the holy trinity of a good producer, a great vintage and ten to fifteen years in bottle. I call these people wine fascists because that is what they are. You can only enjoy wine my way. If you do not enjoy the producers I enjoy, at the age I enjoy them, from the vintages I approve of, your opinion is irrelevant.

A wine fascist.

Of course he had never tasted Pierre Brisset. Why would he have? That might screw up the narrative. He had never tasted this wine. He knew nothing about what happened in my glass that night. But none of that prevented him from adjusting the emotional temperature of my experience. That is what these fucking losers do.

For a certain kind of wine man, that is enough. If he does not know something, his ignorance becomes evidence against it. The world must remain exactly the size of his knowledge because anything existing beyond it threatens the authority that knowledge has given him.

As soon as I pushed back, the mask started to fall off. He sneered that Brisset buys grapes, which told me exactly the kind of person I was dealing with. Sneering at négociants is ancient wine-world nonsense. He described Brisset as a négociant, practically another N-word in Burgundy, let’s just leave it at that, with “barely” ten years of experience.

Then he did the other thing these millennial and boomer wine men do after hoovering most of their knowledge off wine boards. He said I must be praising Brisset because I sell the wines. They never consider the obvious possibility: maybe I sell the wines because I really love them. They always go in the opposite direction. The wines must suck. I must have excess inventory. I must be desperate to get rid of it. It is comical how quickly they invent the warehouse.

After arriving beneath my post to correct my opinion, he told me to shove my opinion up my ass. This is one of my favorite features of the gatekeeper. He invades your experience, declares your language excessive, belittles your judgment and then announces that his own opinion is sovereign territory. He also placed his replies behind author approval, turning his little corner of Threads into a customs checkpoint after crossing the border himself. That told me I was dealing with a man of exceptionally weak character.

There is something about wine that attracts the sort of man who carries a laminated rulebook, mistakes rigidity for discernment and experiences another person’s enjoyment as an unauthorized act. DC Hawkeye found the larger thread and decided to demonstrate the thesis personally.

Men like this cannot go out without a fight, so he returned repeatedly, becoming more furious and abusive with every reply. He invented a warehouse full of unwanted Brisset wine that I was supposedly desperate to “flog.” He called Brisset an unknown négociant and 2021 a very poor vintage. He accused me of comparing mediocre inventory with DRC and Leroy because I needed to unload it on gullible customers. He had still never tasted Brisset, which is what really started enraging me. When he ran out of knowledge, he manufactured a warehouse and placed me inside it. He was defending his authority to decide which Burgundy matters, which producers deserve recognition, which vineyards can be called brilliant and which adjectives another person is permitted to use. Ultimately, I blocked him and sent him into the abyss.

Owning land in Burgundy can mean many things. Often it means the vineyard came through family inheritance, money or access that goes back generations. I have met plenty of brilliant winemakers who could never afford to buy the parcels they work with. They know the growers, they discuss the farming, they select the fruit and then they have to make the wine. Some of them interpret those vineyards better than people whose families have owned land there for a century. Treating a land deed as a tasting note is aristocracy masquerading as discernment. You still have to taste the wine.

The lazy attack on 2021 performs the same trick. It was a very difficult growing season. There was frost, hail, mildew, rain and tiny yields. Winemakers had to work harder, and the vintage was unforgiving. It was transparent. Every mistake showed up in the wine. But the most committed producers made some of the most transparent, beautifully colored and classical red Burgundies of the modern era.

A difficult season only means the winemakers had to work harder to make great wine. In an easy vintage, their main job is not to fuck it up. Anybody who calls 2021 a poor vintage and ends the conversation erases the work of the winemakers and the evidence inside the glass. It replaces tasting with a weather report, which is incredibly lazy, especially from people who call themselves wine lovers. I do not call them wine lovers. I call them wine haters.

Experience should make a wine drinker more flexible because wine humiliates certainty constantly. Supposedly great vintages disappoint. Difficult vintages produce astonishing bottles. Famous producers make dull wine. Unknown producers make your hands shake. A wine that seemed closed six months ago can suddenly become magnificent. A bottle you expected to lay down for twenty years can fall apart before dinner. Real expertise increases your capacity for surprise. The truth is in the bottle. Gatekeeping exists to eliminate surprise before it can threaten the hierarchy.

Back in the States, I find wine people among the most insufferable pricks known to mankind. Way too many conversations become pissing contests over who drank what, who knows whom, what is in my cellar, what is in your cellar, which producer is acceptable, which vintage has been approved, how many years a bottle must remain in the cellar and who has earned the right to speak with conviction. Wine becomes a credential worn around the neck like an outdated tastevin. The bottle itself disappears from the conversation.

And I am talking about men. I rarely, if ever, encounter this behavior in women.

Wine should be one of life’s great pleasures. It becomes exhausting when every glass feels like somebody has handed you a test. You start watching your language and wondering whether your reaction is correct. By then, whatever was inside the bottle has become secondary. This entire mess began because I used the word “glorious” and a stranger decided that my adjective needed his approval.

After the larger thread went up, women and younger wine professionals began telling me about their own versions of this man. A woman who worked with high-end whiskey said MAGA-type men regularly tried to quiz her. They bragged about their palates and announced that they drank only whiskey aged eighteen years or longer. Eighteen years in a barrel had somehow become their entire personality. Instead of having a conversation with someone who knew the business, they made her take a test they had invented.

A younger male sommelier from New Orleans described men in their fifties and sixties appearing beneath his opinionated posts to belittle his experience and tell him he was wrong. I am a man in my fifties, and I know exactly the type he means. They use their age as a substitute for an argument. When somebody younger speaks with confidence, they take it personally. Their goal is to shut him up and remind him who they believe outranks whom.

Many people who viewed the thread recognized that same man in all kinds of hobbies and disciplines. Some recognized him in art, literature, horror, rock music, jazz or sports.

The bottom line is that no matter what the hobby is or what the passion is, there is always some sort of gatekeeping tribunal. Behind every door is some insecure man saying you do not have sufficient knowledge to pass his purity test. This is why it belongs in the larger story I have been writing about men through this Substack. The deep subject is the masculine conversion of passion into rank.

These men put it out into the world that they love certain things, whether it is wine, whiskey, film, music, books or sports. That is not what they love. They love the authority produced by knowing more than somebody else. It is a pissing contest, a dick-measuring contest, which is what it always comes down to with men. The subject becomes a tiny island where they are the dictator and control the borders and the passport check. The pleasure itself slowly disappears beneath the administrative and fascistic state they build around it.

Knowledge can be extraordinarily useful for this because it can be made to look like achievement. For me, knowledge is just another step on an endless ladder toward discovering and learning more about something. The so-called gatekeepers did not make the wine, write the novel, play the guitar, record the album or make the video game. They learned the approved classifications surrounding whatever the thing was. They bought the correct objects. They memorized the established verdicts. Then they converted their proximity to other people’s excellence into personal rank.

There are so many things that threaten this ridiculous arrangement. Unknown producers, difficult vintages, purchased grapes. Possibly even a woman knowing more about whiskey threatens it. A young sommelier with lots of enthusiasm speaking confidently threatens it. Just an ordinary person who likes wine and trusts their own pleasure threatens it. Surprise is very dangerous because surprise reveals how little the rulebook can explain.

This is completely different from how I move through the world. Knowledge, for me, is something to share. I want to encounter things. I want to argue about them. I want to research them. I want to have them envelop me. I want them to become a peak experience. I want to learn. I want to share it with as many people as possible. My whole goal with knowledge is to make the world a larger place for me and for others. A gatekeeper wants to be the most knowledgeable, most important and, quote-unquote, the best person in the room.

This temperament obviously extends far beyond wine. And I want to be crystal clear because people love deliberately misunderstanding this kind of distinction: a wine troll is not a government. They do not possess anything close to the same power. But the machinery is recognizable. Hierarchy, grievance, border enforcement and the need to regulate who is allowed to possess dignity, freedom or joy. The authoritarian experiences somebody else’s independent life as a loss of control. Someone loves the wrong bottle, reads the wrong book, inhabits the wrong body or builds the wrong family, and suddenly the act becomes insubordination.

There really is no joy inside this personality because pleasure always has to be ranked, certified, delayed, rationed or taken away. The gatekeeper cannot simply see somebody loving something and be happy for them. He has to determine whether the person has earned it, whether the object possesses sufficient status and whether the emotion has been expressed at an approved volume. That is why “glorious” mattered. I used an adjective freely. He arrived to confiscate it.

One of the strangest details in all of this was his profile picture of himself shaking Barack Obama’s hand. It sat above the entire performance like a certificate of democratic character. But political affiliation does not cure an authoritarian temperament. You can place yourself publicly on Team Democracy while building petty dictatorships everywhere you believe you own the expertise. The photograph supplied the credentials. The replies revealed the customs agent of pleasure.

The saddest part, and it really is sad, is that wine should be easy to love. So should art, books, music, movies, food, sex and sports. These are among the places human beings go to experience intensity without catastrophe. A harmless pleasure, freely felt, should be one of the simplest things in the world to celebrate. The gatekeeper experiences it as competition.

Someone else’s delight threatens the scarcity on which his authority depends. If an unknown producer can make glorious wine, if a difficult vintage can produce beauty, if purchased grapes can become greatness and if an ordinary customer can know what moves them, his little kingdom begins to collapse. Maybe there is no need for the man standing at the doorway after all.

DC Hawkeye spent an entire afternoon trying to make everything smaller: Pierre Brisset, the vineyards, the vintage, my judgment, my customers and the pleasure itself. He called me a moron. He invented a warehouse. He summoned DRC, Leroy, vineyard rankings, bottle age, land ownership and the moral stain of purchased grapes. Then he disappeared into the abyss. None of it changed a single thing in the glass.

He thought he was defending standards. He was defending his right to stand at the doorway. I opened the bottle without asking his permission. That was the offense. The wine was glorious before he arrived. It was glorious while he was shouting. It remained glorious after I blocked him.

The bottle was glorious. He could never forgive me for opening it without his permission.

The person wearing the shirt wants to communicate that he fiercely cares about children, certainly more than you do, and that he cares so much he is willing to broadcast his desire to kill another human being across his chest for everyone to see. It is a strange form of virtue signaling, completely unhinged and deranged. The shirt is meant to announce a protector. Mostly, it announces a man who has found a socially acceptable place to display his appetite.

But there are no children on the shirts, which would admittedly be a little strange. Nobody is wearing a shirt that says, I love my children. I will protect them. I support free school lunches. I will listen to them, believe them, notice the signs, stop abuse before it happens and help them recover afterward. All of that would require attention, patience and actual responsibility. The shirt requires none of it. The child is somewhere offstage while the killing occupies the entire chest. The shirt is only about one thing: bloodlust. Killing.

If there is one thing Americans love, it is violence. But if you call them the thing they lust after, they do not want to be known as violent people. There has to be some way to launder it, some kind of alibi, and the best way to do that is to find a target who feels justified. Once the target has been chosen, the cruelty does not feel like cruelty anymore. It can become courage or protection or patriotism, fatherhood, justice, love. It does not really matter. Almost any feeling or justification can be used as long as the violence is laundered through it.

The fantasy becomes: I will get to kill them, and I can remain completely innocent and, most importantly, guilt-free. It will not keep me up at night because the permission has already been accepted up and down society, from the highest levels to the individual person, from the macro to the micro.

The political right has constructed an entire movement around this machinery. There are plenty of moving targets, but the basic transaction remains remarkably stable. Immigrants are invading and taking your jobs. Black people become animals or the supposed product of fatherless homes. Protesters are no longer protesting. They are Antifa. They are terrorists. Trans people become predators or somehow the first people blamed whenever there is a school shooting, which is outrageous. Women become vessels whose lives can be subordinated to somebody else’s theology. Once the target has been abstracted enough, you can do almost anything to them and describe it as defense.

This is the energy behind ICE raids, family separation, police brutality, militarized police departments, militarized borders and the endless right-wing fantasy of shooting somebody who crossed the wrong line. Think about stand-your-ground laws. Think about the George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin case. That felt like the beginning of something. The violence is always described as reluctant, even when the people demanding it are visibly exhilarated. They claim to be preserving order while vibrating with anticipation for the moment order grants them permission to hurt someone.

But this is not only a right-wing appetite. The left has it. Centrists have it. Liberals have it. Many people have this appetite.

One of the most horrific crimes imaginable is child sexual abuse. It is the work of a monster, and these people must be stopped, ideally before the crime ever happens. Children must be protected, believed and given every resource necessary to recover, including being separated from anyone who can harm them. You throw the book at offenders. You investigate them, prosecute them, imprison them, remove their access to children and make sure none of this depends on who they are or what level of society they occupy. There is no ambiguity there.

But none of this requires enjoying the fantasy of killing another person. That is the trick hidden inside the slogan. That is the laundering. The moment you question the bloodlust, the bloodthirsty person immediately places the offender’s body in your arms. Oh, you want pedophiles to live? You are pro-pedophile? Suddenly you are not allowed to ask whether the death penalty protects children, whether an accusation has been proved, whether killing offenders prevents future abuse, whether victims need testimony, evidence and answers, or whether a society that is serious about children might invest more energy in stopping abuse before it happens.

You have to perform your concern for the victim, and the only acceptable proof is your willingness to describe the punishment you want inflicted on the perpetrator. You have to announce that no punishment is too severe. You have to say it out loud. It is moral pornography. It is repulsive, unhinged and deranged. The person gets to enjoy the fantasy of violence while experiencing that enjoyment as virtue, often while being cheered on by thousands of people. The child becomes the laundering mechanism. Everything is done in the child’s name, and then the child disappears.

Protecting children is really nothing like what you see on television. Most of it is boring. You have to listen to children and take them seriously when they say somebody is threatening them, whether it is someone in the family, the church, the school, a coach, a neighbor or the beloved man everyone insists could never do something like that. You need systems that can recognize danger early, before a child even fully understands what is happening, without turning childhood into some kind of surveillance state.

When somebody does experience this, the damage can last a lifetime. They may need psychiatric care, therapy, financial support and years of help rebuilding the parts of themselves that were destroyed. None of that is exciting. Nobody gets to become an action hero. It is slow, expensive, exhausting work, and it continues long after everybody else has stopped paying attention. Most of this work will never fit across the chest of a T-shirt.

Announcing that you would kill some imaginary predator is performative masculinity. It does nothing for the child. But killing is the part people love because it is decisive. It provides an ending to the strange little narrative they have created in which they become a white knight. They were not there before, listening, paying attention or helping. They do not have to prevent the wound, understand the wound or help someone live with the wound. He only has to arrive after the blood and promise more blood.

That is the fantasy: I show up, I kill, and then I leave. The leaving may be the most important part.

And then there is the home-invasion fantasy, one of the dominant fantasies in this country. Of course, you have a right to defend yourself from an immediate threat. There is no question about that. If someone enters your home intending to harm you, force may become necessary. This is basic morality 101. But some people are far too enthusiastic about the possibility. They have been sitting around waiting for it their entire lives, replaying the scene over and over in their heads. They have probably dreamed about it. They know where they will stand, what they will grab from the arsenal, how many warnings they will or will not give, and exactly what they will do to the body crossing the threshold. Come into my house. Just try coming into my house. It is said with a fantastical sense of longing.

This imaginary intruder is very imaginary. He is, as people on the right like to say, an NPC. A non-player character. He enters the house carrying the homeowner’s permission slip. There is nothing there. He is some blank little figure with a square nose and empty eyes whose only purpose is to be killed. He exists so the homeowner can kill somebody guilt-free.

Then, of course, there is another genre: the father who announces that he would kill for his children. You see it on social media. You see it in real life. You hear it all the time. What he does not tell you is that he probably does not listen to them. He does not know their fears, what they love or who they really are. He does not go to their soccer practices. He misses chorus rehearsals, the school play and all the boring little events that make up a child’s life. Sometimes it gets much worse. He refuses child support or treats their mother like garbage. He may make the daily atmosphere of their lives unstable and frightening.

But the moment a hypothetical predator enters the situation, he becomes Liam Neeson. Somewhere inside him lives a magnificent father who can only be activated by the opportunity to kill somebody. If he gets to do it in the name of protecting his child, all the better. He gets the bloodlust and the moral high ground, and society nods along and says, “Yeah.”

Killing for your children is imaginary, immediate and theatrical. Living for them is slow and boring. It requires attention, money, endless patience, emotional availability and decentering yourself. You have to change your behavior when nobody is applauding. It requires love without an enemy.

Unsurprisingly, many men find the murder fantasy much easier. One moment in which they get to be the man, one act of lethal protection, and suddenly that counts as parenting. They have already cast themselves in fatherhood’s most dramatic possible scene. Punch your time card and check out. They would kill for their children. They just cannot be bothered to fully know them.

Women participate in this too, but masculinity supplies much of its costume and language. The killing fantasy gives the man a weapon, a villain and a clean ending. It is easy. Violence allows a man to feel powerful without becoming vulnerable. Nobody has to talk afterward about feelings, what any of it meant or anything else. Care asks much more of this kind of man. It requires him to receive information he cannot control, confront things he may not want to confront and look in the mirror. Protecting a child day in and day out requires restraint, good judgment and extreme levels of patience.

The same appetite appears whenever Americans discuss prison and incarceration. The stated purpose of incarceration is to remove dangerous people from society, protect the public, establish accountability and possibly offer rehabilitation. But when someone commits a crime society finds especially vile, the rape and murder jokes begin. The other prisoners will take care of him. The state issues the sentence, and the public quietly adds an unofficial second sentence of sexual assault and bodily destruction. It is dehumanizing. It is collective bloodlust. It is not justice. It is revenge.

Justice can be severe. Someone can be imprisoned for the rest of his life, never having another free day to choose what he wants to do. Justice can remove children from dangerous situations, destroy careers built on exploitation, seize assets, expose institutions and dismantle networks. Immediate defense can require lethal force when a life is truly in danger, and I am not against that. But the distinction people gloss over is between necessity and appetite. Protection asks what must be done to keep this person safe. Bloodlust asks a different question: Who am I allowed to hurt and still consider myself good?

Refusing that false equivalence does not require pretending that everyone outside the right is emotionally innocent. The right has built numerous institutions centered on bloodlust. But people outside the right may oppose state violence against immigrants while demanding state execution for child abusers. They may understand that police can lie and prosecutors can destroy innocent lives, then abandon every concern about evidence when an accusation inspires sufficient disgust. They may oppose prison brutality in theory while happily anticipating it for someone they hate. The emotional maneuver is identical.

Donald Trump removed the embarrassment Americans once felt about their appetite for violence. He taught millions of people to treat cruelty as honesty, humiliation as strength and restraint as powerlessness. He gave the public permission to express feelings that had long been waiting for a clean target. People were waiting for Donald Trump to arrive. Trumpism has now been normalized across the political spectrum, and it has infected parts of the opposition by convincing them that moral seriousness must sound vicious and that hatred can become useful when directed toward the correct body.

Bloodlust is the endgame of revenge. It is the purest fantasy. All it wants is a body. This is why the slogans matter. “Protect children” does not work on a T-shirt because it would create obligations. It would demand attention to what children say, how institutions conceal abuse, how families protect offenders, what survivors need and how danger might be recognized before another life is destroyed. “Kill pedophiles” demands nothing except agreement with the righteousness and alleged morality of the act. The slogan sounds tougher because it relieves the person wearing the T-shirt of every difficult responsibility. The child’s only function is to be invoked long enough to bless the weapon and the act.

I trust absolutely no one who is excited by the prospect of this “righteous” violence. I understand anger. I have been angry. I am human. I understand hatred toward people who destroy lives. There is a long list of people I hate. I understand the animal impulse to protect someone you love. I have written things on the internet that I am not proud of. But this impulse will never become wisdom merely because the target is disgusting, repulsive or morally bankrupt. The moment a person begins enjoying the permission to kill, the claimed purpose of protection has already started slipping away.

A civilization is tested by whether law, restraint and human dignity can survive contact with the person everyone has agreed to hate.

Bloodlust always arrives wearing someone else’s suffering. The child requires it. The family requires it. The home requires it. The country requires it. We describe the violence as reluctant while grinning and licking our lips. Bloodlust makes us stare at the monster so we never notice how much pleasure the executioner is taking in his work. If the child disappears the moment the killing begins, the child was never the subject.

The child was the alibi.

My sleep returned to New York time. The cats remembered that I live here and resumed their own private schedules. The phone filled with problems. A huge issue with a supplier. A complicated situation with a customer. Dating drama. Family drama. Money. Tariffs. Wine offers. The webshop. Threads. The permanent live wire of American politics. Every piece of my life recognized me at once and came rushing forward to reclaim its place. I did not have to rebuild anything. The machinery had been waiting with the lights on. The city resumed me.

I had been gone for nearly a month. Iceland, Chablis, Burgundy, the Northern Rhône, Switzerland, Alsace, Champagne, then Iceland again. Hotels, rental cars, cellar visits, meals, languages, weather systems, unfamiliar roads, tiny villages, long mornings, different beds. It was a work trip, but work on the road does something completely different to the shape of a day. You are never entirely inside your own life because the place around you keeps interrupting it. The landscape imposes itself. The weather changes the plan. A road bends somewhere unexpected. A village appears. You have to find breakfast. You have to find dinner. You have to look.

I took long walks almost every morning. In the smallest villages, I would go out early and watch the place wake up. That became one of the deepest pleasures of the trip. Nothing was being performed for me. These were people entering their own mornings, opening businesses, driving to work, buying bread, beginning the quiet arrangements that allow a village to remain alive. I was only passing through, which gave me the luxury of attention. Nobody needed an answer from me. Nobody knew about the tariffs strangling my business or the supplier who might disappear or the customer situation waiting to become complicated. I could simply walk and watch a place become itself.

New York does not allow me that distance. I know it too well. I know the streets, the routes, the rhythms, the shortcuts, the coffee shops, the benches, the exact shape of the afternoon light between buildings. That knowledge is one of the great comforts of my life, but it also means I can move through the city without fully seeing it. My body knows where to go while my mind works on something else. I can walk for hours through Manhattan while arguing with a supplier in my head. The city becomes the surface beneath the problem. In Europe, I watched villages wake. In New York, my life woke up and swallowed me.

The difference has very little to do with Europe being good and New York being bad. I love New York. I missed it. By the final week or week and a half of the trip, I had begun the countdown. I wanted my cats. I wanted my bed. I wanted my gym. I wanted my walks, my apartment, my coffee, my familiar food, my familiar body moving through familiar space. Travel can be glorious and still reach the point where every hotel room feels like another temporary arrangement between you and the life that belongs to you. I had lived out of a suitcase long enough. I wanted to come home.

And when I came home, it was blissful. The cats would not leave me alone. Everything fit. My own shower felt magnificent. My bed felt almost indecently comfortable. I could make the food I wanted, begin training properly again, walk without checking a map, put something down and know where it would be the next morning. Home returned all the tiny forms of control that travel removes, and I loved every one of them.

Then the supplier problem exploded. The customer problem arrived. The family drama found its way back into the room. Dating produced its own little trapdoors. The political moment kept getting louder and more insane. Within days, the month in Europe began to feel less like something I had lived than something I had dreamed.

That is the part I cannot get over. The trip was enormous while I was inside it. I crossed countries. I tasted with dozens of producers. I drove through landscapes that seemed to change every hour. I watched storms assemble over Kaysersberg. I walked through Swiss villages where ordinary public life still seemed to possess a shape. I stood in vineyards, cellars, courtyards, train stations, restaurants, gyms, hotel bars, city squares. Nearly every day contained something that would have qualified as an event back home.

Now I look at the photographs and think: I lived like this for a month?

The photographs prove it. There I am. There are the villages, the meals, the producers, the rivers, the mountains, the weather. The images are precise enough to preserve the color of a building and the pressure of the clouds above it. Yet somehow their precision makes the trip feel even more unreal. They look like evidence recovered from another biography. I recognize the person who took them. I remember where he stood. But I no longer inhabit his continuous experience of the world. Home turns everything else into the past with terrifying efficiency.

There was a morning in Chablis when I sat on a bench beside the Serein with an éclair and a jambon-beurre. It was an absurdly simple breakfast and completely wonderful. The river moved beside me. The village was beginning its day. I had nowhere else to be for that small stretch of time. Nothing needed to become content. Nothing needed to teach me a lesson. I ate my breakfast and looked at the water.

Since coming home, I have remembered that bench in the middle of some truly horrible situations. I will be dealing with the supplier mess or staring at another problem created by tariffs, incompetence, money, silence, or somebody else’s dishonesty, and suddenly I will think about the Serein. The éclair. The jambon-beurre. The morning light. The fact that for one moment, in one village, my life consisted entirely of sitting beside a river and eating breakfast.

The memory does not solve the problem. The email still has to be answered. The money still has to be found. The business still has to survive. But the bench restores the scale of the world. It reminds me that the emergency filling the screen is not the only form life can take. There are rivers moving through villages while nobody I know is watching. There are bakeries opening in the morning. There are people sitting down to breakfast without knowing anything about the catastrophe currently colonizing my attention. I was one of those people for a little while.

My life in New York has become smaller during the tariff crisis. That is simply true. I go out less because going out costs money and money has acquired a different emotional weight. My days move through a familiar circuit: apartment, coffee, walk, gym, work, cats, phone, screen, wine, sleep. It is a good circuit in many ways. I have built it deliberately. It keeps my body strong and my business functioning. It gives me structure during a period when the country has made almost everything structurally unstable.

Europe forced me beyond that circuit. I had to eat breakfast somewhere. Lunch had to be found. Dinner required entering another room, another street, another part of town. Every day placed me among strangers living lives that had nothing to do with mine. That is one reason travel feels so expansive. It keeps placing the self inside worlds that do not require it. At home, almost everything I encounter seems connected to some ongoing responsibility. On the road, I can be insignificant again.

Even American politics felt different from over there. People asked about our insane president, of course. During the first Trump era, everyone wanted to know every detail, as though I had arrived carrying secret intelligence from inside the collapsing republic. This time the intensity had changed. People still talked about him, but with more distance, perhaps with the assumption that the whole grotesque spectacle would eventually end. I found myself saying some version of the same thing: we are over it. We are exhausted. There is nothing new left to explain.

Then I came home and returned to the live wire. Here, Trump is the weather pressing against every window. He is the tariff attached to my invoices, the cruelty moving through government, the daily emergency entering the phone. Europe gave me distance from the spectacle even while people asked me to explain it. New York returned me to its material consequences.

Maybe people who live between continents understand how to carry multiple lives without allowing one to erase the other. I do not. When I am away, the life at home begins turning abstract. I miss it, but I no longer feel its full pressure. When I return, the life on the road recedes just as quickly. Each existence seems complete while I am inside it. Then I cross an ocean and the other one becomes a story.

The cats understand this better than I do. For a week, they treated my absence as a wound and my return as a miracle. Then my presence became ordinary again. They did not forget that I had been gone. They simply accepted that I was back. The great rupture entered the household record and daily life closed over it. They returned to their preferred sleeping spots and private concerns. Love remained. The emergency passed. Perhaps that is what home does. It absorbs the extraordinary by making your presence ordinary again.

And now, inevitably, I am thinking about the next trip. I want to go to Iceland in November for a week. I want the short days, the low winter light, the frozen waterfalls, the particular darkness that makes Reykjavík feel like a city suspended between the ocean and another planet. I already know the cycle. If I go, I will arrive electrified. I will walk for hours. I will photograph everything. I will feel my life enlarging around me. Then, after enough days, I will begin thinking about the cats. My bed. My routine. My own kitchen. The familiar streets. I will start counting down.

Then I will come home. The cats will cling to me. My body will wake at the wrong hour. The apartment will feel perfect. For a week, returning will feel like the greatest luxury in the world. Then the phone will light up. Travel gives me a second existence, one I can remember whenever the first starts pretending it is the whole world.

She called him witty, energetic, charming, and devoted to South Carolina. It was the kind of statement former Senate colleagues issue when one of them dies, especially when the person speaking may run for president again. It was institutional language, polished smooth by decades of ritual. She acknowledged the dead, extended sympathy to his family, and moved on.

People wanted something else. They wanted silence at minimum. Contempt would have been better. A clean little blade of public disgust would have been ideal. They wanted Kamala Harris to stand over Lindsey Graham’s political grave and say what they were already saying to one another online: good riddance. The argument quickly stopped being about Lindsey Graham. It became an argument about what people now expect politics to provide.

They said they wanted honesty. They wanted accountability. They wanted courage. What many of them actually wanted was emotional revenge performed by a national politician on command. They wanted Harris to reproduce their private fury in public so they could feel recognized by her. Her statement became a loyalty test. The correct politician would feel exactly what they felt, express it in exactly their language, and offer them the little electric jolt of watching an enemy humiliated even in death. That is revenge. Justice is something else.

Revenge wants the enemy to hurt. Justice wants the damage stopped. Revenge wants humiliation made visible. Justice wants power removed from the people causing harm, institutions repaired, victims protected, laws enforced, agencies rebuilt, judges seated, stolen rights restored, and the conditions that produced the harm changed so the whole thing cannot simply happen again. Revenge gives you ten seconds of catharsis. Justice takes years.

That difference matters because revenge is emotionally immediate and politically cheap. You can perform it in a sentence. You can post it from bed. You can collect applause before breakfast. Justice demands the duller, harder work of winning elections, building coalitions, passing legislation, surviving primaries, holding together people with different interests and different emotional vocabularies, and then governing well enough that the gains last longer than one election cycle. Revenge supplies heat. Justice has to build the architecture.

Lindsey Graham earned the anger that followed him to the grave. He spent decades helping build a politics of cruelty, militarism, reaction, and permanent escalation. He accurately diagnosed Donald Trump before deciding that proximity to Trump’s power mattered more than the convictions he had once performed in public. He demanded war with the regularity of a man ordering another drink. He chose access over principle so consistently that eventually the choice became the principle.

Nobody owes him a rewritten history. Nobody has to pretend his public life was noble because it ended. Private citizens are entitled to relief. They are entitled to anger. They are entitled to say that the country is better off without another powerful man devoting his life to making it worse. Kamala Harris occupies a different role.

She was speaking as a former Senate colleague, a national political figure, and a likely future presidential candidate. Her statement was political communication. Every word was political communication. Silence would also have been political communication, and probably a much larger story. Cable news would have spent two days asking why she refused to acknowledge him. Republicans would have called her cruel, radical, unstable, and consumed by hatred. Moderates who still care about the rituals surrounding death would have noticed. Millions of voters who do not spend their lives inside the emotional weather of online politics would have formed an impression. A candidate for president has to think about all of that because her job is to win enough power to protect people. The internet wanted her to act like a private citizen in a group chat. Then it punished her for acting like a politician.

This is one of the great confusions of online political culture. People increasingly measure political figures by the intensity of emotional recognition they provide. The politician must mirror the audience. She must grieve what they grieve, hate what they hate, and perform contempt at precisely the temperature they demand. Strategy begins to look like dishonesty because strategy requires awareness of people outside the room. The result is a politics of permanent loyalty oaths.

Say the exact phrase. Condemn the exact person. Refuse the exact ritual. Display the correct level of fury. Prove that your interior life matches mine.

That is political narcissism. It takes one person’s emotional state and demands that the entire public sphere reproduce it. Ten years ago, after Donald Trump was elected the first time, the first thing I posted was: please don’t normalize him.

The sentence felt urgent because normalization was the whole danger. Trump could never be allowed to become ordinary. His cruelty, corruption, racism, contempt for democracy, and open hunger for authoritarian power had to remain visible as an emergency. The press could not treat him like another eccentric Republican president. Institutions could not absorb him into routine. The country could not allow the abnormal to become the weather. Ten years later, the normalization is complete enough that even many of his opponents now speak his emotional language. A recurring response to my argument about Harris was some version of this: look who America elected twice. Look at what wins. Look at what the other side does.

The implication was clear. Trump was vicious and won, so viciousness must be the cost of victory. He humiliated people, therefore humiliation is strength. He abandoned decorum, therefore restraint is weakness. He treated enemies as subhuman, therefore Democrats must learn to hate with greater efficiency. That is normalization in its final form.

The opposition no longer merely accepts Trump’s presence. It accepts his theory of power. Trumpism teaches that cruelty is authenticity. The cruel person is supposedly the honest one because he says what everyone else is too afraid to say. Humiliation becomes accountability. Contempt becomes courage. Restraint becomes cowardice. Strategy becomes fakery. Decency becomes collaboration with the enemy. Once that emotional machinery enters a political movement, every politician gets judged by how satisfyingly they can hurt the designated target. The slogans can remain progressive. The permission structure has already changed. “Look who we elected twice” is a confession of surrender.

Donald Trump did not won because his victories came through celebrity, racial backlash, evangelical machinery, billionaire money, right-wing media, algorithmic amplification, institutional cowardice, voter suppression, misogyny, the Electoral College, and a political system designed to reward minority rule. Reducing all of that to “he was nasty and nastiness works” is intellectually lazy. It also gives people permission to indulge their own appetite for vengeance while pretending they have discovered the secret to winning elections. They have confused the symptom for the weapon.

Cruelty can excite a base. It can dominate attention. It can make frightened people feel powerful for a few minutes. It cannot build a democratic society. It cannot administer a public health system. It cannot restore voting rights. It cannot repair the civil service, govern a city, protect trans people, rebuild USAID, write humane immigration law, or create an economy where ordinary people can survive. Cruelty is very good at burning the room. Eventually somebody has to live there.

This confusion between revenge and justice also runs through the American criminal justice system. People say they want safety, accountability, rehabilitation, and lawful punishment. Very often they want suffering. They want the accused publicly broken. They want the sentence maximized, the prison brutal, the humiliation permanent. The punishment has to feel cruel enough to prove that justice occurred.

That appetite helped build the American carceral state. Longer sentences. Harsher conditions. Families destroyed. People permanently excluded from employment, housing, voting, and ordinary social life. Victims were often left with little meaningful support. Communities remained unsafe. The machine produced suffering because suffering had become the measurement of seriousness. Justice can punish. Justice sometimes must punish severely. It can remove people from power, imprison criminals, seize corrupt gains, disbar lawyers, dismantle organizations, and impose consequences that permanently alter lives. The question is purpose.

Justice uses punishment to protect people, establish accountability, repair what can be repaired, and prevent the harm from repeating. Revenge treats the suffering itself as the outcome. Once the enemy hurts visibly enough, the crowd feels that something has been accomplished.

Political revenge follows the same pattern. The goal quietly shifts from stopping fascists to watching fascists suffer. Then the emotional appetite begins outranking the practical result. A statement that damages a candidate but produces a satisfying clip becomes preferable to disciplined communication that helps her win. A public humiliation becomes more valuable than a durable coalition. The movement starts selecting for performers of contempt because contempt feels like strength. The enemy’s pain becomes the policy. I understand the desire. I feel it too.

There are people who voted for policies that nearly destroyed my business. There are people who watched the consequences arrive and protected their own innocence by pretending they could never have known. There are public officials who have spent years targeting immigrants, Black voters, women, queer people, trans people, blue cities, public servants, journalists, teachers, scientists, and anyone else who complicates their fantasy of who the country belongs to. Anger is the correct response to that.

Anger is information. It tells us that a boundary has been crossed, a person harmed, a moral reality violated. Anger can clarify. It can mobilize. It can break through the narcotic fog of institutional politeness. It can keep people from accepting cruelty as normal. But anger has to be disciplined by purpose.

A movement built around revenge eventually stops asking whether an action wins power, protects people, repairs institutions, or improves anyone’s material life. It asks whether the action felt good. Politics becomes a series of emotional transactions between politicians and their most online audiences. Every statement must deliver the required sensation. Every enemy must be publicly degraded. Every ritual of public life becomes another stage on which loyalty must be proven. That is the conversion of politics into personalized entertainment.

There is also something deeply revealing about the demand that Harris insult Graham in death. The actual emergency is enormous. Courts are being reshaped. Agencies are being hollowed out. Voting rights are being diluted. Immigrants are being terrorized. Trans people are being turned into state targets. Public health systems are being dismantled. Universities, journalists, law firms, cities, and entire sectors of civil society are being threatened into obedience. Inside that emergency, people turned a conventional condolence into the test of whether Kamala Harris possesses the correct soul. The scale is grotesque.

Lindsey Graham’s obituary is a tiny object inside a much larger catastrophe. Kamala Harris’s statement is a tiny object inside a much larger fight. A furious Threads argument is a tiny object inside a country that needs fascists removed from office, courts repaired, agencies rebuilt, laws restored, voters protected, and millions of people defended from policies capable of destroying their lives. That work requires anger. It also requires discipline, coalition, strategy, endurance, compromise, moral clarity, and the ability to distinguish a private emotion from a public responsibility.

We can refuse to sanitize Lindsey Graham’s life. We can remember exactly what he did. We can feel relief that he no longer holds power. We can also understand why a potential candidate for president issued a conventional condolence and recognize that her responsibility extends beyond satisfying the emotional demands of the people already prepared to vote for her. Politics is the art of acquiring enough power to change material reality. Revenge wants the clip. Justice wants the country.

The left cannot defeat Trumpism by adopting its emotional grammar and changing the names of the enemies. Trumpism has already won something profound if it convinces us that cruelty is the only honest language, humiliation the only recognizable strength, and public viciousness the only proof that a politician understands the stakes.

Ten years ago, I asked people not to normalize Trump. The darkest evidence of that normalization may be that parts of the opposition now believe becoming more like him is how we prove we have finally learned to fight. Revenge can supply heat. It can light the match, fill the street, and make the blood move. Then the applause stops. The cameras leave. The country is still broken. Justice is what remains when somebody has to rebuild the room.

What I found, or what I kept trying to photograph, was a town that revealed itself in phases. When I arrived, the sky was angry. The clouds had that swollen, bruised look that makes a place feel briefly less picturesque and more exposed. Kaysersberg under that sky was still beautiful, of course, but it was a beauty with tension in it. The cobbles looked darker. The façades looked less decorative and more weathered. The whole town seemed to be holding its breath a little, as if waiting to see whether the storm would really commit. That first register matters to me because it kept the place from becoming a postcard too quickly. It gave the town some resistance. It let me arrive as a person rather than as a tourist collecting proof of charm.

Then the light shifted. The storm loosened its grip. Late afternoon and early evening started laying themselves across the buildings and streets, and the place changed temperature in front of me. Kaysersberg began to glow the way towns like that glow in the imagination, half-timbered houses, stone, flowers, water, warm façades catching the last of the sun. But by then I had already seen the place under pressure, which made the beauty feel earned. It had weather under it. Then I woke up early the next morning and walked again, and the town changed one more time. Morning light made everything cleaner, quieter, more legible. The same streets that had felt dramatic the day before now felt composed. The whole place seemed to exhale.

So this is a photo essay about Kaysersberg, but also about sequence, atmosphere, and the way a place can keep altering its emotional register while remaining fully itself. It is about arriving under one sky and leaving under another. It is about beauty, obviously, because Kaysersberg has too much of it to ignore. But it is also about why I was there in the first place, and what it means to move through an exquisitely composed town with Bourdain somewhere in the back of your mind, the meal ahead of you, the weather shifting over the roofs, and your own private life still making itself known inside every beautiful frame.

5:30 PM

Kaysersberg began for me here: church on the left, cobblestones underfoot, storm light overhead, and that immediate sense of having stepped into something medieval without it feeling sealed off or severe. The town had age, obviously, but it also had invitation. I was excited the second I turned onto this street.

5:35 PM

I found this behind the church, where the town starts loosening into vineyards and sky. I’m not religious, but something about the cross there, dark against the storm light and the green rows of Alsace behind it, felt profound to me. It made the whole place seem briefly stripped down to its oldest elements: weather, land, symbol, silence.

5:53 PM

One of the things Alsace does so well is whimsy. The colors, the angles, the little theatricality of the houses, all of it feels almost storybook without tipping into kitsch. Kaysersberg in particular had that quality for me, like Wes Anderson’s ancestors had quietly designed a village and then left it to weather for a few centuries. This was also the moment when the light first started to crack through after the storm, and I felt it immediately. The town was still under pressure, but now it was beginning to glow.

6:02 PM

I am helpless before rose-colored buildings, so this one never had a chance. But I also love the timing of it. This was maybe nine minutes after the previous photo, and the light had already shifted again. The storm was still hanging around, just passing through, which made the contrast even better: the rose church, the timbered house, the flowers on the balcony, the curve of the cobblestones, all of it briefly lit against a darkening sky. I just love the composition of this one.

6:17 PM

I kept coming back to scenes like this in Kaysersberg, where the water, the houses, the stone, and the greenery all seem to settle into one another without friction. I have sat on that bench. I know that little stretch of quiet. Maybe that is why I love this image so much. It catches the town in one of its gentlest registers, composed, inhabited, and completely at ease with itself.

6:27 PM

I walked all the way up to the castle, which has been hanging over Kaysersberg for centuries, and wanted to shoot it in a way that kept its scale intact. That is what I love about this frame. It lets the tower feel immense, weathered, and a little severe, the kind of old stone that has outlasted every mood brought to it. The whole town has beauty in it, but this was one of the moments where the deeper age of the place really announced itself.

6:29 PM

A little farther past the castle, the whole thing opened up. You could finally see Kaysersberg as part of a larger Alsatian order: the vineyards, the maroon roofs, the clustered village below, the other villages dotted out in the distance, the weather still lingering over all of it. I love this shot because it gives you scale without losing atmosphere. The beauty is obvious, but so is the deeper truth underneath it: this is a wine village, and beyond it a whole countryside built from wine villages.

7:54 AM

The next morning, the town had changed again. I love seeing small villages wake up and watching what morning light does to them, how it makes everything more legible, more luminous, more itself. After the stormy drama of the day before, this felt clearer, quieter, almost freshly drawn.

7:55 AM

This was maybe a minute later, but the whole mood had already shifted. The sky had gone calm, the river was carrying the light, and the houses seemed to gather around it in that old European way that always feels both improbable and completely natural. I love the weathered wood, the patios, the antennas on the roofs, the way the whole scene feels lived in rather than arranged. Even in the heat, it felt calm.

8:37 AM

You cannot do a Kaysersberg photo essay and leave out a restaurant. By 8:37 that morning, the town was fully awake, and this one had everything I wanted from Alsace in a single frame: yellow timbering, outdoor tables, gingerbread men in the windows, a little bit of visual chaos, a little bit of whimsy, and the sense that tartes flambées and charcuterie would eventually appear. It was not open yet, but I would have eaten there happily.

What stayed with me about Bad Zurzach was not that people were unusually warm in some sugary, tourist-brochure way. It was almost the opposite. The place felt calm. Practical. Unshowy. Nobody was performing sweetness. Nobody was doing the American thing where every interaction has to be wrapped in this weird overbright service voice that somehow makes the whole exchange feel less human, not more. What I felt there was something much sturdier and much rarer. People seemed to live inside an understood social fabric. They knew one another. They saw one another. They behaved as if the world around them was shared and worth maintaining.

That difference revealed itself in tiny ways, which is usually how these things happen. The woman at the hotel bar told me to say hello to Gabriella at the restaurant. Then I saw Gabriella at breakfast and realized, of course, this is how a place like this works. Of course these people know each other. Of course the person at the bar knows the person at the restaurant. Of course the town is made of actual relations instead of isolated transactions. The hotel guys helped. The women behind counters were patient. I said I did not speak German and nobody made me feel stupid or burdensome. A random man near the bathroom saw that I was slightly turned around and gestured me in the right direction without making a production of it. Nobody was trying too hard. Nobody was turning decency into theater. They were simply participating in the maintenance of the day.

And that, to me, is what made the place feel so aggressively civilized.

I use that phrase very deliberately, because what struck me was the visible existence of a public baseline. The assumption seemed to be that each person had some small responsibility to make things easier for the next person. Nobody was trying to charm anyone or stage some little theater of service. They were simply helping keep the world from becoming harder than it already is. That is such a basic idea, and yet after America, after New York, it felt almost radical.

New York is full of intelligence, beauty, appetite, style, ambition, speed, and force. I love it. It is my city. But it is also full of abrasion. Everything there can feel like friction, or negotiation, or low-grade siege. Every tiny interaction carries the possibility of inconvenience, attitude, impatience, or threat. You build up this psychic callus without even realizing it. You stop expecting ease. You stop expecting ordinary shared life to function on anything deeper than individual appetite, exhaustion, and defensive maneuvering. Then you go somewhere like Bad Zurzach and realize how much energy your home city extracts simply by forcing everyone into that posture all the time.

What I found so moving about Bad Zurzach was that the place felt socially intact. That is what was so striking. The people there were not saints. I am sure the town has its own politics, resentments, pettiness, and private ugliness, because every place does. But the public culture still seemed to operate on the assumption that other people are real, that a shared place has a rhythm, that daily life is not improved by treating every minor encounter like a burden, a threat, or an opportunity for self-assertion.

That is the difference I keep coming back to. In America, so much of what passes for public interaction now feels either aggressively transactional or weirdly performative. We are either overdoing warmth because the script requires it, or stripping the interaction down so brutally that it feels almost hostile. What I felt in Bad Zurzach was neither. It was something older and better. A sense that life in a small place depends on a hundred tiny acts of maintenance, and that those acts are not beneath anyone. The bar woman telling me to say hello to Gabriella. The hotel staff quietly helping. The stranger near the bathroom pointing me in the right direction. None of it was dramatic. That was the whole point. Community is often invisible when it is functioning. You only really see it when you come from somewhere that has forgotten how to do it.

And maybe that is why it hit me so hard. I think a lot of Americans, myself included, are so starved for ordinary social coherence that when we encounter it, we almost mistake it for moral grandeur. But it is not grandeur. It is the accumulated force of small recognitions. People in a place seeing one another, respecting one another, and softening the day in little ways that never make the news and never become content and never get monetized. Just actual public life, held together by habit, memory, and a baseline of mutual regard.

That is what I brought home from Bad Zurzach more than anything else. Not a fantasy about Europe. Not some childish idea that Switzerland is perfect and America is doomed. Something sadder and more useful than that. The reminder that community is real when it is lived rather than advertised. That it is not a slogan, not branding, not an app-mediated performance of belonging. It is people in a place maintaining something together. And once you feel that, even briefly, it becomes very hard not to notice how much of American life now feels like the opposite.

That sentence still sounds false to me when I look at it. It sounds like the kind of line someone writes because he wants to seem aloof, contrary, too evolved for the civic ecstasy around him. But that is not what happened. The Knicks finally won a title after fifty-three years, New York erupted exactly as it should have, and I stood there with a strange emotional flatness, as though the signal was arriving to a receiver that had already been dismantled. I could feel the civic happiness of it, the rightness of a city finally getting its release, the pleasure of millions of people who had suffered through decades of sports humiliation finally getting their delirium. But the old personal voltage was gone. The machinery that once would have lit up my whole inner world had already been taken apart.

That absence is the real subject here.

Because I did not drift away from sports gradually. This was not the ordinary aging-out process where a man wakes up at forty-seven or fifty and realizes he no longer wants to spend four hours on a Tuesday night watching a regular season game between two teams he does not care about. Mine was much stranger than that, and much cleaner. There was a break. There was a before and an after. And the hinge was my first ketamine experience.

Before that session, a friend warned me that ketamine sometimes strips away attachments you think are permanent. I remember joking with him, but not really joking. I said, oh my God, please don’t take away Bergman. Please don’t take away Tarkovsky. Please don’t take away sneakers. He laughed in that way people do when they know something you do not yet know and said, you never know. The sentence stayed with me because it sounded both absurd and faintly apocalyptic. Permanent attachments are supposed to be the things that survive alteration. They are the beams. But during that first ketamine experience, I suddenly saw sports with a kind of cold and terrifying clarity. I saw repetition. I saw seasons collapsing into each other. Games, commentary, injuries, draft picks, trade rumors, playoff collapses, hope renewed, hope crushed, all of it looping with the strange dead rhythm of something I had mistaken for life. And I realized, with almost no emotion attached to the realization, that I no longer truly cared about watching it.

That was the first layer.

The second layer was worse, because it explained the first. My attachment to sports, and especially to the Knicks, had never really been only about sports. Sports had been one of the only usable languages between me and my father. One of the only things we could talk about without the room immediately filling with all the things we could not talk about. The Knicks were not just the Knicks. They were a bridge. Or maybe bridge is too generous. They were a narrow thread suspended over an enormous void. But even a narrow thread is something when you do not have anything else. So I studied sports partly because I loved them, yes, but also because I needed them. I needed to know the roster, the lineups, the injuries, the cap situations, the idiotic little details, because that knowledge created intimacy where intimacy did not exist naturally. I could enter the room armed with the language.

Ketamine exposed the hidden emotional architecture underneath my “passion” for sports fandom. And once you see that, you cannot unsee it.

So when the Knicks finally won, what arrived was grief. The city got its release, and I could recognize the rightness of that, the beauty of millions of people finally getting the delirium they had been denied for half a century. But the championship landed in a life where the structures that once would have made it feel personal had already collapsed. It found a field of absences. The old self who would have needed this moment, the father for whom sports once served as one of the only usable languages, the male world that once would have absorbed the title in real time, all of that was already gone.

My father is gone from my life in every way that matters. The old male world that once would have absorbed this moment is gone too. There used to be a group text, the usual male relay system of Knicks, Mets, random observations, sports as ambient intimacy, sports as the accepted language through which men who could not say much else to one another could still remain linked. That structure disintegrated after Trump’s return and my rise on Threads. Part of it was political. They did not want to hear about fascism. They did not want to hear about moral seriousness. They did not want to sit with the fact that the country was being devoured by forces too ugly to neutralize into banter. But part of it was something more private and harder for them to metabolize. I had always been the intense one, the quirky one, the one who was too much, but still contained inside the manageable scale of ordinary life. Then suddenly I was not contained. I had a massive public audience. The things they had spent years treating as excessive or eccentric were now being recognized by hundreds of thousands of people as force, clarity, and voice. I do not think they knew what to do with that. One of them retreated into nostalgia, which is what people do when they cannot bear to look at what is in front of them. The others drifted with him. We do not speak anymore. These are people I once would have texted through every quarter, every playoff game, every improbable run. When the title came, that room was empty.

And then there are the other absences. Pete, who worked for me, another sports guy, another member of the male atmosphere that once would have made a Knicks championship feel social instead of spectral. He is gone too, for reasons too serious to sentimentalize. I had to fire him after a catastrophic work failure that could have damaged my business in ways I do not even like to think about. We do not speak. There are other men too, old friends whose emotional or political disappearance began with Trump and ended with the realization that they could not meet the moral reality of the moment. Some vanished into avoidance. Some vanished into cowardice. Some simply revealed that what I had thought of as depth was just habit plus time. Whatever the mechanism, the result is the same. Every path that once would have led me into shared male joy around this title had already been severed. So the championship arrived to rubble.

That, I think, is what I keep circling. We talk so much about sports as community, and sometimes that is true. But what kind of community? What is actually being held there? What gets displaced into fandom because it cannot survive in more direct language? I do not think this is just about me and my father, though that was the deepest version of it in my own life. I think a huge amount of male sports obsession is a prosthetic for connection. It is emotion in shoulder pads. It is intimacy in acceptable costume. It is longing routed through a channel that does not force men to say what they are actually doing. Which is why the loss of interest felt so abrupt once the architecture was revealed. I was losing a language I had used to keep certain relationships artificially alive.

And maybe that is why the Knicks winning feels so uncanny instead of joyful. Publicly, it is a perfect sports story. New York finally gets the release. Fifty-three years. A whole city roaring. A million men and boys and old women and bartenders and bodega owners and kids in tiny jerseys and exhausted middle-aged fans suddenly feeling time bend in their favor. It is beautiful. It should happen. I understand exactly what the title means. That is the problem. I understand it so well that I also understand why I no longer feel it.

The event came. The self who would have needed it did not.

That is a different kind of mourning than I expected to have about sports. I assumed that if I ever stopped caring, the loss would feel like boredom, or maturity, or relief. Instead it feels like one of those strange moments when the world finally delivers what it once owed you, only to reveal that time has already moved the furniture out of the room. The wish was granted after the wish expired. The city got its title on time, maybe even heroically late, and I was left standing there realizing that the emotional world in which this would have detonated had already burned down.

There is something almost indecent about that realization, because sports is supposed to be the safe arena for feeling. Sports gives men a place to cry, rage, hope, collapse, believe, and begin again without having to call any of it what it is. It is one of the last culturally sanctioned emotional theaters we still trust. Which is why it mattered so much to me for so long. Which is why it was so useful as paternal language. Which is why the disappearance of that feeling does not feel like a hobby dropped in middle age. It feels like an autopsy.

Here is what I think happened. Ketamine stripped away an attachment I thought was primary and revealed that it had been secondary all along. Sports were not the center. They were the carrier. The Knicks were not the deep truth. They were the form through which other needs moved. Once the form stopped functioning, once the father relationship collapsed, once the male peer world around the Knicks collapsed, once I could no longer pretend that those old structures were alive just because they had once been alive, there was nowhere for the old energy to go. So the title finally arrived and found me standing outside it, watching it like weather.

I do not write any of this with triumph. There is no secret thrill in being the emotionally estranged man while the city celebrates. I would almost prefer the simpler humiliation of still caring too much, because at least that would mean the old machinery was still intact. But it is not. What the championship revealed was something sadder and more final: the self for whom the Knicks once mattered in that total, organizing way had been built around structures that no longer exist.

The city is celebrating. It should. The title is real. The joy is real. The release is real. But the championship arrived on time, and the person who once would have needed it was already gone.

That is the first thing I have to say, because otherwise this sounds like one more travel note about how Europe is civilized and America is a strip mall with nuclear weapons, and while that is not always wrong, it is also too easy. The gym was just where the difference became impossible to ignore. It was one of those stupidly ordinary places that suddenly explains a whole country back to you.

I went three times. That alone says something, because I do not settle into places quickly. I am not one of these people who drifts into a room and instantly feels held by the universe. Usually I am evaluating, scanning, bracing a little, measuring the weather. But this place in Beaune made sense to me almost immediately. The people at the front desk were pleasant in that simple, unfussy way that should not mean much and somehow means everything once your own country has degraded enough. They would just say, have a good workout, have a good training, and then leave you alone. Not fake warmth. Not dead-eyed indifference. Not that weird American combination of forced friendliness and invisible resentment. Just a basic acknowledgment that you are a person entering a place with a purpose.

And yes, these sound like tiny things. That is the point. In a healthy public culture, they would be tiny. In America right now, they stand out like revelations.

By the second and third visit, I was seeing some of the same people. Two guys I had noticed before were there again at the same time. I did not speak to them. I did not need to. Their presence did something anyway. The room started becoming a place instead of a battlefield. It had recurring humans in it. The same faces, the same patterns, the same shared understanding of what the room was for. People came there to train. The buddy groups trained. The strong people trained. The normal people trained. Even when it was crowded, it still felt calm, because the crowd was participating in the same idea. That is the real subject here. The room had a purpose, and enough people still understood that purpose that the room could remain itself.

America, increasingly, cannot do this.

A gym in America is rarely just a gym anymore. It is conten, branding, and private delusion spilling into public space. It is someone filming themselves from three angles. It is someone grunting like a captive silverback because the room must now endure the theater of his effort. It is someone reserving a bench with a jacket, a bag, a phone, a hair tie, a psychic aura, whatever little territorial flags they can plant to make the rest of us understand that their convenience outranks the purpose of the room. It is someone sitting on a machine scrolling Instagram like the gym is their living room and the rest of us are just there to wait politely until their sovereign little mood passes.

Nothing in America is allowed to just be what it is anymore.

That is the disease. Its most obvious form lives at the top, in the scams, the oligarchs, the evangelical ghouls, the Supreme Court ghouls, the whole beautiful necrotic pageant. But its most exhausting form lives down here, in ordinary public life, which has been colonized by self-performance. The self is sovereign. The phone is sovereign. The mood is sovereign. The need to be seen is sovereign. And once that happens, every shared room becomes a little battlefield of private appetites. You are never just doing the thing. You are always negotiating with someone else’s ego..

That is why the French gym hit me so hard. It was normal. It was functioning adulthood. It was a room full of people who understood that a place has a purpose and that the individual is not automatically entitled to override that purpose with their own need to be the center of gravity. That feels almost foreign to me now, which is a damning thing to realize about your own country.

And this is not just about gyms. A few days ago there was some influencer on Threads, a Serbian fashion person with millions of followers, posing at Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo. She had planted herself right there in the middle of this iconic public crossing, sitting on the ground with her legs arranged just so, very obviously so she could show off some expensive shoes. And people lit her up, rightly because even in 2026 some things are still insulting enough to trip the alarm. What offended people was the assumption underneath the vanity. The assumption that one of the most famous public spaces in the world existed, in that moment, as a backdrop for her self-mythology. The other people were just extras in the film.

I wrote something to that effect, that she was treating everyone else as extras and herself as the main character, and it took off because people recognized it instantly. That’s the American disease. Main character syndrome. The rest of us are expected to play scenery, audience, obstruction, labor, validation, whatever role the sovereign self requires. Other people are not fellow participants in a shared space. They are props.

Once you see that, you see it everywhere.

You see it in the gym bro turning a squat rack into a film studio. You see it in the woman posing at Shibuya as though Tokyo itself exists to reflect her back to herself. You see it in the person who enters a quiet café and starts blasting video audio through their phone speaker because why shouldn’t the room be colonized by their impulses. You see it in the guy at dinner who thinks the waiter is not a person but a friction point between desire and fulfillment. You see it in American tourists who move through other countries as though the locals are there to enrich their content rather than live their lives.

And once enough people start moving through the world this way, public life collapses. Not dramatically at first. It just becomes exhausting. A chore. A low-grade humiliation. Every room fills with tiny negotiations over someone else’s sense of entitlement. The social contract gets thinner and thinner until a normal functioning room full of adults doing the thing they came there to do starts to feel almost utopian.

That is what Beaune gave me. Relief from the cult of me.

The French are not saints. I have eyes. They have their own arrogance, their own cruelties, their own absurdities, their own theatrical bullshit. But enough people still seem to understand that public life has form. A place has a function. A room is not automatically an extension of your brand. The individual is not a tiny king dragging his personal weather system through every shared environment. That difference, felt in something as banal as a workout, says almost everything about what has gone wrong in America. Seriousness now feels like a luxury.

That is another way of putting it. Seriousness. Adults doing the thing they came to do. Just participating in the purpose of the room. In America, that now feels almost aristocratic, which is insane. We have fallen so far into performance, branding, and private ego that a room full of grown people acting like grown people feels exotic.

And maybe that is why this bothered me so much more than it should have. Because it revealed how low the bar has gotten at home. A front desk clerk saying have a good workout should be nothing. Exactly. A gym where people come in, train, and leave without turning it into a psychodrama should be nothing. Exactly. But when your own culture has become so degraded by self-absorption that even these little functioning arrangements start to feel rare, you cannot help but notice. You cannot help but feel the loss. America is full of people who no longer know how to be in a room.

That sounds harsh, but I think it is true. We are losing the ordinary discipline of shared space. We are losing the ability to let a place remain itself. Everything has to bend around the sovereign self. And when the self becomes that absolute, everyone else becomes secondary, then decorative, then barely real at all.

Extras in the film.

A gym in Beaune reminded me that it does not have to be this way. That public life can still operate on purpose, form, and a surviving social contract. That adults can still enter a room and submit, willingly and without humiliation, to the simple idea of what the room is for. No more. No less.

Right now, that feels almost miraculous. Which is how you know the rot at home is deeper than most people want to admit.

That sounds harsher than I mean it, though maybe the harshness is part of the point. I am not talking about a cartoon villain test. I am not saying every old friend becomes a monster the second you hit fifty and develop standards. I am talking about something quieter and more unnerving. Time protects people. History launders things. The sheer duration of a relationship can make certain traits feel ordinary, forgivable, even invisible, when those same traits, arriving in a new person, would set off every alarm in your body within ten minutes.

I have been thinking about this a lot with men. Not all men, obviously, because I am not in the mood for the remedial seminar. I mean specifically the male friends who got into my life decades ago, through childhood, college, work, old ecosystems, old versions of me, old versions of them, and just stayed there through inertia, loyalty, shared memory, and the heavy gravity of time. Some of those friendships are real and deep and earned. A handful of those men are absolutely people I would choose again. But if I am being honest, and honesty is the only reason to write this, there are many others I would never let in if they arrived now, as strangers, with the exact same traits, the exact same blind spots, the exact same emotional habits, the exact same way of moving through the world.

That does not mean I am secretly surrounded by monsters. It means something much more ordinary and much more human. When someone has been around long enough, you stop evaluating them in the present tense. They become inherited. They come with sediment. They arrive in your mind padded by old jokes, old stories, old loyalties, old rescue missions, old pain, old context. You are meeting the archive. And the archive makes people easier to excuse.

A man you have known for thirty years can be selfish, misogynistic, emotionally stunted, casually cruel, exhausting, incapable of self-reflection, and somehow still remain legible to you as “my old friend.” A man with those exact same qualities, walking into your life cold at fifty-one, would be dead on arrival. You would spot the rot immediately. You would go home, text someone, and say, absolutely not, I’m never seeing that guy again.

That gap interests me. The gap between selection and inheritance. Between the people we actually choose as adults and the people time simply keeps in circulation because they entered the bloodstream too early to be examined properly. A lot of old friendships survive because they are old. That sounds obvious until you really sit with it. We like to think longevity proves depth. Sometimes it proves endurance. Sometimes it proves habit. Sometimes it proves that once someone gets grandfathered into your life, you stop asking the fresh questions you would ask of anyone new.

Would I trust this person if I met him now. Would I admire him. Would I choose to spend time with him. Would I welcome his way of thinking into my actual present life. Would I recommend him to a woman I care about. Would I want to build anything with him. Would I let him near the person I am now.

Those are clarifying questions. History hates clarifying questions.

Part of what makes this uncomfortable is that it says something about me too, about what earlier versions of me were willing to absorb because that was the atmosphere and because so much male friendship works by laundering dysfunction into familiarity. A man can be selfish, contemptuous, narcissistic, incapable of apology, juvenile about women, emotionally lazy, permanently adolescent, and still get waved through under the old banners of humor, loyalty, history, or some vague assurance that he is better than he seems. The older I get, the less impressed I am by whatever is supposedly hiding beneath the surface.

And yet I do not think this is only about disappointment in other people. It is also about what happens when your standards change faster than your social map, when suffering and experience sharpen you enough that certain behaviors stop feeling quirky and start feeling toxic. You become more exact about what drains you, what insults you, what coarsens the room, what asks too much, what offers too little, what masquerades as intimacy while never quite crossing into actual care. Then you look around and realize some of the men who have been in your life forever are still operating on permissions you revoked internally years ago.

That is a lonely realization, but also a clarifying one. Because it means the issue is not that I suddenly became meaner or less loyal or more judgmental in some cheap way. The issue is that I am finally seeing certain people without the gauze of history. Or at least trying to. The man I am now would not build the same social world the boy I was inherited.

I think this is part of why so many long friendships start to fray in middle age. People say lives diverge, which is true but incomplete. More specifically, one person grows into a different threshold of tolerance while the other keeps cashing checks written by the past. One person updates. The other keeps assuming the old access still applies. The tension is not always dramatic. Sometimes it is just a low-grade nausea. A sense that the person across from you is being received on credit from an earlier decade.

And men are especially good at living on that credit. Male friendship can be weirdly primitive that way. Two guys can know each other forever and never really examine the moral terms of the relationship. Shared history does the work. Shared jokes do the work. A few emotionally significant moments, one crisis survived together, one old allegiance, one memory from college, one stretch of mutual chaos, and suddenly the friendship has a lifetime pass. Nobody asks whether the thing is still alive in the present. Nobody asks whether liking someone is the same as respecting him. Nobody asks whether loyalty has quietly curdled into inertia.

I am asking now.

I am not interested in turning my life into some sterile moral showroom. People are complicated. Everyone carries damage. I have male friends I love deeply, men who have changed, men who can still surprise me, men whose friendship I would choose again without hesitation. Their existence only makes the contrast sharper. They prove the standard is real, that what I am asking for is not fantasy but the present tense.

Would I choose you now.

That is the question time protects people from. It is also, I think, one of the most honest questions adulthood gives us. Not because we owe everyone a verdict, but because we owe ourselves a clearer sightline. Some people are in our lives because they belong there. Others are there because history kept renewing the lease.

The older I get, the less interested I am in honoring the lease just because it is old.

That is the thought I keep coming back to. It is one of the ugliest things I have learned in the last year and a half, not just about Trump supporters, but about Americans with money, Americans with insulation, Americans whose lives are buffered enough that policy can remain a mood, a wager, a set of vibes, a tax preference, a performance of strength, a little fantasy about negotiations and leverage and winning. Politics, for them, is often an abstraction. It is something to debate, posture around, or use to flatter their sense of realism. Then the consequences arrive in someone else’s life, and suddenly they would prefer not to talk about politics at all.

I work in wine, which means I spend my life in intimate proximity to discretionary pleasure. I sell bottles people do not need in order to live. They buy them because they are beautiful, because they are rare, because they deepen dinner, because they make a cellar feel more complete, because they turn appetite into culture and status into taste. I understand that world very well. I know how to speak its language. I know how to guide people into it. I also know, more clearly than ever now, that the economic weather on my side of the table and the economic weather on their side of the table are often so different that they barely qualify as the same atmosphere.

Trump’s tariffs detonated the central logic of my business. My whole model is built around buying direct from wineries so I can cut out layers and offer serious value. That is the engine. That is why the business works. Then came the tariffs, the currency shock, the customer retrenchment, the whole diseased economic regime. Categories I built part of my life around were gutted almost overnight. German Riesling became close to dead on arrival. Mid-range European wines that once made perfect, elegant sense stopped penciling out. The pain was immediate, structural, and ongoing. This was never theoretical to me. It was oxygen, freight, invoices, margin, cash flow, sleep, fear.

And yet I kept running into people for whom all of this remained conceptual. I had one customer, a large one, tell me over dinner that he voted for Trump. This was someone who buys wine from me, someone who knows my business, someone who knows exactly what I do for a living, someone who has heard me talk in detail about how exposed I am to tariffs. I looked at him and said, with total sincerity, wow, you voted for the man who destroyed my business. And his wife jumped in immediately to protect him, saying he did not know the tariffs were coming. That sentence has stayed with me because it contained the whole rot in miniature. A man votes for a candidate who already used tariffs once, who campaigned on them again, who telegraphed them incessantly, and when the consequences arrive the defense is that he did not know. He did not know because politics, to people like this, is not experienced as a field of material consequences. It is a game of posture and abstraction until the bill comes due.

What made the moment so obscene was not just the vote. It was the rage that followed when I held up the mirror. He could handle politics as long as it remained in the realm of idea, theory, tribe, sentiment, market talk, whatever little chamber of self-flattering nonsense people use to protect themselves from responsibility. The second politics became intimate, the second it had a face, the second it spoke back and said I am standing right here and your vote did this to me, the whole performance broke down. That is the part that interests me now. Not that people vote badly. Millions do. It is that so many affluent people cannot metabolize the consequences of their own politics once those consequences step into the room wearing a human body.

I have had this conversation in different forms over and over again. Before the election, I had customers tell me I was being dramatic, that Trump was only threatening tariffs to negotiate, that Europe was taking advantage of us, that the whole thing was just hardball strategy, that I needed to calm down. I told them plainly that he was going to do exactly what he said he would do and that it would wreck my business. I was right. They were wrong. And even after being wrong in the most literal, measurable way possible, the response was still some bland little evasion, some version of well, I hope you get out of it. They wanted the freedom to be wrong and still remain untouched by the human consequences of being wrong. They wanted the prediction to fail without ever having to sit inside what that failure had actually done to someone else’s life.

That is why I keep returning to the phrase all politics are local. People say it like a campaign cliché, but I do not think they understand how intimate it can become. This was not a factory closing in some town they have never visited. This was not a headline from a sector report. This was me, a person they know, a person whose taste they trust, a person whose work they have enjoyed and benefited from, telling them that their vote helped wreck the business through which I survive. That is politics at its most local. That is policy with a pulse. And the fact that so many people still cannot bear that level of intimacy tells you everything you need to know about how unseriously they take the human stakes of their own choices.

There is also a class piece here that I can no longer ignore. The rich have always had the privilege of experiencing politics as a little more abstract than everyone else because damage takes longer to reach them and often reaches them in gentler form. They can absorb losses. They can wait things out. They can pivot. They can buy through discomfort. Even when they are annoyed, they are rarely existentially exposed. So they learn bad habits of mind. They start treating policy like weather for other people. They develop opinions with very little moral imagination. They begin to believe that because they will probably be fine, the thing itself must be manageable. Then they sit across from someone who is not fine and discover, often with visible irritation, that their insulation made them shallow.

And because I work in wine, all of this becomes even more grotesque. Wine is a product of pleasure, time, abundance, care, ritual, beauty. I sell those things for a living while living under an economic regime that has made beauty harder and harder to move. I sit with customers in restaurants, bring them bottles, help shape their palates, make their evenings more interesting, and then watch some of them vote for the destruction of the very structure that makes that relationship possible. I am in close proximity to wealth without being protected by it. I am close enough to see how it thinks. And what I have learned is that many wealthy people lack consequence. Or rather, they lack the kind of consequence that would force intelligence to become moral seriousness.

I am not writing this because I think every Republican customer is a monster or every Democrat customer is a saint. I have had people across the political spectrum fail to really look at what this period has done to me. I have had people on the left avoid the subject because they do not want to deal with someone else’s ongoing damage either. Struggle makes a lot of people uncomfortable. They prefer you in your function. Funny wine guy. Taste guy. Bottle guy. The second your actual life becomes too raw, too prolonged, too inconvenient, they retreat into silence or banality. That is another part of the same disease. But with Trump voters who directly supported the machinery wrecking my business, the chasm becomes almost impossible to romanticize.

So yes, there is a piece of me that remains stunned by the sheer intimacy of it all. You buy from me. You know me. You know what I do. You vote for the man who destroys my business. Then you get angry when I say so. That is American politics in one scene. People want the pleasures of choice without the moral burden of consequence. They want to vote as though no one they know lives downstream from the policies they support. They want their politics to remain a hobby even when those politics have already entered someone else’s bloodstream.

I used to think the ugliest thing in politics was corruption. It still may be. But this comes close. This ability to keep damage abstract until it becomes embarrassingly personal, and then to resent the person who made it personal. This desire to be spared the face of the consequences. This insistence that the chips on the table stay chips and never start talking back. That, too, is a form of corruption. It is the corruption of moral distance. And once you have seen it up close, once you have watched someone look you in the eye after voting for your destruction and still try to preserve their own innocence, it becomes very hard to pretend that politics is merely ideas. For some people, maybe. For the rest of us, it is the structure of harm.

That is the part they never say plainly. They hear a woman name male behavior, or a man name what he has seen in other men, and they do not experience it as witness, analysis, testimony, or truth. They experience it as dethronement. Something ancient and pathetic kicks in. Suddenly they need to restore the old arrangement, the one in which men are the assumed subjects of the world and women are the supporting cast, the atmosphere, the audience, the responsive material. The second that arrangement is interrupted, the second women are allowed to be the ones describing the weather rather than merely standing in it, certain men start wailing as though history itself has become unfair.

This is why so much supposedly nuanced pushback from men is so fraudulent. It arrives wearing the little costume of reasonableness, balance, complexity, fairness, all the tidy words that make cowardice sound mature. But underneath it is usually the same old male panic. Why are you singling men out. Why are you making this about men. Why are you not discussing every possible cruelty committed by every possible person in every possible direction all at once. The demand is absurd on its face, but it tells you everything. These men do not want understanding. They want restoration. They want the old equilibrium back, the one where male behavior gets to remain the unmarked norm and anyone naming it has to do so softly, apologetically, with caveats stacked to the ceiling so no man has to feel, even for a moment, like the chosen category has been touched.

That is why these conversations feel so impossible. You are not just arguing with a person. You are arguing with an entitlement structure so deeply internalized that it experiences plain language as aggression. A man can spend his entire life benefiting from deference, insulation, emotional accommodation, sexual mythology, the endless laundering of male behavior into “human nature,” and still react to one precise piece of witness as though he has been dragged into the town square and humiliated. He calls it vilification. He calls it bias. He calls it hysteria. He calls it anti-male bigotry. What he means is simpler and uglier: I am not used to being named, and I resent it.

And this is where my own exhaustion lives now. It is not just that there are so many of these men. It is that they are so boring in their evasions. They are all running the same software. You write something from the deepest part of your experience, you name a structure they are steeped in, and within minutes one of them is lurching into view to say, yes, but women can be bad too. Of course they can. No adult needs that memo. The point is not that women are saints and men are monsters. The point is that a certain kind of male behavior remains so normalized, so ambient, so soaked into the air, that even the cleanest description of it gets treated as some kind of radical overreach. Men like this do not hear the content of the argument. They hear only the loss of their own default innocence.

I think this is also why I have become so protective of clean thought. There is so much ego, so much posturing, so much throat-clearing bullshit in ordinary human interaction, especially with men who cannot follow an idea without immediately trying to manage it, shrink it, redirect it, dilute it, or force it back into familiar terms. They do not want to see where the thought goes. They want to know how it affects their standing while the thought is still in the womb. That is a miserable way to think, and an even more miserable way to live. It is a tax on honesty. It is a tax on language. It is a tax on any attempt to move beyond the same stale, defensive loop.

And maybe that is the saddest part. It could all be so much simpler. A man could read a piece about misogyny and say yes, I have seen that, yes, I have participated in some version of that, yes, there is something here I need to sit with. He could hear a woman describe male contempt and resist the toddler urge to shout that girls are mean too. He could survive not being the center of the moral universe for five minutes. But a lot of men cannot do that, because they have spent their whole lives mistaking not being named for virtue. So when the naming finally comes, they do what weak people always do. They call witness hatred. They call clarity unfairness. They call decentering abuse. And then they stand there, wounded and indignant, wondering why so many women sound tired.

That is just the truth of the wine business, and right now it feels impossible to ignore. Wine, especially the kind of wine I sell, exists in a world of pleasure, taste, ritual, abundance, aesthetic intelligence, delayed gratification, cultivated appetite, and luxury in the truest sense of the word. Even the more modest bottles I sell are still part of an ecosystem built around discretionary beauty. Nobody needs mature German Riesling or old-vine Burgundy or serious grower Champagne to survive. These are choices people make when life still feels porous enough to admit pleasure.

I have spent decades helping people make those choices. I have built a business and, in some ways, a whole identity around it. I know how to talk about wine, how to place it, how to make someone feel the emotional and sensory logic of a bottle before they ever pull the cork. I know how to build trust with customers, how to guide them, how to get them excited, how to help them discover new producers, how to shift a cellar, how to turn taste into a kind of companionship. That is real work. It is also intimate work. And what tariffs have exposed, more brutally than anything before them, is just how strange that intimacy can become when the people buying the wine and the people trying to survive by selling it are living in radically different economic weather.

For a long time, I could float above that contradiction. Or at least work inside it without staring directly at it. The bottle was the bridge. The dinner was the bridge. The language was the bridge. Taste has a way of making class feel elegant rather than violent. But Trump’s return and the tariff regime that came with it have stripped a lot of that elegance away. What used to feel like a sophisticated luxury industry now often feels like a front-row seat to class insulation. Not because every wealthy client is a monster. They are not. Some are extremely kind, deeply perceptive, and capable of human scale. But the gap itself has gotten so wide, and my own exposure to the damage so intense, that the old scripts no longer hold.

The wine business under Trump 2.0 absorbs a triple shock. First, the tariffs themselves. Then currency chaos. Then the fact that customers, even the ones who are still comfortable, get spooked by the broader economic regime and start pulling back, trimming, delaying, hesitating, or demanding concessions. I built my business around buying direct from wineries so I could cut out layers of distribution and give people real value. That was the engine. That was the proposition. Trump’s tariffs detonated that proposition almost overnight. Entire categories got mauled. German Riesling, one of the deepest loves of my life and one of the best values in fine wine, became close to dead on arrival. Wines that made perfect sense at thirty-five dollars, forty-five dollars, fifty-five dollars now arrive carrying a policy tax, a currency problem, and a customer’s generalized economic fear. A bottle can still be beautiful and become impossible.

That is the structural version. Then there is the interpersonal version, which is where the real psychic damage starts to set in.

I have a client, Paul, who makes several million dollars a year as a lawyer. Partner at a big firm. Gorgeous Park Avenue apartment. Extremely comfortable life. I know him well enough to have gone to dinner with him, well enough that I thought the relationship lived, at least partly, in the realm of actual friendship. When I told him, in one of the worst stretches of my life, that I was in serious financial trouble, his response was to send me a link to his law firm and remind me he is a bankruptcy lawyer. I remember looking at that text and thinking this is one of the most tone-deaf things anyone has ever sent me. It was so grotesquely misaligned with the moment that it almost became abstract art. I am telling you I am drowning and you are handing me a brochure. That is the chasm.

A few weeks before that, I had taken him to dinner and brought some of my best bottles, not trophy wines, but real wines with force and class and value, exactly the kind of wines I sell best when someone is willing to trust me and stretch a little. The goal was obvious. Let him taste at a higher level, let him feel the difference in his mouth and in the room, and maybe he starts buying more seriously. The result was that he bought less wine from me and casually rubbed in bottles he was buying from other people. Again, I do not care if customers buy wine elsewhere. That is life. That is the business. But there is something almost perversely revealing about sitting across from someone whose life is perfectly intact while yours is being torn apart by tariffs, currency chaos, and economic instability, and realizing that he still experiences you primarily as a service category. Funny wine guy. Bottle guy. Cellar guy. The one who can make dinner more interesting. The one who can explain German Pinot on a Sunday morning while the floor is on fire.

That is what I mean when I say the gap has become harder to ignore. It is not just a matter of who has money and who does not. It is who gets to experience money as aesthetic choice and who has to experience it as oxygen. It is who can lose money and remain intact, and who experiences money loss as a change in atmospheric pressure. It is who gets to ask for case discounts, little shaves here and there, a favor on this order, a better deal on that, while pretending the overall system remains normal. It is who gets to keep treating wine like a charming luxury game, and who has to live inside freight, tariffs, exchange rates, dead categories, delayed shipments, razor-thin margins, and the terror of wondering whether the thing you built can survive a government this diseased.

And the sickest part is that I am standing in intimate proximity to all of it. I am in the room. I am selling the room. I am helping build the cellar. I am furnishing the beauty. I know what these bottles mean to people. I know the emotional role they play. Celebration, escape, status, sensuality, memory, companionship, intellectual stimulation, all of it. That is part of what makes the contrast so psychologically bizarre. I am helping people preserve and deepen pleasure while my own business is taking direct artillery fire from policy they may barely feel.

There is a kind of class war people only recognize when it looks cinematic enough. A boss screaming at a worker. A picket line. A CEO bonus. A hedge fund ghoul liquidating a town. Fine. That all counts. But class also moves through tone, insulation, and failure of imagination. Sometimes class war is a rich man in a beautiful apartment being unable to metabolize the fact that someone he likes is under sustained political and economic assault. Sometimes it is a customer asking for a price shave while the person on the other end is trying to keep a company alive. Sometimes it is the assumption that because the wine still exists, the world beneath it must still be functioning. He thinks he is making conversation. You experience it as being asked to dance while the floor burns.

What has made this even more difficult is how few people can metabolize someone else’s struggle once it stops being brief, legible, and narratively convenient. A bad month, people understand. A weird quarter, maybe. A year and a half of crisis, of pressure, of economic damage tied to political events they do not personally feel in their nervous system, that is much harder for them. They want the old version of you back. They want the useful version. The entertaining version. The one who can still perform normalcy for their comfort. They do not want to understand that the machine is grinding you down in ways that have permanently altered the room.

I am not writing this because I want pity. I am not interested in pity. I am writing it because tariffs lexposed the moral and psychological architecture of the world I work in. They made a lot of people show their scale. They revealed who can still see a human being through the role and who cannot. They widened a preexisting chasm until it became the whole landscape. And once you see that landscape clearly, once you understand that you are selling beauty across an economic gulf that many of your customers will never have to cross themselves, the old scripts become impossible to perform with the same innocence.

I still love wine. That is important to say. I still love what it can do. I still believe in the producers, the vineyards, the bottles, the cultural and sensory intelligence of the thing itself. That is part of why this hurts. If I did not love it, this would just be economics. But I do love it. Which means I am stuck in a luxury business that has taught me more about class than any political slogan ever could.

The bottle stays beautiful. The structure underneath it does not. And for the people trying to survive by selling that beauty while the floor keeps shifting under their feet, that contradiction is no longer theoretical. It is the air.

That, to me, is one of the most common forms of dehumanization. It rarely arrives with shouting, humiliation, or spectacular abuse. It arrives through the everyday flattening of a person into use value and calling the result friendship. It happens when someone does not ask, with any seriousness, what world you are standing in before they ask you to resume your role in theirs. They assume time has smoothed over whatever they were too uncomfortable, too incurious, or too self-enclosed to understand in the first place. They want the old version of you back on stage. They want the service to resume. And when you do not deliver it, when you finally say I am not available for this performance, they experience that not as your humanity but as your aggression.

This is what happened with David. He knows, because I have told him repeatedly, that my life has been under sustained financial, emotional, and political pressure since Trump returned and the tariff situation started doing real damage to my business. He knows this is an ongoing structural crisis, the kind of pressure that changes the oxygen in a room and settles over everything. And yet every few months he texts me as if the crisis must have passed offscreen. He wants to talk German Pinot. He wants wine advice. He wants the version of me that existed for his pleasure before reality became inconvenient. He wants to wake up on a Sunday morning, drink his coffee, avoid whatever loneliness or boredom sits inside his own intact life, and summon Lyle the wine guy back into existence.

That is what made it so offensive. The erasure inside it. The assumption that because enough time had passed for him, enough time had passed for me. The assumption that a person can be left in the fire and then casually re-entered as though nothing is burning. The text was retrieval masquerading as conversation. He was asking for access to the version of me that made his day feel textured.

The contrast with Michael is the whole moral argument. On paper, both men occupy a similar category. Well-off, around my age, people I have had dinner with, people who like talking to me, people who enjoy some mix of my knowledge, humor, and way of seeing things. But when I tell Michael what is happening, he changes register. He says he is sorry. He understands that what I am dealing with is not a passing inconvenience but a real crisis, and he asks the practical human question beneath the whole story: how bad is it, how much damage are the tariffs actually doing, and what does day-to-day life look like inside that kind of pressure. He receives my pain as real. He does not try to turn it into a service category, a legal issue, a topic shift, an inconvenience, or a chance to get the old version of me back on the phone. He treats me as a person.

David treats me as access.

That distinction may sound small until you have lived inside it long enough to feel the blood draining from your limbs. Because it is not small. It is the difference between being seen and being used. And what makes it even uglier is that the using is often so socially acceptable. It comes dressed as friendliness. It arrives with good manners. It can even arrive with affection. That is what makes it so hard to confront. People like this do not think of themselves as exploitative. They think they are making conversation. They think they are reaching out. They think they are being normal. But normal for them often means this: please step back into the role I prefer you in and spare me the discomfort of your actual life.

There is a class dimension to this that people are often too embarrassed to name directly because class war, in the American imagination, is only supposed to count when it looks cinematic, like a factory floor, a picket line, a CEO bonus, a hedge fund vampire, some obvious tableau of extraction everyone already knows how to recognize. But class also operates through emotional insulation. Through the inability of one kind of person to metabolize the lived reality of another because money has kept their own life buffered against consequence. Sometimes class war is a rich man in a $5 million apartment being unable to absorb the fact that someone he likes is drowning. Sometimes it is a person with the resources to lose money and remain intact talking casually to someone for whom money loss changes the composition of the air. He thinks he is making conversation. You experience it as being asked to dance while the floor burns.

That is why these interactions feel so grotesque to me now. They are casual on the surface and ruthless underneath. They remind me of something I have known for a very long time, which is that many people do not really relate to other human beings. They relate to roles. They relate to usefulness. They relate to the part of you that makes sense inside their own life script. The second that script is interrupted by your actual suffering, by your actual limits, by your refusal to keep being whatever function you served for them, they become confused or offended. The side character has stepped out of frame. The furniture has started speaking. The wine guy has turned out to have a life.

And maybe I am especially sensitive to this because I have spent my whole life resisting the urge to do it to other people. I go to Starbucks every day. I know everyone in there. I know their names, their moods, pieces of their lives. We talk. It comes naturally to me because I cannot move through the world treating the people in front of me as machinery. It has always been like that. In the buildings where I grew up, with the doormen, the staff, the people my family treated as infrastructure, I was the one actually talking to them. The people my family treated as service categories were often the very people with whom I had the deepest conversations, the deepest relationships, the ones who saw me and whom I saw in return. That is not a sentimental point. It is the whole point. I have always understood, at a gut level, that other people are not scenery.

That is why David lands where he lands. He is violating a principle. He is doing the thing I have spent my life trying not to do, which is to flatten a person into a role that serves your own comfort. I know what it means to acknowledge someone in full, even when the encounter is brief, even when they are technically there to provide something, even when the world has already arranged the hierarchy and made the script available. I know what it means to look past the function and recognize the life. So when someone turns around and treats me as function, I feel the insult immediately. Because I know exactly what is missing.

This is also why I am increasingly allergic to the way people talk about friendship as though simple duration proves moral depth. It does not. Time does not equal recognition. Years do not equal seeing. You can know someone for decades and still only know the service they provide in your emotional economy. You can be fond of someone and still never really take in what is happening to them. You can invite them to dinner, text them, enjoy their company, think well of them in some broad, flattering way, and still fundamentally refuse to register the density of their life. A lot of relationships survive because the role remains stable. The second the person inside the role changes, or finally insists on being visible, the relationship reveals what it was built on.

And that is the violence of casual dehumanization. It usually arrives in ordinary, socially acceptable forms, which is exactly why it is so corrosive. People want the funny friend, the wise friend, the stylish friend, the useful friend, the one who always knows what to say, always knows what to order, always knows what bottle to bring, always knows how to make the room interesting. But if that person ever says, I am suffering, I am not available for performance, I need you to meet me where I actually am, suddenly the main character feels inconvenienced, even injured. He thinks the side character has gone off script. What he cannot understand is that the side character never was a side character. He was a full human being the whole time. The problem is that you only loved the edited version.

I am tired of that. Tired in the deep sense, not the theatrical one. Tired of people who want access without recognition. Tired of being treated as category instead of person. Tired of the wealthy and insulated acting as though their inability to feel the pressure in someone else’s life is a neutral fact rather than a moral failure. Tired of the way certain people can look directly at your crisis and still, somehow, ask for the entertaining version of you. Tired of the casual brutality of being reduced to what you provide.

There is no grand solution here. I do not think writing this will cure the problem. The people who treat others like scenery rarely think of themselves that way. They think they are social. They think they are kind. They think they are reaching out. But I know what I know now, and I am no longer willing to pretend that this flattening is harmless. It is not harmless to be treated as function. It is not harmless to be summoned as a role by someone who has ignored the reality of your life. It is not harmless to be asked to resume normalcy for another person’s comfort when your own life is still on fire.

One of the most quietly moral things a person can do is refuse that hierarchy altogether. Refuse to turn the barista into a coffee machine. Refuse to turn the doorman into a decorative presence in the lobby. Refuse to turn the friend into a category that exists for your entertainment or convenience. Refuse the whole rotten little system in which some people get to feel like protagonists and everyone else exists as support staff in the screenplay of their feelings. That refusal is discipline. It is a way of walking through the world without making everyone else disappear.

And when someone finally says to you, in one form or another, I am not scenery, I am not your wine guy, I am not your function, I have a life too, the moral test is very simple. Do you step toward that reality, or do you get offended that the furniture has started talking.

That, to me, explains a great deal about why the oldest relationships are often the most painful. It is not just that there is more history. It is that history hardens. People become loyal to their interpretation of you. They become attached to a version of you that served some psychic purpose in their own life, and once that happens, change becomes difficult for them to metabolize. Growth becomes suspicious. Success becomes irritating. Repair becomes inconvenient. The actual human being in front of them has to compete with ten, twenty, thirty years of prior drafts, all of them carrying emotional residue. The person they are talking to now is competing with the person who disappointed them in 1997, irritated them in 2004, scared them in 2013, embarrassed them in 2018, whatever the year was, whatever the wound was, whatever little scar they polished into identity because it helped them know where they stood.

This is why so many family relationships feel impossible. Families are supposed to be the place of unconditional love, which is one of the great sentimental lies people tell because the alternative is too destabilizing to look at directly. Family is often the least forgiving structure in a person’s life. It is where roles are assigned earliest and revised least. It is where the first judgments get made and then fossilized. It is where your oldest self can be held against you long after that self has died. People talk about forgiveness in families with this almost religious reverence, as if blood naturally produces mercy. It doesn’t. If anything, blood often produces entitlement without generosity, obligation without imagination, closeness without fresh sight. Families remember selectively, weaponize strategically, and then call the whole cycle love.

That is why the old aphorism forgive and forget lands with so much force. People always say it is profound because almost no one can do it. Certainly not in families. Certainly not in long relationships where grievance has had years to mature into worldview. We all know this, even if we pretend otherwise. We all know people who will happily tell you they love someone while still holding a fifteen-year-old version of that person in front of them like a mug shot. We all know fathers, mothers, siblings, friends, spouses, exes who can recall an old failure with perfect clarity while somehow failing to register ten years of evidence that the person standing in front of them is no longer that person. The older the relationship, the more temptation there is to keep relating to an old draft because the old draft helps the other person maintain their own story.

That is the part no one wants to admit. The archive is not neutral. People do not just fail to update because updating is hard. They fail to update because the old version of you does work for them. It justifies their stance. It preserves the hierarchy. It allows them to remain the reasonable one, the stable one, the disappointed one, the one who saw through you early, the one who knew what you were. If you really change, if you become more serious, more moral, more accomplished, more visible, more respected, more loved, more recognized than they were prepared for, then they have to revise themselves too. They have to ask whether they misjudged you, whether they relied too heavily on an old injury, whether they preferred you smaller because smallness was easier to manage. Most people would rather protect the mythology than revise the self.

I have been thinking about this because it explains so many of the most painful relationships in my life. My father. My mother. My brother, at different points. My business partner. Old friends I have known since childhood. Friends I have known since college. People who, in theory, should have had the richest picture of me are often the very people least able to take me as I am now. They are too attached to a prior frame. Everything gets filtered through the old report card. One bad grade never leaves the file. One period of instability, one argument, one mistake, one role you once played in the emotional ecosystem, and suddenly it does not matter what you do later. You are still the reckless one, the difficult one, the dramatic one, the one who cannot be trusted, the one who made things hard, the one who disrupted the script. The point is stability. They know who they are if they know who you were.

And this is why I find the modern family-values rhetoric so grotesque, especially on the right. You hear some idiot say, you would really throw away your family over politics, and you realize how many layers of falseness are packed into a single sentence. First, it is rarely politics in the trivial sense. It is morality. It is values. It is what kind of person you are willing to stand beside and call safe. But deeper than that, the line assumes that family is some naturally sacred structure and that fracture is always a failure of the person who leaves. What nonsense. Family is one of the most psychologically contaminated structures in human life. It is where shame accumulates earliest. It is where roles harden fastest. It is where people most insist on unconditionality while practicing some of the most conditional perception imaginable. If you want to see how little blood guarantees mercy, look at any room where relatives are still arguing with a version of someone that no longer exists.

What has made this even sharper for me is the strange contrast between old relationships and public life. The people who have known me longest are often the least capable of seeing who I am now. Meanwhile strangers, readers, people who encountered me through Threads or Substack six months ago, eight months ago, a year ago, are taking me in the present tense. They are responding to the person in front of them. They are not arguing with my old case file. They are not consulting the emotional archive. They are reading the work, meeting the current mind, hearing the current voice, and responding to that reality. There is something beautiful in that and something devastating too. Because it means the people with the shortest history sometimes have the cleanest sightline. The less you have known me, the more likely you may be to see me clearly.

That is an almost unbearable realization when you sit with it long enough. The people who watched you grow up, who should know the grain of your character, who should be able to say yes, I remember the chaos, yes, I remember the pain, yes, I remember the old version, and I can still see the person standing here now, cannot do it. Or will not. While a stranger, who has only the current evidence in front of them, can. It tells you something brutal about intimacy. Time does not guarantee recognition. Duration does not guarantee vision. In fact, the longer someone has known you, the more likely they may be to confuse memory with truth.

This also explains why success can be so destabilizing inside old relationships. When you begin to become more yourself, when your work sharpens, when your voice lands, when people start paying attention, when strangers start saying things about your talent that old friends never said, it forces a confrontation. Some people can metabolize that. They update. They feel joy. They say yes, I see it too, I see what is happening, this makes sense to me. Those people are rare and precious. Others cannot metabolize it at all. They feel displaced by it, irritated by it, vaguely mocked by it, as though your becoming has somehow accused their old interpretation of being incomplete. Which, of course, it has. A lot of people do not mind your suffering nearly as much as they mind your transformation. Suffering confirms the file. Transformation threatens it.

That is part of why so many long relationships die in phases. The rupture on the surface is usually some discrete event, some fight, some betrayal, some money issue, some stupid thing at work, some political argument, some missed chance to handle a situation gracefully. But underneath it is often something older and stranger. One person has changed, or at least become more visible to themselves, and the other person is still relating to a version from twenty years ago. They are talking across eras. One person thinks they are in the present. The other is still grading the exam from sophomore year.

I think about my own life in rough seven-year epics because I have always felt how dramatically a person can change while somehow retaining an essence underneath. The person I was at twenty-two is not the person I was at twenty-nine, is not the person I was at thirty-six, is not the person I am now. The through-line is real, but so is the change. And one of the great tragedies of long relationships is that many people cannot hold both truths at once. They either cling to the essence so hard that they deny growth, or they cling to the history so hard that they deny the present. They cannot let a person remain themselves while also becoming someone new. That is a very hard thing to do, maybe the hardest. It requires humility. It requires the willingness to admit that your picture may be outdated. It requires love with fresh eyes. Most people do not have that kind of vision.

So yes, I think family is a tainted structure. I do not mean that in the cartoonish internet way, where every tradition is oppression and every intimate bond is a prison. I mean that family is one of the most overpraised and underexamined structures in human life. It can be beautiful. It can save people. It can be the one place where someone is taken as they are. But it can also be the place where someone is least likely to be allowed change. It can be the structure that teaches you your oldest self is your permanent sentence. It can be the place where people love you in theory while refusing to update their understanding of who you are in fact.

And maybe that is the quiet horror underneath so many adult estrangements. People talk about betrayal, politics, money, spouses, inheritance, resentment, all of which matter. But underneath all of it there is often a simpler and sadder truth. Someone kept insisting on the old report card. Someone kept relating to the file. Someone could not bear to let the person in front of them outrun the version that made emotional sense years ago. So the relationship died under the weight of accumulated paperwork.

I do not say any of this as someone floating above the problem. I am sure I have my own archives, my own stale frames, my own preferred villains and prior drafts. I am sure there are people I still partly see through old weather. That is part of being human. But I am increasingly convinced that one of the deepest forms of love is the willingness to keep updating the file. To let someone become. To let the person in front of you compete successfully with the archive. To understand that history matters, memory matters, damage matters, but none of those things absolve you from the discipline of fresh sight.

That discipline is rare. It may be rarer in families than anywhere else. Which is why so many of us end up finding present-tense recognition in strangers, readers, colleagues, new friends, people who come to us without the burden of old mythology. It should not be that way. But often it is.

The longest relationships in our lives are not automatically the deepest. Very often they are just the oldest crime scenes. And if the people inside them cannot stop treating your past as destiny, then no amount of history will save them. Sometimes the only way to live is to leave the archive behind and step into rooms where people are willing to meet the person who actually walked in.

That sounds almost mythological now, like the opening line of a movie made before the internet flattened everything into one endless indoor light. But it was real. Friday night, 8:30, the stoop. That was the plan. Just a place. A physical place in the world where me and three other idiots would meet and become ourselves in public. We stood there, sat there, smoked, talked shit, watched people go by, made each other laugh, embarrassed ourselves, learned timing, learned status, learned how to recover from saying something stupid, learned how to flirt badly, learned how to get ignored, learned how to exist around girls and older kids and neighborhood characters and the whole minor-key social orchestra of being alive.

That mattered more than people understand now.

Everyone wants to talk about the male loneliness epidemic, and it is real. It is absolutely real. But most of the conversation around it is so flattened and moralized that it misses one of the most obvious structural facts. Yes, a lot of young men are emotionally underdeveloped. Yes, a lot of them are entitled, inert, porn-brained, irony-poisoned, status-obsessed, allergic to self-examination, and one bad day away from a podcast host telling them women are the enemy. Fine. All true. But before any of that becomes ideology, there is a simpler and older problem. We destroyed a huge amount of the informal social world where boys used to accidentally become men.

The stoop mattered, and so did the park, the meadow, the curb, all the half-aimless little public zones where you had nowhere special to go and still somehow found your way into social life. Being bored with other people mattered. Running into girls in real life mattered. Running into older kids mattered. Running into people who thought you were cool, people who thought you were annoying, people who humbled you, people who amused you, people who let you orbit the room without fully entering it yet, all of that mattered. It was social rehearsal, friction, humiliation in manageable doses, the place where you learned how to read a room, take a hint, recover from a failed joke, and get rejected without turning it into a worldview.

Now a lot of boys grow up in sealed digital chambers where the self forms under surveillance and performance at the exact same time. Bad parenting starts with the iPad and then the rest of the culture finishes the job. You get Discord, Reddit, gaming, TikTok, porn, algorithmic body panic, niche grievance, private language, private resentments, and an endless series of substitutes for embodied life. You get communication without presence, access without intimacy, stimulation without community. Then people act shocked when a twenty-two-year-old guy has no game, no patience, no emotional regulation, no confidence around women, and a relationship to rejection so radioactive it looks like state material.

What exactly did they think was going to happen?

We took away half the spaces where social instinct used to develop. We emptied public life, then flooded the remaining space with screens, metrics, branding, self-consciousness, and avoidance. And then we stared at the aftermath as though it had descended from the sky. A lot of these guys did not come out of nowhere. They were formed in a lab. The age of permanent access killed a lot of actual social practice and replaced it with simulation. The result is a thinner, stranger, more brittle personhood. And that brittleness matters, because there are many kinds of loneliness. Some loneliness has dignity in it. Some loneliness has introspection. Some loneliness is the price of having standards, depth, or an inner life. That is not what I am talking about. I am talking about stunted loneliness. Aggrieved loneliness. A loneliness with no language except blame. The kind that curdles fast because the machine is already waiting to monetize the wound.

A guy who cannot get laid, cannot talk to women, cannot tolerate ambiguity, has no organic social life, no mixed human world around him, no broader civic or neighborhood structure to hold him inside the species, is now one click away from being told that his private hurt is a civilizational atrocity. That is the manosphere in one sentence. It takes social failure, sexual frustration, and emotional underdevelopment and turns them into ideology. It tells mediocre men that they are not lonely because they are isolated, avoidant, frightened, socially half-formed, and marinating in private digital rot. No, they are lonely because women have become corrupted by freedom. It is one of the most cynical and effective grievance machines ever built.

And yes, those men are still responsible for what they become. I am not writing absolution here. I am writing ecosystem. Earlier generations had plenty of misogynists, plenty of predators, plenty of creeps, plenty of men who reduced women to trophies or targets or little mirrors for their own pathetic status needs. I wrote an entire essay about that. But a lot of those men still lived in a denser human world. They had stoops, neighborhood bars, and dumb local jobs. They had cousins, parks, side streets, public awkwardness, real-world humiliation, the kind of friction that forces a personality to adapt or at least exposes it to weather. They might still have turned rotten, but they had more chances to be interrupted before the rot became doctrine.

Now a lot of boys can disappear into the machine before anyone decent gets to them.

That is one of the great unspoken differences between younger men and older men right now. People keep talking about generational gaps as though they are only differences in taste, media, or politics. They are not. A twenty-one-year-old and a fifty-one-year-old now may have been formed by almost different planets. I came up in a world where identity was still shaped by place, bodies, boredom, weather, repetition, accident, embarrassment, public life. You walked outside and the day imposed itself on you. You ran into people. You got read by people. You got corrected by the world. Now a lot of younger people, especially boys, are being formed by interfaces first. By feeds, avatars, private spirals, synthetic status systems, infinite comparison, and algorithmic mirrors. That is a civilizational rupture.

And no, I am not doing boomer nostalgia here. The old world was cruel in its own ways. Plenty of young men learned terrible things on stoops too. Plenty of male bonding was and remains contaminated, predatory, degrading. Again, I have written that piece already. But contamination is not the same thing as sterilization. What we have now is a world where boys can become men without ever really entering ordinary public life long enough to be shaped by it. That is new. Or at least new at this scale.

The result is male loneliness stripped of context and fed back to men as injury theater. No friends, no game, no patience, no resilience, no actual practice around women, no tolerance for uncertainty, no larger human rhythm to absorb the shock, and then suddenly Andrew Tate or one of his many little fungal cousins shows up to explain that this is a grievance to weaponize. It is not your responsibility. It is women’s fault. Society’s fault. Feminism’s fault. Modernity’s fault. Now the lonely boy becomes the entitled man, and the entitled man becomes the radicalized consumer, and the radicalized consumer becomes a voter, a poster, a harasser, a husband, a boss, maybe a politician if the country is sufficiently diseased.

Which, unfortunately, it is.

So yes, the age of communication worsened male loneliness because it replaced practice with simulation, community with access, friction with avoidance, and actual public life with private digital formation. Then, once the damage was done, it sold the damaged boys a story in which the wound itself was proof of their righteousness.

That is a brutal loop. And it is real.

I do not think we fix it by whining about kids today or pretending we can drag everyone back to some vanished version of public life. That world is gone. But I do think we have to tell the truth about what disappeared and what took its place. The stoop was not everything. The park was not everything. The meadow was not everything. But they were real places where a person could become legible to other people and therefore, slowly, to himself. A lot of boys do not have that now. They have devices. They have content. They have grievance merchants. They have a front-facing camera and a poisoned interior monologue.

And then we ask why they are lonely.

The praise is real. The work is real. The reaction is real. Hundreds of thousands of people on Threads, now thousands on Substack, read what I write and say things to me that would have sounded impossible to the person I used to be. They tell me the work matters. They tell me it changed how they think. They tell me I should run for office, do messaging for Democrats, write a book, start a movement, keep going, never stop, that this thread is the greatest thing they have read, that this essay named something they have lived with for years and never heard said properly. I take all of that seriously. I am grateful for it. I know it is real.

But it lands strangely. It lands with static in it. It lands like a package delivered to the wrong address and still somehow opened in my house.

The reason is simple: my mother never praised me in any way that helped build a self. What she offered instead was hostility, contempt, and the constant sense that I was wrong for being there at all. When people describe mothers as withholding or cold, they are usually reaching for the soft language adults use when they still want to protect the dead. That does not fit here. She hated me. She told me I was a mistake. She told me she wished I had never been born. She told me she wished I had been a girl. I was afraid of her for most of the first eighteen years of my life, and I mean afraid in the real sense. She was a terrifying presence to grow up around. She once threw my baseball card collection out the window. She could enter a room and change the pressure in it instantly. Her fixation on control could be so bizarre it turned surreal. The slippers. God, the slippers. If I did not wear slippers on the kitchen linoleum, she would erupt, as if my bare feet were a deliberate assault on civilization.

It was not all negative. I am not interested in writing a cartoon. She gave me things too, though in her own brutal and inimitable way. Vocabulary, for one. She used words I did not know, and whenever I asked what one meant she would say, look it up. Which is not warmth, but it did work. A lot of my relationship to language started there, in irritation and curiosity and the strange discipline of having to chase meaning alone. But there was no praise. There was something worse than no praise. There was anti-praise. There was the steady communication, explicit and atmospheric, that my existence was wrong, my presence was abrasive, my being there was already an offense. So the person who was supposed to mirror me back to myself with warmth mirrored me back as error.

That does something to a person, first in the house itself and then years later, when the world suddenly begins telling you something your home never did.

Because now the world does the opposite, imperfectly but often enough that it has become a fact of my life. I am big on Threads. I did not set out to become big on Threads. It happened because I wrote and wrote and wrote until the writing found people and the people found each other and suddenly there was this giant account and this giant audience and all this momentum and then Substack started moving too. It is very easy from the outside to call that success and leave it there. But inside the body it is more complicated. When recognition arrives after deprivation, it is collision.

The brutal irony is that the praise is real, and that makes it harder, not easier. If it were fake, I could dismiss it. If it were shallow, I could brush it off. If it were obviously disposable, I could say this is just the internet being the internet. But a lot of it is not disposable. A lot of it is deeply felt. People are really seeing something in the work. They are really naming it. So now I have to sit with a fact that is bigger than “fame feels weird,” which is a phrase for people with easier histories than mine. I have to sit with the fact that the world is giving me something formative that the person who made me refused to give me at all.

And then there is the other layer, the one that hurts in a completely different way. During my rise online, I have lost a lot of friends. Some from college. Some from the wine world. Some I have known since I was five or six years old. Not all, thank God. I still have a few who have been absolute champions, people who send me screenshots, who tell me this is unbelievable, who understand what is happening and feel joy rather than threat. One from college. One from second grade. Real ones. But others could not metabolize it. That is the only phrase for it. They could not metabolize the fact that there are a lot of people who care what I think, a lot of people who care how I write, a lot of people who now see value in the exact parts of me they either contained, ignored, patronized, or took for granted when the audience was smaller or nonexistent. So while strangers were praising me, some of the people who had the longest access to me recoiled.

That is where the whole thing becomes almost too psychologically neat, too on the nose in a way life usually has the decency to avoid. The praise I wanted most was never really from strangers. The strangers are welcome. The strangers are kind. The strangers are often shockingly perceptive. But the praise I wanted was from the people who were there before the public arrived. The mother who never gave it. The old friends who should have recognized something before the masses did. The people who knew the raw material and still could not say yes, I see it, yes, this is real, yes, you are not insane, yes, the thing in you is not too much, it is the thing. Instead, some of them disappeared or turned weird or became brittle and withholding in ways I still do not fully understand.

So the praise comes, and I appreciate it, but it does not land where people think it lands. Or maybe it lands exactly where they think it lands, which is the problem. It lands on old architecture. It lands on the site of a wound. It lands on a person who still, somewhere inside, is standing in the old apartment waiting to be told something simple and world-forming by the wrong woman.

I also think this is why I do not really sit in the praise for very long. The second I publish something, I am already thinking about what is next. On Threads, I post and then I am in the comments right away for a little while, and then I come back later, and then my mind is already moving. On Substack, I usually wait longer, maybe a day, maybe longer than that, before I even go in and look. But the deeper truth is that as soon as the work leaves me, part of me leaves it too. I am already inside the next sentence, the next essay, the next thread, the next thing I have to say before the signal dies. I do not know how much of that is ambition and how much of it is damage. Probably both. Productivity is easier to metabolize than love. Work is easier to trust than praise. Work can be sharpened, revised, improved, strengthened. Praise is warmer, and warmth is harder for people like me.

I am not complaining. That part matters. I am not doing some embarrassing little lament about how hard it is to be admired. The admiration is not the problem. The problem is older. The problem is that when you grow up without praise from the person who was supposed to teach you how to receive love, public recognition does not arrive as a clean gift. It arrives tangled with grief, suspicion, hunger, resentment, and a strange inability to simply let it touch you without also feeling the absence behind it.

That is why I think the praise is both real and poisoned. The poison is old. It lives in the system that formed me, the one that still does not quite know what to do with recognition when it arrives. I take the praise in. I respect it. I know it means something. But it does not soothe the place in me that people imagine it should soothe. It illuminates that place. It shows me the exact shape of what is still missing.

And maybe that is the sentence I have been circling for a while now. Recognition is not always healing. Sometimes it simply reveals the original injury with new clarity. Sometimes the applause does not drown out the old voice at all. Sometimes it just makes you realize how long you lived without hearing anything like it, and how much of your life was built in defiance of that silence.

Still, I would rather have the praise than not. I would rather be seen than not. I would rather tell the truth and have it meet people than remain buried in the body where so much of it lived for years. I do not dismiss what is happening. I know I am lucky, or gifted, or disciplined, or whatever combination of those things the moment requires. I know the work matters. I know the audience is real. I know the recognition is earned. I know all of that. I just also know that strangers can love your voice and still not repair the place where you first learned to doubt it.

That is not their job. It was never their job. But sometimes I wish the people who were there at the beginning had done theirs.

Part of it is simple. Americans are raised to confuse wealth with merit. If someone is rich enough, people assume there must be a reason, and the reason cannot just be luck, inheritance, exploitation, monopoly, stock inflation, labor extraction, regulatory capture, tax avoidance, public subsidy, union suppression, market timing, or the thousand other dirty ingredients that go into modern fortunes. No, it has to be genius, vision, grind, brilliance, some shimmering proof that the number in the bank account can be read backward as a character reference. The richer the person, the more mystical the aura, which is why so many people talk about billionaires the way villagers once talked about saints.

But there is something more humiliating in it than that. A lot of billionaire simping is fantasy proximity. People defend the ultra-rich because they imagine, at some irrational level, that they themselves may one day be invited into the palace. This is trickle-down delusion in emotional form. Please, sir, do not tax him too much. Do not burden him. Do not make him sad. Maybe one day he will notice me. Maybe one day the money cannon will fire in my direction. Maybe I am not a worker getting crushed under a billionaire economy. Maybe I am a temporarily embarrassed magnate. It is the politics of lottery tickets and table scraps.

That is why the whole thing is so grotesque on the right. The same people who foam at the mouth about handouts, socialism, dependency, welfare queens, and government coddling turn into Dickensian street urchins the second a billionaire enters the room. Suddenly they are all soft eyes and open palms. They will scream at a poor person for needing food assistance, then throw themselves in front of criticism aimed at a man with three yachts and a space program. They will tell a struggling family to work harder, then insist a billionaire should not have to contribute more to the society that made his fortune possible. It is one of the great comic obscenities of American politics. They hate handouts unless the fantasy recipient is themselves and the imaginary benefactor is a king.

And the billionaires themselves have changed. The old robber barons were monsters too, obviously, but at least some of them wanted monuments, libraries, museums, parks, universities, some visible civic architecture that could make their wealth look, however self-servingly, like contribution. Today’s billionaire class often seems united by a single message: let them eat cake, and if there is no cake, let them choke on aspiration. What is Elon Musk building for the public soul? What moral architecture does Jeff Bezos leave behind other than faster shipping and a more efficient warehouse panic attack? These men want to be feudal lords with apps.

And still people kneel. Still they defend them. Still they treat even the mildest demand for taxation, accountability, labor standards, anti-monopoly action, or civic responsibility as though someone has proposed dragging a genius into the street and beating him with hammers. The reality is much more modest and much more embarrassing. Most people asking anything of billionaires are asking them to live in society. To pay more into the systems they benefited from. To stop behaving like private empires hovering above the law. To stop converting every public good into a monetized subscription model. The response from the simps is hysterical because the defense is never really about policy. It is about aspiration, identification, worship.

That is the word, really. Worship. Billionaire simping is what happens when a culture loses any serious moral language for wealth and power. Money becomes not just a tool or a sign of success but a proof of chosenness. The billionaire is no longer a person with too much. He becomes a secular deity. Criticizing him feels, to his followers, like blasphemy. And once you get there, democracy starts to rot very quickly, because democracies are not built to survive a population that mistakes oligarchs for oracles.

Every billionaire is not automatically evil. Every rich person is not a cartoon villain. But no society should look at this level of concentration and feel awe. No healthy public should see men sitting on mountains of money while the country frays and respond with devotion. That is submission. And the saddest part is that the people doing the submitting often think they are expressing strength. What they are really expressing is the oldest weakness in the world: the desire to stand near power and call it virtue.

And the thing that keeps hitting me, over and over, is that one of the most performative things you can possibly do in this moment is accuse someone else of being performative. That move has become its own costume. It lets people stage the one role the internet now rewards above almost every other one: the person too smart to be fooled, too cool to be moved, too elevated to be caught participating in ordinary human feeling. They do not have to build anything, risk anything, or commit to anything. They just stand off to the side with their little clipboard and announce that everyone else is doing theater. That itself is theater. It is one of the cleanest forms of public self-construction we have left. The anti-performance performance. The critic of the pageant who somehow never notices he is also in makeup.

That is part of why the word has become so poisonous. It no longer clarifies very much. It mostly elevates the person using it. It is a status word now. A shortcut to moral and aesthetic superiority. You call something performative and suddenly you are no longer inside the mess of politics or emotion or culture or grief or contradiction. You are above it, clean and dry, watching the idiots splash around in the mud while you maintain your precious distance. Except of course you are not above anything. Nobody is above the fray. We are all in the fucking fray. We are fraying along while our nerves fry in public. The idea that there is some immaculate perch from which to sneer at everyone else’s compromised motives is one of the stupidest fantasies of the online age.

And maybe that is why I react to the word so strongly, even though I use it too and have to consciously try not to. Because the accusation has become bigger than the thing it was once trying to name. There are people who cannot metabolize what is happening in front of them, especially if it hits close to home, exposes something they recognize in themselves, or reveals a structure they would rather keep foggy. So instead of engaging the thing, they neutralize it with the word. Performative. Done. Box checked. A little alarm goes off in their head telling them they have successfully transcended the event. They have not. They have just used a fashionable solvent on whatever was making them uncomfortable.

You see it everywhere. Pro-Palestinian activism, instantly called performative by people who want to avoid dealing with the moral horror at the center of the issue. Earlier waves of right-wing hysteria did the same thing with different vocabulary, groomers, pedophile supporters, enemies of children, all the usual apocalyptic branding tricks meant to assign contamination as quickly as possible. The content changes. The machinery stays the same. Someone is trying to make a claim, tell a truth, express a conviction, and instead of engaging the substance, people rush to diagnose the posture. It is the laziest form of criticism and one of the most seductive because it allows the critic to feel like the smartest person in the room without having to say anything especially intelligent.

And I know this because I get called performative all the time, often in situations where I am doing something more personally costly and less calculated than almost anything else I have done in public. I write something raw, morally complicated, autobiographical, not flattering to myself, and some jackass reads it and says performative, because that word lets him avoid the far more destabilizing possibility that I might mean it. Or worse, that I might be naming something he knows is real. That is what the word often protects people from now. Not fakery, but recognition. If what I wrote reveals something in you, or indicts some social behavior you benefit from, or disrupts some lie you prefer, then the easiest way to get your psychological footing back is to dismiss the whole thing as staged. The performance accusation becomes a little emergency exit from your own discomfort.

Which is not to say actual performance is not everywhere. Of course it is. The manosphere is one giant bad drag show of wounded masculinity, all chest-thumping, status cosplay, fake dominance, podcast confidence, and little rituals of grievance meant to conceal how frightened and diminished the whole thing really is. TradCath men online, half of them looking like they were assembled from surplus Brooks Brothers mannequins and fascist Pinterest boards, are doing pure costume drama too. Wellness influencers are performing softness and spiritual depth while selling cortisol merch and pretending their sponsored mineral water is a sacrament. Everybody is doing a version of it. We live through profiles, avatars, platforms, feeds, clips, carefully selected fragments of the self. David Cronenberg saw this coming more clearly than almost anyone. Videodrome remains one of the most prophetic films ever made because it understood that media would not merely reflect identity. It would mutate it. It would blur performance and flesh until the distinction itself started to collapse. That is the world we live in now. Everyone is staging something because everyone is being watched, even by themselves.

But that is exactly why the word has become less useful, not more. If everyone online is performing at least part of themselves, if all mediated identity contains some level of curation, exaggeration, self-editing, or self-consciousness, then calling something performative often tells us nothing. It just says the accuser has noticed that we live in public now. Congratulations. What matters is not whether a person’s public act contains performance. Of course it does. What matters is whether there is conviction inside it. Whether there is cost inside it. Whether there is a real moral center beneath the staging. A person can be self-conscious and sincere at the same time. A person can be polished and real. A person can also be clumsy, vain, audience-aware, and still mean every word. The internet has made people so paranoid about looking fake that they now struggle to recognize genuine feeling unless it arrives disheveled, undocumented, and bleeding in a ditch.

That is one of the saddest effects of this whole poisoned discourse. The constant performance-sniffing does not merely expose phonies. It makes sincerity itself feel suspect. It teaches people to view expression as strategy by default. It erodes the possibility that anyone might actually mean what they say in public. And once you get there, once the baseline assumption becomes that every visible feeling is branding, every public ethic is theater, every act of solidarity is a career move, then something essential starts to rot. Not just trust. Imagination. You lose the ability to conceive of people acting from belief instead of optics. That is a terrible way to live. It is also a great way to become the exact kind of shriveled little cynic the platforms love most.

So yes, the word still has a use. Sometimes something is performative in the emptiest and most embarrassing way. Sometimes a gesture is all posture and no blood. Sometimes a person is obviously using the language of conviction as set design for a self. I am not arguing that the category should be abolished. I am arguing that it has become a lazy narcotic, a poisonous reflex, a status move masquerading as insight. The people who use it most aggressively are often the most invested in their own performance of discernment. They are not outside the stage. They are just playing the role of the person too enlightened to be on it.

And maybe that is the sentence I keep coming back to: the accusation of performativity has itself become one of the most performative gestures of our time. That is the rot. That is the joke. We have built a culture in which some of the most audience-conscious, posture-obsessed, self-curating people alive now spend their days denouncing everyone else for having an audience, a posture, or a self. It would be funny if it were not so exhausting.

Nobody is above the fray. Not me, not you, not the moral exhibitionists, not the cynics, not the theater critics in the back row throwing tomatoes at everybody else’s visible emotion. We are all stuck in the same ugly, mediated weather, trying to say something true through a machine that keeps rewarding falseness, flattening complexity, and turning self-awareness into another accessory. The real task is not to become pure of performance. That is impossible. The real task is to mean what you say anyway. To keep whatever is true in you alive long enough that it survives the suspicion, the noise, the branding, the poses, the little poisoned words people use to keep themselves from being moved.

If somebody wants to call that performative, fine. At this point, the word tells me more about them than it does about me.