Let me tell you a story.

Once upon a time in Hollywood, writers, actors, directors, and filmmakers watched their lives upended and their careers destroyed by a system of accusation, guilt by association, and political suspicion.

One by one, members of Hollywood’s creative community were hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee and interrogated about their political affiliations. One question came to define the era: Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?

Some refused to cooperate and paid an enormous price. Certain key players in Hollywood were blacklisted. Some were even imprisoned for contempt of Congress. Perhaps even more frighteningly, others discovered that no conviction, or even formal charge, was necessary. Suspicion was as good as a guilty verdict. The accusation itself became the evidence.

Others cooperated. Elia Kazan, one of the most important American directors of the twentieth century, appeared before HUAC and identified former colleagues from the Group Theatre as Communist Party members. “Elia Kazan is a traitor,” Orson Welles famously remarked, later describing On the Waterfront, in which the protagonist informs on a corrupt union, as a “celebration of the informer.”

The burden of proof had reversed. The accused was expected to demonstrate innocence, usually by demonstrating allegiance. And one of the most convincing ways to demonstrate allegiance was to implicate somebody else.

Arthur Miller would famously go on to allegorize this modern-day witch trial in The Crucible, a play ostensibly about Salem but consciously written with the Red Scare in mind. Miller saw the dangers of group hysteria, of accusations without evidence, and how they were capable of destroying people’s lives. Some of the lives destroyed were indeed those of his friends and collaborators.

I began writing this essay intending to argue that we are living through something akin to a new Brown Scare: that mechanisms once used to discover hidden Communists have been repurposed to discover hidden fascists.

This is true to some extent, but it oversimplifies a more complicated dynamic wherein the word fascist has been evacuated of meaning. At least during the Red Scare there was the pretense of searching for an identifiable political affiliation, animated in part by a real fear of Soviet influence and espionage.

Let me engage the game for a second on its own terms and qualify everything I’m writing with my own loyalty oath, which shouldn’t even be necessary, but I feel compelled to include anyway. Anyone who actually knows me or my values would find the accusation that I am a Nazi or fascist or MAGA or whatever risible. And yet, during Covid I lost friends for taking a heterodox position on lockdowns, mask mandates, and mandatory vaccinations. I thought these principles were perfectly in line with the worldview I had previously held, and yet I had old friends who knew me accusing me of siding with The Deplorables.

The old Red Scare template has indeed been updated and replaced with the Schmittian logic of friend/enemy, so that anyone can discursively be labeled fascist, MAGA, or whatever. There is not necessarily a coherent politics at play here.

To the extent that a Brown Scare has replaced a Red Scare, we turn to Carl Schmitt, the Nazi legal theorist who proposed that the fundamental political distinction is not between good and evil, true and false, or even left and right.

It is between friend and enemy.

For Schmitt, the enemy did not have to be evil, ugly, economically threatening, or personally contemptible. He or she merely had to be the enemy.

But I would like to complicate this further by adding yet another layer. Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction has been given a fresh coat of paint by blending classical friend/enemy politics with Manichaeism. I would like to argue that contemporary discourse has fused the political enemy with the moral monster. This is Manichaeism with a Schmittian twist.

In this context, who “we” are exists in direct opposition to who “they” are. Just as importantly, we demonstrate who we are not by distancing ourselves from the enemy. Political identity becomes something performed through ritualized denunciation and humiliation.

I have been known to float a conspiracy theory among friends that Harry Potter turned my entire generation into Manichaeans because it was the only book any of them actually read as children. For years, every Millennial thinkpiece seemed to require identifying a Voldemort: an embodiment of inherent evil who could only be defeated by the forces of good. Though I’m kind of joking here, I do have a point. Schmitt’s enemy need not be evil. The Manichaean innovation is to make him evil. There are good people and bad people. There is us, and there is Voldemort. Which side are you on? Gryffindor or Slytherin?

A disagreement about Covid policy, for example, could instantly associate you with MAGA crazies, with the “deplorables.” Skepticism toward certain New Left orthodoxies becomes evidence of reactionary politics. Opposition to some boutique feature of the contemporary left becomes evidence of sympathy with the far right.

The phenomenon is hardly ideologically coherent according to any conventional left-right spectrum. France’s LFI and its leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon were accused of “fascism” for opposing the Israeli military campaign against Gaza. Meanwhile, conservative shock jocks like Mark Levin use the appellation “communist” or “Marxist” as a catch-all phrase to describe anything they don’t like. (There is a funny instance where Levin referred to the Frankfurt School as the “Franklin School” in his book.) The specific epithet matters less than the function it performs: dividing friends from enemies, reminding us who the good people are and who the bad people are.

The word “Fascist,” has been nearly evacuated of meaning, operating in certain corners of political discourse not as an analytical category but as a designation of enemy status.

Once that designation has been made, evidence becomes almost beside the point. You can snip things out of context. Accuse someone of being MAGA based on an illiterate reading of a tweet or post or even a Twitter like.

The rumors spread according to the old McCarthyite playbook of guilt by association: you appeared on his podcast; you published in her magazine; you follow this account; you liked her tweet; you had dinner with that person; somebody photographed you standing next to somebody who once said something objectionable.

Of course, association can sometimes tell us something. If somebody spends his or her life attending fascist political meetings, donating to fascist organizations, and publishing fascist propaganda, it would be absurd to pretend that none of this constitutes evidence of his politics. But this is very different from treating every association as proof of ideological alignment or contamination. A retweet is not an endorsement, as the bio often reads. Knowing somebody is not the same thing as sharing their politics.

I want no part in a politics or discursive culture that operates this way. More than that, I think it should be vociferously opposed. Bad-faith attacks and guilt by association destroy people’s lives, hurt innocent people, ruin relationships, and frankly, come off as kind of pathetic. Eventually, people censor themselves before anybody else has to do it for them.

There is a personal irony here for me.

There was an earlier version of myself who was outspokenly hostile to free-speech absolutism. I’m embarrassed to admit that I once collaborated with a friend on what amounted to a treatise against it. The arguments we advanced will be familiar to anyone who has spent time in left-wing political spaces, but they were relatively novel at the time: speech does not occur on a level playing field. The balance of state power disproportionately tilts the scales in favor of preferred speech, often privileging white supremacists over, say, left-wing activists. “More speech” is an inadequate response when one side possesses vastly greater resources and reach. When one side has the backing of the state.

We pointed, with considerable satisfaction, to the uncomfortable history surrounding American free-speech jurisprudence. Hugo Black, one of the Supreme Court’s great First Amendment absolutists, had once belonged to the KKK. And Brandenburg v. Ohio, the famous decision protecting even the advocacy of violence except where it is directed toward inciting imminent lawless action and likely to produce such action, arose from the prosecution of a KKK leader. Black joined the Court’s opinion, although his own conception of the First Amendment was considerably more absolutist than the Brandenburg test itself. (He wrote a brief concurrent opinion.) At the time, we pointed to other free-speech absolutists, most prominently Glenn Greenwald, who chose, pro bono, to represent Matthew Hale, the leader of the white supremacist World Church of the Creator, in a First Amendment case. Greenwald has likewise defended the principle behind the ACLU’s decision to represent neo-Nazis seeking to march in Skokie, Illinois.

At the time, I thought these facts discredited the principle of free speech.

I have come to think they reveal its necessity. The principle only means something when it protects someone you’re ashamed to be seen protecting. This is what we all learned in middle school and I have come to believe that it is essentially correct.

A younger me would have rolled his eyes at the idea that bad arguments should be defeated by better arguments. But I feel strongly about this now. People should be judged for what they actually say and what they actually write, by what they actually do and how they conduct their lives, and not by hostile or illiterate misreadings or some endlessly expanding web of associations.

If we are to be serious and to have a discursive world worth living in, we must reject in full a political culture that replaces argument with association as evidence. Denunciation must never be the price of belonging.

At the end of the day, it really is as simple as this: let people speak. Judge them by what they actually say and do and how they conduct their lives.

The alternative is a world in which everyone is forever being asked the same question in different words:

Are you now, or have you ever been . . . ?

Exactly a year ago today, I was in Birmingham, Alabama, on my summer vacation. I was there for reasons that feel shameful to write about now, the consequence of mistaken judgments and poor decisions I’m still trying to understand. If I think too much about it, I get upset with myself.

And August 24th is approaching rapidly. My mother’s birthday. The anniversary of her death. My original sobriety date, before I relapsed and threw it away. The day is loaded and approaches like a bomb I can only hope to defuse. I don’t look forward to that date coming, but I look forward to it going. The relapse was not unrelated to that trip to Alabama. August has a way of accumulating meanings for me. My birthday is in September. The calendar tells me that the year changes in January. But August. August is always the month in my head that demarcates one year from the next.

This year I took two consecutive weeks off work and didn’t go anywhere. I can’t remember the last summer I didn’t go back to California. But my grandma died in October, and with her death what had been an obligatory trip became an optional one. And this year I skipped it.

I could have booked a trip somewhere far away and exotic. (“‘Exotic?’ Is that Orientalist?” Said whispers to me.) I considered it. But the timing didn’t feel right. Something in me wanted to stay put. I feel like things are changing or settling or something, and I thought staying in NYC without the obligation of work would be wise.

Then, during the first week of my vacation, I got Covid. It wasn’t particularly bad. A mild cold, two unpleasant days, and then I was basically fine. I feel a little like Macbeth, as if it had been prophesied that I would get Covid and, by writing and constantly talking about it, I’d conspired to bring it about. I had finally given myself two weeks with nowhere I was required to be, and my body immediately found a way to make sure I stayed there. It’s only my second time getting Covid. I’m kind of against the idea of even testing for it. I don’t really understand why people care about what exact mechanism is making them sick. If you’re sick, you’re sick. Drink water, rest, recover. But for whatever reason, I went to the doctor and laughed when my positive Covid test came back. “You’ve got to be kidding,” I thought. Part of me feels as though I somehow brought it upon myself, that I somehow cosmically attracted it.

I also have a long, researched essay sitting unpublished. I spent a lot of time writing it but, on the advice of a friend, decided not to put it out into the world. It might feed a fire that’s best left to burn itself out. There is something strange about spending so much time making a thing and then deciding that the wisest thing to do with it is nothing. Maybe that’s a sign of maturity?

So I’ve mostly laid low.

I feel myself entering a period of withdrawal, though that word isn’t quite right. It isn’t isolation. I’m happy with the people in my life right now, and I love them, and I’ve remained relatively social. But there’s an internal change or recalibration happening. It feels more like a retreat inward, a need to regroup mentally, to become a little quieter so I can hear what is actually going on inside me. I’ve been reading a lot of dense books and also watching reality television. When my eyes strain from reading Shelley, I turn to Bravo. I guess this is better than bed-rotting and watching TikToks. (Kill me now, please.)

I’ve been going to my Lacanian analyst twice a week. I speak a lot in analysis and he says very little. A lot of nodding. A lot of silence. A lot of stopping me at a particular word and asking me what, exactly, I mean by it.

I like it. I feel like I’m uncovering my desires, figuring out what I actually want for the first time in my life. Being intentional with my choices. Being intentional with who I allow access to me. I’ve cut people off and the people that I’m now allowing in are the people that I want to allow in.

I sometimes think of the line attributed to Lenin about the capitalists selling us the rope with which they will be hanged. Analysis feels a little like that. My words are my rope, and I will eventually indict myself with my own subconscious. Sometimes I hear myself say things and I hardly recognize my own voice or can’t believe I just admitted something I wished to keep quiet. But when you’re sitting across from a guy who barely talks and just encourages you to keep free-associating, how do you not hang yourself? I talk for 45 minutes (or whenever bro decides to end the session after some unarticulated breakthrough), and somehow I always leave feeling like I know myself a bit better. It’s clarifying.

In addition to the analyst, I see an addiction psychiatrist. I saw both of them today. It is a lot of work, this trying to become mentally healthy. I’m on vacation from my job, but I wish I could take a vacation from my own thoughts. Since I was a kid, I’ve been described as pensive. I remember my aunt compiling a book of pictures around a pool one summer when I was a kid, and in every single shot I was alone, staring out into the distance as if stuck in my thoughts. All the other kids looked like they were having fun. Why am I like this? Thoughts are like the cartoon quicksand I used to fear as a kid: As soon as you start letting yourself think, there’s no hope at salvation.

The new Phoebe Bridgers album came out today. I’ve already listened to it dozens of times, beginning to end.

When I love a piece of art, listening to it or looking at it or reading it never feels like enough. I want to absorb it. I want it inside me. I want to carry it around until I can no longer distinguish between the thing itself and whatever it awakened in me. I want it stored somewhere I can reach when I need it. It’s the same impulse that had me memorizing Shakespeare as a kid in my free time. If I can absorb the syntactic structure of something beautiful and profound, perhaps that will become an innate part of who I am too. Is that how art works?

This post feels like free association, but it’s August and I’m off work and it’s after 11:00 PM, and who has time for structured thinking under such circumstances?

Lately I’ve been thinking about what it means to be atomized. There’s, of course, the Marxist theory of labor alienation: laboring away at work in which you do not see yourself reflected back. Marx conceptualized this in terms of labor, partly as a consequence of the division of labor that accompanied industrialization. “As the principle of the division of labor is ever more completely applied, the workman becomes weaker, more limited, and more dependent. The art advances, the artisan recedes,” Tocqueville famously observed. This is philosophically distinct from what Arendt calls “work”: the process of creating something meaningful that will outlast you. But how do these concepts apply when removed from the sphere of political economy and applied to interpersonal relationships? Where is our grand philosophy of relationship alienation?

Contemporary culture increasingly treats a degree of atomization, particularly in romantic relationships, not as a problem but as a virtue. A feature, not a bug. Something to strive for in a “healthy” partnership. We see this in the rise of pop stoicism, with its focus on self-improvement, and in the therapy-speak addled cult of wellness, which seems to teach us that the ideal relationship consists of two fully formed, self-sufficient people who simply choose one another, as though from a position of total completeness. It is a sterile rejection of Hegel’s dialectical conception of love, in which one gives up the illusion of absolute independence and finds oneself in the recognition of another. Instead of two halves coming together to complete something, we are told to be two complementary machines. How romantic! “Will you be the iPad to my MacBook?” the healthy, well-adjusted specimen of late-stage capitalist alienation asks his potential mate, whom he no doubt met by swiping endlessly on a dating app. Work on yourself endlessly. Become independent. Don’t need anyone. Only when you have achieved some stoic level of independence is the time right to find a partner. The message cuts both ways, for men and women alike: don’t rely on others, and if you get cut, heal the wound yourself.

There is an ideology working behind the scenes here, as there always is. It’s exactly what you’d expect from a mode of production that prizes the individual over the collective, that teaches self-sufficiency as an a priori moral good and the need for others as a weakness. In the West, Herbert Spencer and Social Darwinism won that argument a long time ago. Who knows Kropotkin, with his argument for mutual aid and cooperation, rather than competition, as a central engine of evolution and survival? Outside of anarchist circles, do people even know his name? Do they teach Kropotkin at HBS? One wonders why not.

I was wondering where the word “codependency” even came from, so I did a little sleuthing. It sounds distinctly modern. It turns out its roots are in the rooms of Al-Anon, the offshoot of AA, in the ‘50s and ‘60s, as a way of describing the spouse of an alcoholic. This was a real and specific diagnosis: a person losing herself inside someone else’s disease, organizing her whole life around a catastrophe she did not cause and could not stop. Codependent, indeed. (And yes, the origins of the term are gendered, much as the language of AA’s Big Book is.)

That version of the word still means something. I, particularly as the child of two alcoholics and an addict myself, am not interested in defending that definition of the word or unhealthy and exploitative relationships generally. But I do think there needs to be some corrective to what we might call the modern notion of “codependency.”

Language is descriptivist, and words change over time. Codependency now means something completely different. It means attachment. But attachment with a negative connotation. The word leaked out of addiction-recovery literature and into the general lexicon of American self-help until it stopped describing a specific relationship to a specific pathology and started describing something much closer to ordinary human attachment. Arguably, healthy human attachment. Through the natural diffusion of language, and with the aid of self-help books, “codependent” came to mean almost anyone who needed another person too visibly. Wanting reassurance became “codependent.” Missing someone became “codependent.” Even wanting to be with someone became “codependent.” The clinical term for enabling an alcoholic’s disease became the pop-psychological term for love that doesn’t hide itself.

Brief interlude while we all go listen to the Beatles’ “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away.”

This is not simply an accident of language drifting, the way words do. It is ideological work, and it did exactly what ideological work does: it took something structural—a culture that wants workers who are frictionless, individuated, endlessly available, unencumbered by obligations that might compete with the demands of the market—and repackaged that structural demand as a personal virtue. Don’t need people too much. Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. Rely on yourself and no one else. The self-sufficient individual is a requirement of capitalism if it is to sustain itself. A person who needs no one, who is a lone and solitary island, is easily expendable. An object. Something that can be moved, fired, relocated. Interdependence is expensive to this mode of production. It creates people who might, for instance, refuse a transfer because it would separate them from someone they love. Is that codependency? It creates people who take a sick day to sit with someone else’s grief. Is that codependency? Atomized individuals are simply more efficient.

My mind drifts here to the disintegration of several long-term romantic relationships I’ve experienced in my own life. Relationships that were, admittedly, codependent. There is a way of narrating those losses, the therapy-culture way, that would ask me what I’ve “worked on” since, what I’ve learned to self-soothe, what boundaries I’ve built so that a loss like that couldn’t destabilize me so completely again. But I don’t want to build those barriers. I don’t want to fortify myself against heartbreak at the expense of actually experiencing meaningful connections, all so they fit neatly into the very narrow box of sanctioned healthy relationships. My grief is not a vulnerability to be patched, a design flaw to be corrected so that next time I’ll be more independent, more resilient, more able to absorb the blow alone. More like a robot.

Somewhere between the Al-Anon meeting and the self-help shelf, we lost the distinction between losing yourself in someone else’s dysfunction and simply, deliberately, needing someone. We let a culture that benefits from our atomization convince us that the second thing is merely a milder version of the first.

It isn’t.

I would like to propose reconceptualizing “codependency” as a form of mutual aid. It was Kropotkin’s whole argument: that cooperation, not competition, is one of the primary mechanisms by which anything survives. A relationship where two people are genuinely, structurally dependent on each other, symbiotically, is not a relationship in need of recovery from itself. It might be the only kind of relationship built to withstand what atomized, self-sufficient love cannot: the actual, ongoing, unresolved fact of needing another person and being needed in return.

Needing someone else is beautiful. It’s part of what makes us human. And we shouldn’t be ashamed of that.

If I were ambitious and actually trying to be a writer (lol), I’d probably spend today tracing the history of the Occupy-era “No Dads” thing—the tendency, the meme, the whatever you want to call it—that circulated around Malcolm Harris, Aaron “Believe All Women” Bady, The New Inquiry crowd, and that whole 2011 moment.

I didn’t like it much at the time, but as with a lot of the 2008–2012 socialist milieu, I mostly bit my tongue and went along with it. Though I objected plenty, I picked my battles, and this was not one of them.

My Father’s Day hot take: dads are good.

Strong, positive male authority figures are a net positive for society. There needs to be some restraining influence. Some source of structure.

And this is coming from someone who loved his dad deeply. My father was less an authority figure than a friend. He was the quintessential cool dad. There were basically no rules in our house and almost nothing was enforced. I miss him a lot today. But I can also acknowledge his shortcomings. In a funny way, he was the “No Dads” version of a dad. And while there was a lot that was wonderful about that, I think some of the problems I’ve spent my adult life working through can be traced back to it as well. And I’m using myself here as a microcosm for a society that has basically done away with dads.

Reading the above, I can’t help hearing Ricky Ricardo’s voice in my ear: “Seany, you have some ’splaining to do!” So let me try to clarify what I was trying to get at.

The “No Dads” tendency was more of a hashtag campaign than a serious political manifesto. But anyone percolating in online spaces circa Occupy couldn’t help but encounter it. The concept itself was somewhat deliberately nebulous: a set of overlapping assumptions that floated through left Twitter, through the comment sections of The New Inquiry, and through the particular social milieu that cohered around Occupy Wall Street.

The idea, roughly, was that patriarchal authority was so thoroughly implicated in the structures of domination—capitalism, the state, heteronormativity—that the figure of “the father” was irredeemably compromised. He was viewed not as a provider or protector, but as a disciplinarian enforcing hierarchy. Dads, in this analysis, weren’t just flawed. They were ideologically suspect, structurally incompatible with an egalitarian politics. I should note that around this time, anarchists to David Graeber’s left started referring to him derisively as “Anarchy Dad.”1 Even Graeber, certainly one of the animating forces behind Occupy, wasn’t immune to the “No Dads” campaign. In that view, the loving, present, attentive father was merely an avatar of the same power structure that was teargassing people in Zuccotti Park.

This was the theoretical layer. Beneath it was something more visceral and more interesting: a generational formation that had grown up in the wreckage of a certain kind of family. These debates pre-date Sophie Lewis’s Abolish the Family, but it’s no doubt a lineage from which she draws.

In the economic devastation that followed 2008, in the debt-laden landscape that Malcolm Harris would later canonize in Kids These Days, any kind of authority figure was subject to skepticism. For this cohort, the father as authority figure was not abstract. He was a mortgage that had gone underwater. He was both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He was a factory job that no longer existed. He was a pension that had been looted. The fantasy of the protective patriarch had been so comprehensively exposed as a lie that rejecting "the dad" as such felt like political clarity. Like seeing through something.

I understood all of this. I still do. Harris was right about a lot, about precarity, about the way millennials were turned into instruments of human capital (a grotesque term on its face) before they were old enough to consent. The phrase “No Dads” was picked up by Gerry Canavan in his essay, “No Dads: Cuckolds, Dead Fathers, and Capitalist Superheroes,”2 but its antecedent could be found in Aaron Bady’s early essay, “America Dads: Louis CK and Barack Obama,”3 which I assumed he picked up from Twitter.

The other main proponent of No Dads, to my recollection, was Kade Crockford, who at the time was a scrappy Twitter presence constantly dodging fed allegations and who now holds a prominent position with the ACLU.4

The No Dads posture wasn’t just an analysis. It was an aesthetic. A social performance. And like most social performances in political communities, it was enforced by closing ranks and bullying, ironically mimicking the very hypermasculinity the hashtag campaign proposed to reject.

Here is what dissent looked like in that milieu, circa 2011: you expressed it quietly, to your friends, over drinks. You did not express it on Twitter, where the pile-ons were swift and total. You did not express it in print (i.e., on your WordPress blog), where the comments would come from fifteen directions at once, each one more certain of its own righteousness. The left, in that moment, was in the grip of a particular kind of performative solidarity that no one actually believed, a solidarity that demanded consensus as its price. To object was to give ammunition to the enemy. To hesitate was to be suspect. The correct politics were not a position to argue for but a shibboleth to display.

The irony, which has only sharpened with time, is that this culture of enforced agreement was itself profoundly authoritarian. The No Dads crowd was, in practice, running one of the most aggressively paternal operations in contemporary media. The rules were strict, the discipline was real, and deviation was punished. They just didn’t call themselves “dads.”

Jamie Kilstein was, in some ways, the purest embodiment of this contradiction. Aside from taking such radical positions as declaring that Nickelback’s music is, in fact, bad (I wanted to link to the video here but it’s apparently been scrubbed from the internet), Kilstein co-hosted Citizen Radio with Allison Kilkenny, a daily podcast that billed itself as what Democracy Now! would be if they were more daring. He was everywhere in that world: on The Majority Report with Sam Seder, at Occupy events, on stage at lefty venues across the country. He was an outspoken male feminist, relentlessly vocal about women’s rights, about believing accusers, and about the failures of progressive men to actually practice the values they preached.

In February 2017, multiple women came forward with allegations of sexual misconduct, emotional manipulation, and predatory behavior.5 Kilstein was dropped from Citizen Radio the same day. His record label severed ties. The community that had elevated him as a model of correct male behavior closed ranks, against him this time, with the same swift certainty it had always deployed, just in the opposite direction.

I am not interested in relitigating Kilstein’s case specifically. What I’m interested in is what his rise and fall reveals about the culture that produced him: a culture that had replaced the actual, difficult work of thinking about male authority (when it goes wrong, when it is necessary, what it is for) with a set of signals, postures, and approved phrases. “Believe women” was not wrong as a starting point, but it was obviously reductive. It turns out that, like men, women can in fact lie too.

The No Dads problem was never really about dads. It was about authority: specifically, a refusal to think clearly about when authority is legitimate and when it isn’t, when hierarchy enables flourishing and when it crushes it, when the father teaches and when he controls. These are not easy questions. But they are also not questions you can skip or wring your hands of with a hashtag campaign.

My father was, as I said, the coolest of cool dads. He was my friend before he was my authority. There were no rules in our house to speak of. I loved him for it. I love him for it still, now that he is gone. But a vacuum certainly exists in the place where having a more authority-oriented figure could have saved me some problems down the road. This is not a criticism of him. It is an acknowledgment that even the best, most loving version of “No Dads” carries consequences. Freedom without form is not the same as liberation. Children—people!—need not just love, but shape.

The New Inquiry eventually published an entire issue called Daddy6—this was in 2015—that tried to theorize the return of the paternal term of endearment as an ironic, self-aware act of power reclamation. The issue contained the line, “For a long time, TNI was No Dads.” It was meant, I think, as a boast. It read to me then, and reads to me now, as an inadvertent confession.

We needed dads. We pretended we didn’t. Some of us paid for it. Some of us are still paying.

I don’t want to overcorrect into something I also don’t believe. The specific form of male authority being evangelized in certain quarters today, the drill-sergeant dad, the patriarch as strongman, is its own kind of pathology that deserves criticism. The answer to No Dads is not Bronze Age Mindset. The answer is something harder to perform, harder to brand, and harder to meme: the father who is genuinely present, who exercises authority in the service of the child’s becoming rather than his own ego, who can be questioned without crumbling and challenged without retaliating. Who is, in the end, trying to produce someone who will not need him anymore.

That version of fatherhood is not a political program. It is a practice. It is specific, local, and resistant to vague theorization. The Occupy-era left, which was much better at theorizing than at practice, was perhaps not equipped to see it.

So on this day, just a few days after Father’s Day, I think the dad as a positive archetype deserves to be rehabilitated. We, and society in general, would be better off for it.

As You Like It is one of Shakespeare’s pastoral comedies. The play takes place in the Forest of Arden, where Rosalind, surely one of Shakespeare’s most brilliant and witty characters, up there with Sir John Falstaff, has fled after being banished from court. Disguised as a young man, she wanders the forest with her cousin Celia. Two nobles undercover as provincials.

Meanwhile, Orlando, though noble by birth, has been mistreated by his older brother, who has denied him the education and upbringing due to a gentleman. At one point Orlando bitterly asks what “prodigal portion” he has ever squandered that he should be reduced to such a condition. “My brother Jaques he keeps at school, and report speaks goldenly of his profit; for my part he keeps me rustically at home…He lets me feed with his hinds, bars me the place of a brother, and…mines my gentility with my education.” He is, in a sense, a gentleman rusticated by his own brother.

Without getting into a full synopsis, which isn’t the point of this essay, both Rosalind and Orlando find themselves displaced into Arden. Rosalind arrives carrying the sophistication of the court into the countryside. Orlando arrives as someone whose natural nobility has survived in name but evacuated of most of the privileges that should accompany it. The forest becomes a place where both are able to become different versions of themselves.

I think about where I grew up as a kind of Forest of Arden.

In front of our house stood a large redwood grove, Stolte Grove, really three groves flowing into one another, thought beautiful redwood lined trails. One had a stage where symphonies would occasionally perform, or weddings would happen. If I ever get married, I want it to be there, on that stage. In another there was a small bench where, during high school, I sat reading As You Like It. I learned huge portions of the play almost line by line, pacing around my own little Arden.

I identified with parts of both Rosalind and Orlando.

We lived in Mill Valley, part of Marin County, fifteen minutes north of San Francisco and hardly the wilderness. But my mother was from San Francisco—the City—and my grandparents still lived there. My father was from the west side of 44th Street in Manhattan. Both of them were city people.

My mother fit naturally into Marin. Growing up in San Francisco in the 1960s, it had been her dream to live in Mill Valley and be surrounded by redwoods. My father loved it too, but he was less obviously at home there. He had a strong New York accent and always seemed, at least to me, slightly displaced in our little Arden.

He was very much in love with my mother, as Orlando was Rosalind, though in the flawed, imperfect, and entirely human way real people are. I remember him once consulting me and my sister before picking her up from the airport, asking whether his hair looked good before applying a generous amount of what he called “smell swell,” his term for cologne.

My mother, despite loving Marin’s beauty, remained a city girl. She carried herself with a cosmopolitan air. Haircuts, for example, were activities that had to happen in the city. The provincials of fancy Marin County, apparently, could not be trusted with contemporary fashion. You would think we were living in the sticks.

Some of that attitude rubbed off on me, I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit.

I loved where I grew up. I loved the redwoods and the fog and the landscape. I feel like that geography is a part of who I am and you can’t understand me if you don’t understand it, understand the topography of my childhood. But for as long as I can remember I wanted to leave. I wanted to go to the Big City. The Big City, of course, was New York, not San Francisco. Like Pip in Great Expectations, I wanted to become a gentleman. I wanted to meet artists, writers, thinkers, have interesting conversations in late-night bars. I had a voracious hunger to become cosmopolitan, to become, like Pip, a gentleman.

So I moved to New York at twenty-one.

And I can safely say that, to some degree, I achieved what I set out to do. I’m a New Yorker now. Not merely because I’ve lived here for years, or because I was born here (which I was), but because I’ve internalized a certain way of paying attention. I know what exhibitions are opening, what books people are reading, what arguments are circulating. I guess you could say I’m plugged into “the discourse.”

But lately I can’t shake the feeling that I solved the wrong problem.

For most of my life I thought the story was about escaping Arden and making my way to court. About leaving the provinces, acquiring sophistication, and becoming worldly.

Now I find myself longing for Arden.

Not the Arden of childhood. You don’t get to go back to that one. But another version of it: a slower life, a wife, a family, a grove of redwoods outside the window. All the conventional things my younger self was certain he didn’t want.

The irony is that I spent half my life trying to leave the forest only to discover that Shakespeare’s exiles were all better off there.

I remember feeling this way as a child. Every Friday night my family would have Shabbat dinner with my grandparents. Even then, while sitting at the table, I was aware that this ritual was temporary. My grandparents would not always be there. Someday I would grow up. Someday the dinners would stop. What should have been a source of comfort was often tinged with sadness because I could already feel its future absence.

I could have sworn there was an XKCD comic I saw in high school that contained the line, “All things are temporary, treat them as such.” I spent ten minutes looking for it just now and couldn’t find it anywhere. Maybe I imagined it. Maybe I fused together a dozen different things I had read into a single sentence that never actually existed.

In any case, it expresses an idea I’ve spent most of my life struggling to internalize.

The insight animates most Eastern philosophies, though by the time it reaches contemporary America it tends to get laundered into a kind of therapeutic jargon about attachment that makes me want to kill myself. Still, beneath all the wellness-industry clichés lies something profound: everything passes away.

Our high priests of modern medicine might classify what I’m describing as an anxiety disorder. An unhealthy preoccupation with endings. Attachment issues. Catastrophizing, maybe. But as soon as something beautiful begins, I find myself anticipating its conclusion. A vacation starts and I am already stressed that it will end. A relationship deepens and I become conscious of its fragility. A play opens and I can already feel closing night approaching.

The thing that has helped me most is the realization that finitude is not a defect in life but the precondition that makes life meaningful in the first place.

During the pandemic I kept reading and rereading Martin Hägglund, trying to hammer this idea into my skull. I’m a dense person. I often need to hear the same thing twenty times before I understand it. Hägglund’s argument is simple and, like all great insights, obvious only after someone says it: if something lasted forever, nothing about it would matter. We care because things can be lost. We love because the people we love are finite. Time is precious precisely because it runs out.

The tragedy of impermanence and the beauty of impermanence are the same thing viewed from different angles.

Tonight was one of those nights when I felt the truth of this particularly strongly.

A play I’ve been doing readings of since September closed. The play itself is about the ending of a scene, but its final performance seemed to coincide with the ending of something else as well. I’m not entirely sure what. Not a friendship. Not a chapter. Not anything I can name. Just the vague but unmistakable feeling that some period of life had quietly reached its conclusion.

The show was great. The house was packed. The cast is full of people I admire enormously. Afterward we gathered for a party and I looked around the room at faces both familiar and new. Some of these people I’ve known for years now. Others only recently entered my life. But there was a warmth in the room that felt tangible. Even if the music was loud and I somehow ended up accidentally ordering an entire lobster and steak. It’s difficult to hold a conversation while cracking lobster claws in a crowded restaurant, I discovered.

And then, as always, I found myself doing that thing I do.

I was sitting in the middle of it, already missing it.

Whitman whispers to me:

“You but arrive at the city to which you were destin’d, you hardly settle yourself to satisfaction before you are call’d by an irresistible call to depart,
You shall be treated to the ironical smiles and mockings of those who remain behind you,
What beckonings of love you receive you shall only answer with passionate kisses of parting,
You shall not allow the hold of those who spread their reach’d hands toward you.”

For most of my life I’ve regarded this tendency as a flaw. A failure to be present. But lately I’ve begun to wonder if there is something worthwhile buried inside it. Maybe what I am actually feeling in those moments is gratitude struggling to express itself. Maybe sadness is simply the price we pay for recognizing that something matters.

Perhaps that’s why theatre affects me so deeply. More than any other art form, it wears its impermanence on its sleeve. A novel remains on a shelf. A film can be replayed. A painting hangs on a wall. But a performance disappears as it unfolds. The moment it exists, it is already vanishing.

All things are temporary, treat them as such.

Whether the quote exists or not, I think it’s true.

Driving without GPS was always an adventure. I remember family road trips where my dad would deviate from the map, and suddenly we’d be trying to find our way back through dark frontage roads and strange little towns in the middle of nowhere. There was always the possibility of getting lost, which made travel feel more adventureious somehow, less predetermined.

I’m 19 now. My girlfriend is 27 and already divorced. She jokes about robbing the cradle. I never find it very funny.

In college, if I needed to get somewhere, I had to print out MapQuest directions from my laptop. The pages would get me from Point A to Point B, but God help me if I had to improvise beyond that. I’d call my dad, who knew Los Angeles by instinct, knew every street name and freeway interchange. His advice was often something like, “Drive toward the water.”

Hey, Dad, I’m on a highway. I don’t know where the water is. I’m not a salmon swimming upstream. I don’t have some biological compass pointing me toward the Pacific.

I’ve probably driven from Los Angeles to Marin County along “the” 5 hundreds of times. (Look at how LA I am with my definite article use in front of the interstate name. God, I’m so LA!) I know every sad Denny’s along the route, every gas station glowing alone off the exit ramps. Andersen’s Pea Soup in Buellton, which I always stop at but never actually eat at. I did buy one of their mugs once, though. It sits now in the IYKYK section of my cupboard.

There was the time our car broke down in Gorman, just past the Grapevine. I remember my mother on the phone somehow convincing a rental-car employee to drive fifty miles out of his way to come get us, lest we end up like characters in Oliver Stone’s U Turn.

Cut to Virgil:

“You and me — gonna open up the finest sporting goods store in that city ever did see. Get us a place on the North Shore by the lake. Season Brewers tickets. Just you and me, Grace.”

My sister Noelle and I used to laugh at that line, at the modesty of it, as though season tickets and a sporting goods store in Milwaukee represented the pinnacle of human ambition. But the older I get, the less ridiculous it sounds.

There was one night at CalArts when I left around 3 a.m. to drive home in the dark. It was foggy and I could barely see ten feet ahead of me. I romanticized the whole thing as though I were trapped inside a Sam Shepard play.

Vince in Buried Child:

“I was gonna run last night. I was gonna run and keep right on running. I drove all night. Clear to the Iowa border. The old man’s two bucks sitting right on the seat beside me. It never stopped raining the whole time. Never stopped once. I could see myself in the windshield. My face. My eyes. I studied my face. Studied everything about it. As though I was looking at another man. As though I could see his whole race behind him. Like a mummy’s face. I saw him dead and alive at the same time. In the same breath. In the windshield, I watched him breathe as though he was frozen in time. And every breath marked him. Marked him forever without him knowing. And then his face changed. His face became his father’s face. Same bones. Same eyes. Same nose. Same breath. And his father’s face changed to his Grandfather’s face. And it went on like that. Changing. Clear on back to faces I’d never seen before but still recognized. Still recognized the bones underneath. The eyes. The breath. The mouth. I followed my family clear into Iowa. Every last one. Straight into the Corn Belt and further. Straight back as far as they’d take me. Then it all dissolved. Everything dissolved.”

I can still recite the entire monologue by heart.

Last summer I drove from Arizona to California with a GPS calmly telling me where to go the entire time. No decisions necessary. Just obey the little voice. The voice could have told me to drive into a cornfield and I would have listened. You must obey the GPS voice, after all.

During COVID, I drove across the country twice, westbound with my friend Stevens, eastbound alone. At one point we got caught in rain so heavy we could barely see the road. A truck came flying up behind us, laying on the horn, and Stevens started having a panic attack while I sat there texting a girl I was talking to at the time, unconcerned by the possibility that we might die. Later he told me my lack of panic actually calmed him down.

On the drive back east, I stopped at a motel in Youngstown, Ohio sometime around 2 or 3 in the morning. Youngstown is the quintessential symbol of American decline, one of those Rust Belt cities hollowed out by deindustrialization and decades of political abandonment. It’s sad the way much of America is sad. There was blood on the shower curtain in my room.

The next morning I woke up gasping for air. Someone in the room next door was cooking meth, and the fumes were seeping through the walls.

This summer I want to drive again. I want to take the 5 north by myself. I want to see all the familiar places I’ve memorized over the years, the truck stops, the diners, the exits whose names I know better than the names of people I went to school with. I want the strange loneliness of the road again. The feeling that, even now, I could still get lost. Maybe I’ll even turn my GPS off and go off memory.

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices,
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me; that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.

At night the monsters come out. A lesson I learned very young. Daytime people and nighttime people inhabit entirely different universes. In daylight everyone aspires to perform coherence. At night the facade starts to sag. Walking home through crowded New York streets, the happy people seem happy in the way drunk people seem happy, chemically suspended just above their despair, laughing too loudly beneath restaurant awnings.

The air conditioner in my apartment hums. I’ve always loved that sound. It makes me feel safe. The quiet hum of background noise. Contained. Safe from the wiry electricity of groups.

I don’t do especially well at parties unless I have one person there with me, someone I can retreat to a corner with, away from the crowd, and build a smaller world beside. Someone to metacommentate on the absurdity of social life in real time. Someone to exchange the little glance that says: are you seeing this too?

In fact, I think that may be the deepest kind of intimacy I know. Not romance exactly. Not even friendship in the conventional sense. More like a temporary conspiracy against the surrounding atmosphere. A private frequency. The best jokes work this way too. The funniest jokes are often only fully legible to three people in the room.

Maybe this is the Andy Kaufman fan in me revealing himself. I’ve always been drawn to performances that feel like coded transmissions rather than entertainment, little worlds that ask for participation rather than approval. As a kid I thought adulthood meant eventually becoming comfortable in large groups. As an adult I think it means finding peace in solitude.

I aspire to be more like my friend here:

I didn’t post yesterday’s entry because I lightly teased someone who I seriously doubt will ever read this blog, but at this point I’ve already had a few awkward encounters where random people at events tell me they saw something I posted on Substack. I don’t like this. It’s part of why, until I retired from Twitter, I wrote and blogged pseudonymously. Maybe that’s a cop-out. Maybe we should all stand by our words and defend them publicly. But the internet is a hostile place where bad-faith readings are the norm, and once something is online it no longer really belongs to you. So for the time being I’m trying to avoid unnecessary controversy.

Yesterday was Mother’s Day, which is a rough day for me every year. The only person who reached out was my godmother, Ingrid, who sent me a kind Instagram message saying my mom was like a sister to her and that she still thinks about her every day. I think about her every day too. I regret the years I didn’t send flowers, or acted petulant, or assumed there would always be more time. It’s a cliché because it’s true: you never get that time back. Hold closely to the people in this world who love you unconditionally. There are fewer of them than you think.

I reached out to L— and she didn’t respond. Last year, pathetic simp that I am, I bought her and her mother a spa trip for Mother’s Day. Why did I do that?

I can’t believe it’s already mid-May again. This year has gone by so fast, and I keep replaying where I was a year ago and realizing, with some horror, that emotionally I don’t feel all that different. For a long time now I’ve existed in a kind of suspended state. Not rock bottom exactly, but stasis. A holding pattern. I’m forty years old and sometimes feel stunted, like I’m still living some slightly modified version of the life I had at 25. Same loops, same fantasies, same mistakes. Rise, wash, repeat. At some point that has to change. I want to look back on this blog a year from now and feel embarrassed by this version of myself in the healthiest possible way, because it would mean movement actually occurred.

Lately I’ve felt a little like Chance the Gardener in Being There. Accidentally profound through pure boilerplate. Or maybe so untethered from reality that it starts to resemble wisdom again. “As long as the roots are not severed, all is well and all will be well in the garden.” There’s something moving about his total simplicity, which is of course why the movie works. The idea that growth has seasons. That winter isn’t failure, only part of the cycle. That things can look dead for long stretches before returning unexpectedly to life. And this can all happen quickly.

I started psychoanalysis last Friday and have my next session on Tuesday. When I jokingly posted about it on IG, a friend replied, “Just go to church!” The funny thing is, I want that too. I want religion at the center of my life. I want someone to read the Bible with, to talk about the Gospels with seriously, without irony or distance. I want some form of salvation, whatever shape it takes.

But I’m excited to begin analysis too. I know psychoanalysis doesn’t offer easy fixes or neat life hacks, but I want a space where I can speak honestly and have someone listen carefully enough to help me understand why I continually make terrible decisions I can see coming in advance. Why chaos feels magnetically familiar even when what I consciously want is peace. Why I keep seeking out unstable situations while fantasizing about an ordinary, stable life somewhere else. More than anything, I want my desires and my actions to stop pointing in opposite directions. Hopefully this is at least a step toward that.

At this point both my parents are gone. So are my grandparents. The only person who has really known me my entire life is my sister, along with a few relatives on the East Coast who weren’t especially present during my formative years. We lived in California, they in NYC.

A few weeks ago, my high school drama teacher was in New York on a class trip with his students. He invited me to dinner and to see a play with them at St. Ann’s Warehouse. We ate together beforehand, caught up, talked theater, life, aging. When he saw me he hugged me with tears in his eyes, and it suddenly occurred to me that this man, my old drama teacher, is now one of the very few people left who has known me across the full span of my life, even if we’ve only stayed loosely in touch over the years.

He appeared to remember everything about me. The exact year I graduated. The plays I performed in. Stories about my mom and dad I had completely forgotten. Tiny details from high school that no one else alive would even think to recall. There was something deeply comforting about it. It felt less like seeing a former teacher than some distant family member returning with pieces of myself I didn’t realize I’d lost.

He’s touched so many lives over the years, but I realized during that night that he’s also become one of the central continuities in my own.

Not to be a complete sadsack, but I’ve been overwhelmed with grief lately and honestly don’t understand how most people move through life functioning normally. I don’t move on from things easily. I get attached. I hate change. Lately I’ve felt profoundly unmoored. I think this next year has to be about grounding myself and trying to live in reality instead of fantasy. I want to read more. Write more. Pay closer attention. For years I’ve tried to dull my own senses because feeling things too sharply became painful. In some ways I’ve deliberately stunted myself.

I was talking recently with a writer friend whose output I admire and asked him how he manages to produce so much work. He told me that at some point he accepted he was going to write badly sometimes, and that the important thing was continuing to write anyway. I think I need to give myself permission to do that too.

I’m at work now for only a couple more hours. Afterward I’ll go to the gym, and tonight I’m meeting a friend for a recovery meeting in Brooklyn.

Last year a girl I was involved with borrowed a very large sum of money from me. Embarrassingly large. On May 1st she made her first payment back. At this point the relationship has become entirely transactional. Maybe it always was and I just didn’t want to see it clearly. Still, she does at least seem to be making an effort to repay me. At the current rate it will take more than three years for me to recover the full amount.

I could probably hire a lawyer and force the issue, but that’s not really my style. I don’t particularly want to create more stress in her life. In the long run the money probably matters more to her than it does to me, and I’m trying to think about the whole thing as an expensive lesson in boundaries and self-deception.

I have a tendency to repeat the same mistakes with people. I want to believe the best in everyone. Sometimes that’s admirable and sometimes it’s just naivete. Certain people drift into my life because they want something from me, and moving forward I need to become much more careful about who I allow close.

My friend K happened to be in town from Los Angeles. We talk on the phone occasionally, but somehow we hadn’t seen each other in over two years, which feels insane. She’s staying at her parents’ place on Central Park West and 73rd Street, one of those beautiful old buildings that makes New York feel like a movie set. I rode my bike uptown, met her for lunch, then we wandered around Central Park for a couple hours catching up about life, relationships, work, all the usual evidence of time passing. It was genuinely nice to see her.

Afterward I biked all the way back to Williamsburg. My weekly poker game is tonight, but after spending the day walking around in the sun, part of me wants to stay home and skip it this week.

I think I’m turning into a homebody. I was never like that before. I used to want to be out constantly, orbiting bars and parties and openings and whatever else felt culturally adjacent enough to justify leaving the apartment. Now all I seem to crave is domesticity. A wife. Kids. A quiet kitchen in the morning. Sometimes I fantasize about moving back to California.

I don’t know what I’m going to do this summer now that my grandmother passed away. Visiting her was always the thing that pulled me back home to San Francisco. I may still go just to see my uncle, but honestly I think I mostly want to reconnect with the geography of my youth. I miss the redwoods. I miss Mount Tamalpais. I miss the Mill Valley depot. I miss the pace of life there, the strange combination of beauty and calm that Northern California still holds in my mind, whether or not it fully exists anymore. If I could wave a wand, I’d probably already be settled there somewhere in the hills, living in a quiet house, maybe playing golf a couple times a week, aging into something softer and less performative. If anyone wants to lend me $10,000,000 to make this dream a reality, DM me for my Venmo.

I want normal things now. Or at least what used to count as normal things. I have very little interest in becoming a forty-year-old flâneur wandering downtown forever, turning nightlife into an identity because he never figured out what else to build. That’s not the kind of man I want to grow into.

Well, it’s 7:10 now. Maybe I should head to poker after all.

Hillsdale opens in the disgusting mess of a frat house, where multiple parties over several years have ended but never once been cleaned up. Crushed beer cans, stale food, relics of a life that has technically ended but refuses to disappear. The motto still hangs on the wall, Facta Non Verba, deeds not words, but nothing here resembles action anymore.

Michael is already on stage when the play begins. Long stingy hair, beer in hand, moving through the wreckage like a pig in a pen. Not a man living in filth so much as someone who has ceased to perceive it. Soon Bruno enters, trash bag in hand, trying in vain to tidy up. An important guest is coming. The house must be made presentable, if only as a performance. Michael couldn’t care less. “It’s the end of history for us,” he says, fukuyama-esque.

The party is over in a very literal sense. These men never left the frat house after graduation. They have lingered in the ruins of a hierarchy that no longer exists. The guest of honor is Reese, former president of the fraternity, now successful, married, and, crucially, the one whose family money still effectively controls the house. Ownership here is murky in legal terms, but psychologically absolute. Reese’s visit is more like a sovereign visiting his subjects than a friend dropping by.

He arrives with his wife Marina and his sister Zoey, and immediately the contrast is unbearable. Reese is composed, articulate, full of ideological language and institutional affiliation. He works with the Cato Institute, speaks in the idiom of Austrian economics and civilizational decline, and carries himself like a man who believes he himself can shape history. “A modern Ayn Rand,” one character remarks. Atlis shrugs, leaving Reese to do the heavy lifting.

But the play is not naïve about him. His intellectualism is both sincere and hollow. He delivers long, quasi-philosophical monologues about death, legacy, and how future generations will misread us, arriving finally at a kind of cosmic apathy, an argument that nothing we do will matter, and therefore perhaps nothing should.
It’s dressed up as depth, but it’s really a coping mechanism.

Around him, the class structure of the play becomes unavoidable. Zoey sells shoes at Macy’s, saddled with debt and drifting. Bruno works with his hands, barely holding the house together. Michael scrapes by doing landscaping, living season to season. Reese alone moves through institutions, capital, and abstraction with ease. The old fraternity brotherhood, the supposed equality of the frat, is revealed as a fiction that only ever masked these differences.

The play’s real subject is not simply “post-college malaise.” It’s downward mobility, or more precisely, the dawning realization that mobility was never equally available to begin with.

What makes Hillsdale more than a sociological sketch is how it binds this class tension to desire. Everyone wants something from someone they cannot have. Michael wants Marina, but more than that he wants what she represents: a life he believes was stolen from him. Marina, for her part, is not simply a gold-digger caricature; she is fully aware of the Faustian bargain she has made, and fully trapped within it. Bruno and Zoey circle each other in a different register, physical, tentative, almost innocent, but equally doomed.

These relationships feel unsolvable not because of bad timing or miscommunication, but because the underlying structures (money, status, history) make resolution impossible. Love doesn’t fail here. It never really had a chance.

The play keeps returning, in different forms, to a single question: who is the real failure?

Michael, who sees through everything and therefore can do nothing? Cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Bruno, who works, endures, and shrinks his ambitions to fit reality? Reese, who has “won” but cannot stop performing his own importance? Marina, who trades freedom for security and resents both? Zoey, who was promised a future in education and instead inherits debt and invisibility as a shoe saleswoman?

No one escapes. Each represents a different adaptation to the same underlying condition: a world in which the scripts that once structured meaning—college, brotherhood, upward mobility—no longer function.

Even the fraternity itself reads as a kind of failed aristocracy. It promised lifelong bonds, hierarchy, and honor, but offered none of that, leaving behind only symbols and debts.

“Deeds not words” becomes, in retrospect, a cruel joke.

What’s striking is that the characters are not deluded about this. They are painfully self-aware. Reese admits, in private, that he feels like a “husk.” Michael knows his resentment is consuming him. Bruno understands he has settled. Zoey can articulate her own failure in almost clinical terms. There is no illusion to puncture. Only the question of what one does after the illusion is gone.

That’s where the play edges into something closer to philosophy. If Michael is right, if this really is the “end of history” for them, then the problem is not how to succeed, but how to live without the possibility of meaningful change. Reese answers with ideology. Bruno with work. Zoey with longing. Michael with rage. None of them quite succeed.

The result is a kind of American Chekhov: characters who talk, remember, desire, and fail to move, not because they lack will, but because the world they inhabit no longer converts will into outcome.

By the end, what lingers isn’t a single tragedy but a shared condition. These are not exceptional people. They are typical. That’s what makes it unsettling.

Hillsdale is, at its core, a play about what happens after the promise breaks, when you are left not with catastrophe, but with the slow, humiliating realization that nothing is coming to save you, and nothing you were told to do was ever quite enough.

Today I’ve been invited to review a play, Hillsdale. I’ve seen it before, so I’m not going in blind. I also re-read the script. At this point it reads to me as a period piece, which is strange given how recent it is. I first saw it at BCTR, though I think the original staging was at Sovereign House. The play deals with masculinity, stasis, that stunted feeling that your best days were your college years and everything since has been a kind of extended coda. The characters feel like products of that post-pandemic lag into adulthood, as if time stopped and then restarted incorrectly. Similarly to how I, a millennial, felt graduating in ‘08 right as the financial markets crashed. I remember MAGA flags draped across the set when I saw Hilldsdale last. I don’t know if that will still be the case tonight. Truthfully I don’t know what I’m going to say, but say something I will.

This is about the fifth time recently I’ve been asked to review a play, which I find slightly absurd. I don’t think of myself as a particularly perceptive critic. See above re memory. But I am excited to have a task. Entering a play with a mission changes the experience completely. You watch differently, more aggressively, like you’re trying to catch it in the act of meaning something. I’ll also take notes but try to be suubtle about it.

The weather was nice this morning. I had an easy commute.

Reading through a few Substack notes, I could feel the alcohol in them. It’s a distinct signature. I’m glad I don’t drink anymore. When I drank and did drugs I often barely recognized my own writing the next day. This might sound obvious but it’s worth stating: most of the time you are not as clever as you think you are when you’re drunk.

I’ve been thinking about ethics. I try to live as a good person and fail constantly. It’s not even dramatic failure, just steady, low-grade inconsistency. Still, there are a few rules I follow without exception, usually without articulating them. When those are broken, for me, there’s no repair. Which is probably unfair. I know that. But I also don’t think everything needs to be negotiated into language. Some things feel self-evident, and when they’re not shared, it’s less a disagreement than a sign you’re not built for each other.

I slept with the window closed last night. Felt snug. Woke up feeling good.

Read more

The lockdown era did not conclude so much as taper off. The temperature checks to enter restaurants, the absurd pageantry of wearing a mask to the table and then removing it when seated, the proliferation of QR codes, people being turned away from my Broadway theater because they didn’t have Covid vaccination cards, mostly kids and Black families, but we can’t talk about that. Can’t we?

There was no decisive ending, no moment of reckoning, just a gradual loosening, like a rule everyone stopped enforcing at once, knowing it was dumb all along but finally unable to pretend. The public, once mobilized around the moral clarity of saving lives, drifted into fatigue. Remember the banging pots for the front-line workers? Even the promised resolution, the vaccines, arrived in an ambiguous form, unable to carry the symbolic weight the whole enterprise had placed on them (side note: how dumb a name was “Operation Warp speed??”).

I remember sitting in an ambulance with my dad on the way to the hospital and asking the EMT if she was going to get a Covid vaccination shot. She laughed. “Don’t believe what you see on the news. It’s very old and sick people who are dying. I ain’t putting that shit in my body.” First, they were sold as sterilizing vaccines, then they were sold as ….what? Something that maybe, possibly, prevented a minor cold but didn’t stop transmission. Top to bottom, the whole thing was absurd. Absurd on its face.

By its own logic, the system pointed toward continuation. More precautions, more boosters, an indefinite horizon of technocratic management. “The New Normal,” as it was called, echoing a phrase that sounded lifted from dystopian fiction. What was the new normal, anyway? Living life behind a mask. Having groceries delivered by the surplus population who couldn’t, “Stay the Fuck Inside.” There were always more lives that could be counted, more risks that could be minimized. But the will to sustain that logic collapsed. By mid-2021, the tone shifted. Not openly, not ceremonially, just a quiet recalibration, a retreat conducted without acknowledgment. Working on the front lines of Broadway gave me a clear view of this, the fading of the rules. The first day we dropped masks at the theater, nearly had me in tears.

What is striking is that no one emerged vindicated. The architects of prolonged restrictions never secured the historical narrative they seemed to expect. But their critics did not inherit it either. There was no broad admission that dissent had been justified, no cultural reversal that crowned them as prophets. If anything, the louder and less disciplined strains of opposition muddied the waters, making it easier to dismiss sharper critiques along with the noise. Serious objections were often drowned out by theatrics, and that confusion blurred whatever clarity might have forced a reckoning.

The whole episode was ridiculous, cartoonishly so. Not a clash with a winner, but a drawn-out gun battle at the OK Corral, where people could, depending on their political convictions, find “safety” in routine, sanity, and fragments of trust. “Believe the science” was the rallying call for this set. For an event of such scale, it has already receded with surprising speed, precisely because it offers so little in the way of narrative closure. There is no clean story to tell about it. There is no coherent narrative.

And yet its effects are everywhere. The institutional center that drove the response came out diminished, its authority thinned, its confidence shaken, unsure how to rebuild legitimacy without revisiting what happened. Meanwhile, the forces that fed on the backlash, most notably the post-left, have largely vanished into irrelevancy or self-mythologizing and have struggled to convert that energy into anything durable. It is one thing to narrate collapse from the outside; it is another to govern within it. A sensibility formed in opposition does not easily become a program, unfortunately.

What lingers is a kind of unresolved charge. The episode remains politically radioactive because it was never seriously or democratically adjudicated. Those who directed it rarely conceded error. Those who fought it rarely confront their own limitations. The Brownstone Institute, Jeff Tucker, and the Great Barrington Declaration and their associates are mostly nowhere to be found in post-pandemic policy. The result is a stalemate of denial. The anger, the suspicion, the sense of overreach, none of it found a legitimate outlet or a coherent response. Even now, there has been little effort to repair the damage or to meaningfully constrain the conditions that produced it.

It is as if something enormous was built in a moment of fear, something blunt, improvised, and powerful, and then quietly abandoned once it became inconvenient to maintain. There has been no resolution, no heads on chopping blocks. There has been nothing in place to prevent this from ever happening again, and happening again it will. We can almost be sure of that.

We just started previews of Last Days of Downtown, the final play in the Dimes Square trilogy, at the new Manhattan home for Center for Theatre Research. I’m having a great time working on this play with a group of people I genuinely love. The play is about a scene, but it is also made by one: a pretty chaotic, very specific ensemble of artists all bringing different things to the table. A lot of the actors are essentially playing composite versions of recognizable downtown figures, the kind of people you’d see if you’ve spent any time orbiting KGB, Night Club 101, Funny Bar, Clandestino, or, God help you, the old Sovereign House.

The title is not subtle. This is, at least in part, a eulogy for the strange downtown ecosystem that took shape after Covid and its attendant vibe shift. People rebuilt themselves in public. They tried on new ideologies and aesthetics, sometimes sincerely, sometimes ironically, often both at once, in rejection of the puritanical moment that had swept the country in the years leading up to it and the current world of lockstep conformity taking its place. A moment that had a lot of us feeling like we were living through mass psychosis, or “the dumbest time in human history,” as a character in Dimes remarks. Nothing made sense, almost by design, and even though the reaction against all of that was often messy and incoherent, it did produce something that felt like an alternative. A scene formed that was part community and part performance. In New York, that eventually hardened into something people, half-joking, started calling Dimes Square.

The original Dimes Square play captured that world in a satirical key. It showed an art and literary scene at what felt like the end of the world, full of people who were brilliant, ridiculous, self-aware, delusional, petty, cruel, and often completely unable to tell the difference between sincerity and performance.

Last Days of Downtown is doing something a little different. It’s still working in a similar satirical key, but the octave has changed. It’s less interested in diagnosing the scene than in asking what that scene actually did to the people inside it, while prompting us to think about what comes next. Now, merely being inside among friends without a mask is no longer the act of rebellion it once was, much less wearing a MAGA hat. Where are the Dimes characters now, now that things have settled, or at least rearranged themselves into something else?

There’s a line early on where Terry says, “My phone, by the way, is a literal torture chamber.” It feels indisputable that in the years following Covid we have become more enslaved to our phones, to the awareness that we are constantly performing online and having our actions monitored. If this scene is panoptic, then Last Days of Downtown finds its audience looking in. Everyone in the play is acutely aware of themselves as characters. They’re constantly tracking how they’re perceived, what people are saying about them, what version of them exists in other people’s heads. They’re artists, or at least adjacent to artists, but they’re also stuck in this feedback loop of reputation, gossip, and performance. The result is a kind of paralysis. People talk constantly about art, about morality, about each other, but they have a hard time acting, committing, or even just feeling something directly.

Terry, who I play, is kind of the cleanest version of that problem. He’s talented, ambitious, and completely unable to step outside the social world that’s suffocating him. In a way, he’s a victim of the scene he helped create, and as he gets older he’s being edged out of it, with the leading actor in his film sleeping with his partner. Cucked by the very scene he helped create, he understands exactly what’s wrong. He can articulate it better than anyone, but that doesn’t free him. If anything, it makes it worse. Self-awareness is hardly an emancipatory quality. It tightens the trap. At one point he says he’s “anesthetized” his own capacity to feel out of fear of judgment, and that feels like the core of the play to me. A culture that becomes obsessed with perception eventually loses access to experience, to having any agency at all in our own lives. The act of making art becomes subordinate to the social milieu of the artist.

But the play isn’t cynical about these people. They can be absurd, cruel, self-involved, all of that, but they’re also earnestly searching. They want love, meaning, something that isn’t filtered through irony or clout or whatever version of performance they’ve gotten used to. Even at its most chaotic, with drugs and arguments and people drifting in and out of parties, there’s a real longing running underneath the scene.

In the final movement, the play explicitly invokes Fellini’s 8½. That film is about a director who can’t move forward, who’s stuck between memory, fantasy, desire, and the pressure to make something meaningful. He doesn’t quite belong anywhere in the social world outside of his own art. He wants to belong, but even with people he genuinely loves, he’s still somehow a tourist, or voyeur, of his own life. The crisis is creative, but it’s also existential. He’s so self-aware, so overexamined, that he can’t act.

That’s Terry. That’s the scene. That’s, in a lot of ways, where we are.

Last Days really does feel like an 8½ for the downtown, post-Covid scene. It’s about what happens when the artist isn’t just blocked, but split across platforms, personas, and reputations. When your life starts to feel like something you’re directing and editing and watching at the same time. Who are we performing, and why? What’s the point?

And let’s not forget, the scene at its core started as a literary movement, or at least aspired to be one. A scene whose work quickly became messy, uneven, sometimes embarrassing, but nonetheless alive. And in its last days, approaching its final breath, it still pushes against polished professionalism and institutionalization. It takes risks. It produces both genuinely great work and total garbage. The scene itself collapses the distance between life and art. The party becomes the text. The rumor becomes the narrative. The self becomes the medium, for better or worse.

But that collapse has a cost. When everything is manufactured content, nothing feels stable. When identity is infinitely flexible, it gets harder to know what’s actually real. Last Days of Downtown is about that cost. It’s about what happens after the high of reinvention wears off and people have to sit with what they’ve made of themselves.

And it’s not only an ending. There are moments where something else feels like it’s trying to come into view. Not a return to the old world, but not quite this one either, it’s something slower, a little more grounded, a little less obsessed with being seen. Terry, by the end, seems like he might actually be ready to move toward that, into “something else entirely.”

That’s part of why the play feels important right now. It’s capturing a moment that’s already disappearing, but more than that, it captures the feeling of living inside a culture that doesn’t totally believe in itself anymore and is awkwardly, sometimes painfully, reaching toward whatever comes next.

If you’ve spent any time in downtown New York over the past few years, you’ll recognize these people immediately. If you haven’t, you’ll still recognize the condition. Either way, you’ll probably see something of yourself in it.

Come see it!

As a fellow Mill Valley native now living in New York, I felt an uncanny recognition in their exchange, that odd mix of nostalgia and displacement. I moved to New York at twenty-one and instantly projected my anxieties onto Cody. Like him, I arrived fresh out of a breakup, drifting into the city with more melancholy than clarity. My first place was a tiny Williamsburg apartment with three CalArts classmates, perched on the corner of Lorimer and Stagg, right above a bodega that was a front for dealing heroin. Rent was $500 each. There was no bathroom sink, so we shaved in the kitchen. I slept on a futon in a room where, for months, “guests” often shared the bed, something I tried, and failed, to hide from my roommates. Eventually one of them snapped: “We’re going to have to start charging your guests rent.” The city seemed brimming with possibility, but also impossibly heavy. I was arrogant then and ambitious. I graduated from the top of my class at college and assumed things would just fall into place for me without my having to exert much effort. It took years in New York to grind that out of me. I saw all of that in Cody: the paralysis, the spiral of overthinking, the blindness to abundance.

Dana only appears in the first and final scenes, but her presence hovers over everything. When Eden enters, she immediately recognizes Dana as the analyst she ghosted. The irony is sharp: after this opening, Dana ghosts US—the audience—until the end. Yet the seed she plants in that first encounter gives the play its unconscious gravity.

Her question to Cody is devastating in its simplicity: “Are you lonely because you broke up with someone, or did he make you feel lonely?” That line sets the terms of everything that follows. Which is worse: being lonely inside a relationship, or outside one? Having lived both, I’m still not sure.

We soon meet Eden, Cody’s cousin and roommate, played with extraordinary sincerity by Lilly Brown. Her performance is so textured you find yourself, if not siding with her, at least understanding her. She is melancholic, haunted, and fully believable opposite Ezra, the brilliant, flawed ex she can’t quit. Ronan Schwarz makes Ezra magnetic and unbearable in equal measure. He’s perfect in the role. Their chemistry is so strong it’s instantly recognizable, painfully so. He’s the kind of man contemporary culture doesn’t know how to handle: brilliant, hot-headed, nonconformist, cynical, horny, insufficiently liberal—yet aching for decency. Part Norman Mailer, part Hemingway, part Joni Mitchell’s Richard. No accident that Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde threads through the play. Another difficult man. Their scenes together were gutting, not just because of their undeniable chemistry but because I’ve lived those spirals: the accusations, the shame, the need, the betrayals. Schwarz and Brown deliver something rare in contemporary theatre: the ache of two people bound in love and destruction. Not fashionable, frictionless romance, but something darker, truer.

I couldn’t help recalling my own breakup years ago. My long-term ex was cheating on me with someone in NYC’s activist circles, a guy who became a loud voice for school shutdowns during Covid, a stance I vocally opposed. Her siding with him felt like betrayal on multiple levels. Political, romantic, you name it. To me he was an opportunist and an idiot. All the things that make my skin bristle. I think she knew I was right. In a cinematic breakup, we met in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden in the rain. “You know this guy’s an idiot, right? He’s wrong about everything.” I said. “He’s easy,” she replied. “I’ll always love you, but you’re… complicated.” That memory returned as Eden explained to Ezra why she now prefers someone “easy” and “uncomplicated.”

Ezra skewers Eden’s fling with Remy, played by Sam Marzella, the seductive but hollow fuckboy: “You like your boyfriends castrated.” Later: “I’ve committed the two cardinal sins: being too horny and not being super liberal.” The audience laughed, but the line stung. This is the Sam Shepard/Patti Smith archetype of love: volatile, consuming, transcendent in its mess. Great, but also horrible. The opposite of algorithmic coupling, where intimacy is sold as optimization, frictionless and sterile. Over the Moon refuses that model entirely.

Cody’s relationship with Tee (Taj Burroughs) offers a counterpoint. Where Eden and Ezra burn hot, Cody and Tee (ex-lovers) circle one another with tenderness and frustration. Their conversations show how intimacy blurs into caretaking, how desire coexists with exhaustion. The play never flattens relationships into types, each pairing shows another facet of what love and commitment demand.

The most poignant turn comes with Uncle Billy, played with tragicomic brilliance by Bob Laine. Billy is Eden and Cody’s older relative, a lonely gay man whose drunken monologues on aging, grief, and forgotten poetry feel less like character work than dispatches from cultural decay. You can hear his voice echoed all over this blog if you listen carefully. He recalls how their grandfather could recite Milton, Dickens, Shakespeare, Yeats, Eliot from memory, an inheritance now lost. Watching Laine, I heard echoes of my own essays on how attention corrodes under the glare of screens. Billy is funny and sad, raging and tender, and through him we glimpse how personal loss bleeds into civilizational loss.

At last, the play circles back to Eden and Ezra. They confess their flaws, their impossibility, and still grope toward each other. Eden reflects that love comes down to who you want to die with. That’s as close to a definition of neo-romanticism as we’ll get: love not as vibe, but as vow. (As I wrote elsewhere.) Not optimization, but sacrifice.

Over the Moon dramatizes our longing to re-enchant love, to step outside the sterile marketplace of desire and risk binding ourselves again. For me, it was both a personal excavation—old heartbreaks resurfaced—and a reminder of what theatre can still do: restore attention, slow us down, remind us that intimacy isn’t a product or a commodity with an exchange value. Difficult, painful, ruinous, but also, at moments, transcendent.

The path to celebrity used to run through institutions. Studios, magazines, casting offices, the kinds of gatekeepers who at least pretended to care about charisma or craft. Even at its most artificial, the old system required something—beauty, mystery, a certain je ne sais quoi You couldn’t just show up and vibe your way into cultural relevance. You had to be someone, or at least convince a roomful of cigarette-smoking men that you were. The early-aughts introduction of leaked-sex tape as entrance to stardom in many prefigures our current moment.

Now we’ve outsourced all that to the feed.

Celebrity today is mostly ambient. Porous. It comes and goes. You don’t earn it, you just accumulate it. There’s no need for talent or myth or even a coherent persona. You just need a face that doesn’t upset the algorithm and a phone with decent lighting. Platforms like TikTok have made it possible to be famous for being symmetrical and available. The result is a new kind of figure: the tabula rasa idol, the vaporware celebrity, the person who’s everywhere and still somehow doesn’t exist. Just ripe for the right forces to come along and mold that being into cultural soup du jour.

Addison Rae is a good case study. Not because she’s unique, but because she isn’t. She’s a tabula rasa idol. Blank enough to project onto, attractive enough to circulate, and responsive enough to mold. Paper Magazine styled her in high-concept editorials, called her an icon, and handed her a cultural script she hadn’t written. But that’s the point. She didn’t need a narrative, she just needed distribution. She posted a few dance videos, the algorithm approved, and the culture industry filled in the rest. Now she’s in movies, campaigns, fashion spreads, not for doing anything remarkable, but for being remarkably usable. She’s a template, not a text. An interface the system can easily brand, rebrand, and rinse for engagement.

This isn’t really about her. It’s about the cultural machinery that produces people like her on a loop. Fame used to be about performance, or at least spectacle. Now it’s just presence. You show up in the feed, often enough and prettily enough, and the audience fills in the blanks. Your job is to be vaguely appealing and slightly adaptable. The internet handles the rest.

The term “vaporware” comes from the tech world. It meant software that got hyped before it was ever released, announced with fanfare, promised in sleek demos, but never actually built. That’s what this new version of fame feels like. All projection, no product. There’s nothing behind the interface, but the interface is so well-distributed that it doesn’t matter. You don’t need substance when visibility itself has become the currency.

This is the logical end of a culture that rewards attention over intention. We’ve moved from stars to avatars, from charisma to calibration. What matters now isn’t what you are, but how well you circulate. The most successful public figures are the ones who offer just enough personality to be marketable, but not so much that they can’t be rebranded on demand. They’re not artists. They’re user experiences.

We’re not creating icons anymore. We’re just running beta tests.

Warning: I’m about to talk about reading the Bible. Could be Cheugy. But this is my Substack—my little fiefdom—and today, this is what I feel like writing about.

I started my morning the way I’ve come to like best lately—FaceTiming a friend and reading the Bible together. It’s a nice ritual, a liturgical book club, and something that helps cut through the static in my brain and starts the day on the right foot. Today’s passage was 1 Corinthians 13—the “love” chapter, the one you’ve heard a thousand times misquoted at weddings or stamped on throw pillows in upscale Hamptons gift shops next to the ones that say “It’s Wine O’Clock.” But Paul’s words aren’t kitsch. Frankly, they’re lovely. And this morning, they sparked something.

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.”

I read that and winced—not because it was lofty or sentimental, but because it was precise. For years, I moved through life armed with the inverse. I was impatient with myself, brutal even, weaponizing self-hatred as if it were a kind of virtue. Envy wasn’t an occasional guest, it was a permanent roommate, curled up in the folds of my ambition and self-loathing, whispering reminders of what I wasn’t: successful enough, smart enough, lovable enough. In recovery, I’ve had to learn a new grammar. Not just patience in the abstract, but patience directed inward—a quiet, difficult daily practice of not flinching at who I am. Paul wasn’t writing about self-love—but without it, the ability to love others freely is foreclosed.

Right after we closed the Book, someone from the program reached out to make amends. First time anyone’s ever done that with me. We have a complicated history and haven’t talked in nearly a year. Now she was sober again, trying to do the work. We talked about what it means to forgive yourself. Not in the Hallmark-card sense, but the raw, trench-level forgiveness that recovery demands. Learning not to hate your own past. Learning not to rewrite it or repress it or compulsively apologize for it—but to integrate it, gently. To look at each other and say, we both messed up, but we can acknowledge that failing without holding resentments.

“We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.” That line from the Ninth Step promises in AA was hovering between us. And suddenly Paul’s letter wasn’t about marriage or manners—it was about survival. Love, real love, starts at home, and sometimes “home” is the war-torn wreckage of your own self-image and your own past mistakes. Without self-love, you can’t be of service to others. To not love yourself—for all your faults and weaknesses—is a disservice to other people in your life. Loving yourself is an act of service.

“It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.”

Addiction was nothing but record-keeping. A forensic archive of shame, betrayal, petty humiliations. I had spreadsheets in my head of everyone who had ever wronged me and every way I had ever fallen short. Forgiveness, it turns out, isn’t some saintly ideal. It’s maintenance. If I don’t burn that ledger, it burns me. The biggest act of love I’ve ever pulled off has been the slow, uneven, sometimes theatrical work of not hating myself. Trust me, easier said than done.

There’s a prayer I say in meetings:
“God, I offer myself to Thee, to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self…”

That line still wrecks me: the bondage of self. Addiction was my attempt to escape the prison of being me. Recovery is learning how to live inside that cell—and maybe even renovate it into a home.

“Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.”

Addiction taught me how to lie with a straight face, especially to myself. Recovery insists on a brutal kind of honesty. It isn’t confessional chic. It’s more like emotional cold showers. No euphemisms, no rerouting the story to make yourself look better. Self-love, in this context, means dragging your own bullshit into the sunlight and watching it melt.

“It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”

This is what I cling to on the bad days. Self-love isn’t some Instagram mantra—it’s trench warfare. It’s holding the line when your brain tells you you’re garbage. It’s stubbornly believing in your own capacity to change when you’ve got a hundred data points telling you otherwise. It's radical. It's slow. It often looks like nothing.

“And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

I used to think that was the poetic flourish, the part meant to be underlined in cursive script on some Pinterest board. But now I read it like an equation. Faith kept me from giving up. Hope kept me from going back. But love—love is the thing that actually changes me. Not the narcotic high of being loved, but the quiet, daily choice to be loving—especially to the self I used to disown. Admission: I often fail at this, but I do work on it daily.

1 Corinthians 13 isn’t a wedding toast. It’s a field manual. A set of instructions for how to survive being a person. Recovery didn’t just teach me to quit substances. It taught me how to stay. How to stay with myself when I want to run. How to love a version of me that’s unfinished, and might always be.

And that, I think, is holy.

I was not born this broken. Before the pandemic, I could inhale a novel in one sitting and endure a Bergman double-feature without clutching a phone like an EpiPen. I could watch a film like Sátántangó and actually pay attention. COVID did not invent my affliction. It poured gasoline on it. Lockdowns collapsed the barrier between work and doomscrolling, and every human interaction shrank to a Zoom window framed by Slack pings and CNN death counters. Screens were no longer optional—they were patriotic. Stay home. Save lives. Stream everything. The state and the market joined hands, stuffed a pacifier-shaped iPhone in our mouths, and applauded our heroic suckling.

Theatres went dark, snuffing out my last sanctuary of undistracted attention. When the lights finally returned, I made a grim discovery: a play is now the only place I can focus, and even that is enforced by shame, not reverence. A novelist cannot see me ignore her craft, but an actor onstage can clock the blue glow on my face. Terror, not virtue, keeps my literacy from totally unraveling—at least in the theatre.

Lockdowns kicked me off a cliff. Gen Alpha was born mid-air. They will never know boredom as a blank room that demands imagination. They are cognitively premixed with screens the way polyester blends with cotton—cheap, durable, forever slightly sweaty. I mourn the erosion of a faculty I remember. They will not even feel the phantom pain of the amputated limb. Storytelling will flatten into snackable fractals. Ideology will travel not by coherence but by meme velocity. Worship will mutate into a holographic livestream, communion by QR code. If theatre survives, it will resemble a speakeasy, one of the last contraband zones where a phone stays pocketed like a flask during Prohibition.

Extinction by infinite scroll is not inevitable. I’ve begun training for guerrilla attention with embarrassingly analog drills—silent meals, walks without earbuds, direct eye contact, a kink rarer than anything on Pornhub. I schedule Sabbath hours for my thumbs, let them twitch in withdrawal while I stare at the unfiltered sky from my roof deck over my morning coffee. When the urge to tweet another half-baked insight hits, I write it by hand—okay, let’s be real: I record it in my Notes app. Most hot takes die of natural causes before reaching the internet. Ecological balance restored.

Screen damage is a chronic condition, not a death sentence. Step one is confession: Hi, my name is Sean, and my frontal lobe is fried. Step two is courting the exquisite discomfort of monotasking until it turns pleasurable. Reading for an hour feels illicit, like cutting class. Eventually the silence returns and roars, the way hearing returns once a nightclub empties.

We are mass-producing minds allergic to sustained thought, yet damage implies repair. Each time I sit in a darkened theatre—phone muted, heart syncopated with strangers—I glimpse both the prelapsarian self I was and the post-digital human we could become The one, for all my bluster, I feel like I myself am becoming. The screens will keep buzzing. The only question is whether we still possess enough shame, or enough hunger for real life, to look away.