Vol. 114
By Jay Fox
The world is a huge place when you’re young. Opportunities and mysteries abound. For someone who is innately curious or creative, youth is a time of insatiable thirst for knowledge and experience. There is a kind of freedom in ignorance. You know so very little about the world, so its enormity seems at once both exciting and daunting.
Suburban Detroit, where I grew up, seemed small. At the time, I thought it was because this was some quality peculiar to the area. By contrast, the vibrant cities of the East Coast and expansive landscapes of places like Montana and Colorado felt like they offered more. I’ll probably never know what it’s like to live out West, but I can say that my twenty years in New York City—roughly from 9/11 through the COVID pandemic—confirmed my suspicions. Cities like New York, or even Detroit, are designed to be magnets for daring and creative people, especially young people.
Middle age, like the suburbs, seemed small to me when I lived there. From the perspective of my youth, all the older people I knew lived in worlds that were deeply familiar to them and grounded in routine. I don’t mean for this to be dismissive or critical. What I mean is that a person with a job, a mortgage, and a family can’t go off on adventures all the time and they’re typically too tired after working all day to have much of a social life. It’s true in places like New York, too. Even for those with demanding jobs but no family, life has a tendency of to shrink from the five boroughs to one borough, to one neighborhood, to one cluster of blocks, to perhaps one or two bars where one becomes a regular. While I would have derided this kind of sentiment in my twenties, in my thirties I found that it can be a very comfortable place to be, even with the demanding job. I saw my friends become comfortable too, be it in Boston, Chicago, Brooklyn, or the suburbs.
The world becomes smaller as you get older, and that is okay.
Until it’s not.
One of the things that is often said to set apart geriatric millennials (age 38-45 or thereabouts) is that we are old enough to remember a time before the internet and young enough to have still been raised by it. As a result, there was a long-held (and foolish) belief many of us had about being too clever to be taken in by the kinds of scams that get Boomers to give away their life savings to a fake Nigerian prince or someone involved in a pig butchering scam. At the other end of the spectrum, we hadn’t been totally sucked into the algorithms like younger people, with lives dominated by social media. We thought ourselves immune to that kind of thing.
COVID dispensed with that illusion.
Life flattened during that period. Time flattened as days melted together. Even today, spring 2020 feels devoid of the rhythms that tend to define life. It was just a featureless, undulating chaos with nothing to punctuate the stream of time. As the world shrank, we retreated deeper into the virtual world because it was the only world with which we could safely interact.
For a lot of people, life never regained all its dimensions. I think this has affected every generation differently, and it seems like those of us in our late 30s and early 40s experienced a doubly shrinking world—both because of COVID and because it’s the time in life when one’s social world tends to become smaller because of family and work—and it has accelerated an overwhelming trend toward atomization. Friendships have withered on the vine, and parasocial relationships have bloomed. Bars have reported declining sales and once thriving establishments have shut down. In some cases, public spaces are actively under attack. National parks are being underfunded; plazas are becoming gated; and virtual public spaces are being more brazenly cordoned off, privatized, and monetized by the world’s richest and most pathetic men.
Rather than offering a solution here, I’m going to change it up. I’m going to make a request to anyone reading this.
As someone who spends a good amount of time at the bar (I happen to be writing this from The Hunterian at 413 E. 70th Street on the Upper East Side), I can say from where I sit that the decline in public life is real and noticeable, particularly in places like Asheville, which is where I now live. It relies very heavily on beer tourism to prop up its struggling economy, and seats are not being filled in ways that are alarming. Even bar life in New York City is not what it once was.
So here’s my request: go out, get a drink, and sit at the bar. If you hate the bar, go to a park. When the opportunity arises, just start talking to the person next to you. See where it goes. You’re probably not going to meet your best friend or your soulmate, but the simple act of having a conversation with a total stranger can be invigorating and worthwhile in a way that feels real. It certainly beats doomscrolling or bed rotting or already living in the past when you likely still have more than half of your life ahead of you.
We aren’t alone. We have no excuses.
_________________________
Jay Fox is a writer and musician based in Asheville, NC. His work has appeared in Crain’s New York, Salon, Stay Thirsty Magazine, Aethlon, and FutureStructure. His novel, The Walls, was published by Stay Thirsty Press.
