Writer's Diary
5/17/26
American English needs a better word than anxiety to describe whatever the emerging condition is where one feels like a personal or civilizational catastrophe could happen at any moment.
There’s something about American life in 2026 that doesn’t seem quite real. In fact, extremely fragile. Like there’s nothing really holding any of this together, or like the Wizard of Oz will stop pedaling soon.
The permanent underclass meme expresses this feeling as an economic concern.
The simplest explanation might be that we have too much data about our lives. There’s too much information in the ecosystem, and everyone is in a state of nervous despair because there’s too much information.1
Millennials embraced minimalism (physical minimalism, a minimalism of things (Marie Kondo and all that) while embracing a maximalism of sensory inputs, sensation and episteme—and gotten things completely backwards.
Our physical systems need to be plural, sprawling, messy, abundant, and our mental systems need to be simple, clean. The physical world now seems sort of uniform, flattened and Instagramified.
The mental world is chaotic, overgrown.
Thought experiment: if you knew that every AI token you used burned one of your brain cells, or severed one synapse, caused the withering of one dendrite, would you still burn those tokens?
Lately I’ve loved wandering around Manhattan by myself at night. Even while I remain an extremely social person, my appetite for socializing has definitely gone down lately. Is it strange to admit that I sort of long for loneliness more often? That I do not think I experience loneliness enough anymore? Aloneness, rather.
The verbs have changed from reading and writing to situation monitoring and prompting.
Culture may have to hide from the internet to survive. I think my artistic projects may have to hide from the internet in the future to survive.
COVID era masking psychologically encouraged and justified homogeneity and the disappearance of the other. Masking was a visual leveler, made a uniform sameness acceptable, even good. So now when all the girlies wear the same influenced brands and all the boys have the same haircuts and muscles and it’s the same dead-eyed affect, phone-molded eyes, there’s nothing to be worried or concerned about.
The deeper question here is how does a blightness and indifference of spirit somehow accompany this spirit of dread? Why do anxiety and dread accompany indifference and passive consumption?
After abstaining all week, I got properly drunk and forgot after the last days after party on Thursday night. But I think that feels like a good rhythm. Moving between being alone and sober and being convivial and tipsy—cutting out a lot of the middle, more exhausting, more irrelevant forms of relatively generic socializing.
The e-bike is really a perfect metaphor for the ambient drug that doesn’t otherwise have a name or moniker. Suddenly in the last few years, these dangerous machines are everywhere, mostly driven by the insatiable need for people to order out because no one can cook anymore. The drivers have no regard for their own safety or others. And the streets largely serve these bikes no longer pedestrians, just as the bikes serve the apps, the algorithms. We could say that sociopathy is just the integration of machines into people, the handing over of human intelligence to machine intelligence.
You can’t walk around the East or West Village and not be aware that part of the poverty of American culture is actually poverty, that we have mass affluence and mass affluence spends itself on generic garbage, overpriced dinners and overpriced bars; people sitting in silence on their phones at those overpriced dinners and overpriced bars; a kind of numb, soulless consumption and narcissistic self-display that never ends, is never supposed to end (and metastasizes like cancer).
Algorithmic behavior drives bubbles faster and faster, so chances are if you think you made a great decision—chances are you’re in the right place for the random reasons rather than your own goodwill and intelligence and selectiveness; you’re a part of a behavioral wave.