The current decade feels different from other decades. While the ’90s felt full of potential and possibilities, and the ’00s felt like a world in turmoil, the ’10s began a decline that reached its nadir in the mid ’20s.
The world feels tired, annoyed, irritated, uncharitable. There’s a pervasive egotism.
It’s a Saturday, in the early spring of 2025 and I’m vacillating between depression and numbness. I haven’t felt much in the previous decade, mostly by design. The strongest emotions I did feel were tempered by circumstance.
Emotions have scared me for a long time, because they have been so incredibly disruptive in my life. Now, here, in this stable, largely emotion-free, boring life, I am both yearning for emotions and frightened of what chaos they may bring. But mostly, I’m very worried that the time and the possibility for emotions have evaporated.
This decade feels different, there are wardrums sounding, “strong men” have taken their seats in power, progressive movement is being abandoned, protectionism and capitalist primacy are back in fashion.
Come to think of it, this stormfront may soon reach my previously stable, boring life and upend all of this numbing comfort. I may get my wish / fear soon enough, for change, experiences and plenty of (negative) emotions.
But this will be King Circumstance. Not President Choice. I’ll not have much say in the matter, and the only thing I can do is adapt, ride the rapid river, avoid the rocks, find calmer streams. I have this quiet, small hope that this will awaken me, if it happens, make me more alive again. But I’m not sure. I’m not sure how much fight I have left in me.
Thoughts of the past come into my mind a lot these days. Not like before, where it was shame, regret, pain mostly. Nowadays I look back at the peaceful, seemingly happy times we had. I think of (perhaps mythical) moments of joy and friendship. Waking up after a whole night of smoking weed, to a sunny Sunday morning in the garden —just sitting there cathartically washed and windswept, clean and young, together.
There were other experiences, broader, wilder, with many more people. Reading my words from 20 years ago feels like looking at a movie, so full of life and far removed from me. As I sit here in my darkened studio, the outside world bathed for the first time in a long time in warmth and light, like Raoul Duke, in that hotelroom in Las Vegas. From his vantage point of the early 70’s looking at the high water mark the sixties left, far out west. I know I was there and a part of it, but that decade has been dead and buried for another three already.
In these years, when Saturday rolls around, the sun is shining and something in my chest starts to twitch and ache, a futile hope drenches me. Perhaps, somehow, something will happen tonight, a party, I will go out and just stumble into something wild and Dionysian —like it did 20, 30 years ago, when it was so common and easy. Of course it never happens. I don’t think that even young people do this anymore.
We meet, these people I spent these nights and mornings with, now and again. We share a past, we grew up together. Then grew apart, but not like everyone else. We are still connected. Some of us have families, all have careers. We’ve become middle-aged (not to say old) men, gray, balding, as comfortable as possible in the steady thrum of every day life. It’s not always easy, viewpoints differ sometimes —when we were young, our interest in politics was limited to legalization and perhaps environmental issues, dredging up memories of our overlapping lives and (mis-)adventures. It’s like a warm familiar blanket, but it can smell a bit musty and stale.
Talking about our personal lives, experiences, feelings feels a bit iffy still, as vulnerability was never our strong suit, but over the years more of these kinds of words are shared. I think —and perhaps I’m projecting, we are all a bit afraid to fall into acknowledgement of how empty it all feels, which would be potentially destabilizing and thus undesirable. I am grateful to have these people in my life, not just because they are my best friends, not just because they were there at that time and know me then and now, but also because they are really good people.
The loneliness can really get to me sometimes. Usually I do great on my own. I’ve become very adept at securing myself. I’ve been able to steer my raft to the center of the river where I have been able to —not exactly build a career, but find employment that suits me, affords me freedom, offers a lot of responsibility and, alongside decent remuneration, has some semblance of meaningfulness.
I have things to do, whether you would call them hobbies, or perhaps something that betrays a bit more ambition than that, photography, music, writing, filmmaking. Some are more at the forefront of my regular and favorite activities, others have fallen by the wayside, some seem to be making a comeback. Key to all of these is that, broadly speaking, I can all of this by myself. Alone.
The same goes for walking, in the forest, on the island. Riding a stationary bike while I watch something or other from my highly curated and extensive media library via my meticulously designed and organized personal computer setup, which also allows me to enjoy my media away from home.
Every other week or so, I cook a couple additional meals from scratch, with whole food, preparing meals for the freezer so I can be as efficient as I need to be during the workweek, only having to remember to put some food out in the morning and heat it up at night. The other week I do the same, but cook ahead for a couple of days and put it in the fridge.
A highly organized, very single-serve, hobby kit type of life. And of course I don’t talk about it, because that would draw attention to the isolation and disconnect, masked by all of this efficiency. Everything is done over the internet, behind the safety of the screen, the user input devices. Ordering groceries, technology, clothes —every couple of years, as I wear the same outfit every day, cuts down on choice stress, even my work is done completely online.
When I’m asked if I like it, or if I would want my life to be different, I never know what to do with that question. It’s not like I have a choice exactly. It’s just evolved this way. Anxiety, panic attacks, AvPD, sleep disorder, these will not just go away because I want my life to be different. “Well, then do something about it, go to therapy!” Yes, well, a psychologist, psychiatrist and medication have not changed anything about how I experience the world at large. Which is, the more I think about it, quite a natural way to respond to what the world is.
Sure, I would love for things, me, to be different. I would love to be easy and at ease, charming, outgoing, living my life outdoors and among people, meeting new friends, flirting, perhaps even chancing upon a romantic anomaly. But in practice, years drift by, as I live my life here, in this small apartment, engaging as much as I can with the outside world, in the ways that I can.
It’s a profound loneliness, but one that feels necessary somehow. I’m not a complete recluse. I go for walks with friends, I go have dinner at a friends house, I sometimes attend a birthday party, I even on occasion go see a band play. But it is not without trepidation and stress.
I wonder if this influences the way I see the world. Of course, and no, of course not. Because yes, if you have anxiety and are hyper-vigilant, you see threats everywhere, but no, there is the sounds of the wardrums in the air, and yes, the far right, even fascist political organizations are winning terrain everywhere. Though I sometimes wish it was due to my vantage point that I have this dim view of the world, I doubt that I don’t see the world clearly.
So where does all of this leave me tonight? On this Saturday in the spring of 2025. My chores are done, nothing to hide behind in that regard. Running out of steam on this —not sure what to call it, essay? Heading into the studio tonight to make music, feel like too lonely a pursuit. Seeing friends, I should explain this a bit more perhaps, is not something that is an impulsive option. They either live further away and are in the rhythms of their own lives. I wouldn’t dare disrupt those, nor do I think would they appreciate the disruption, or they live close by and are working on the weekend, dealing and recovering from their own stressful situations, or are simply entangled in family life.
The safest way to spend my Saturday night is to cook my dinner, eat it while watching something, and then just let myself be captured by the passive consumption of media, to let the hours pass unnoticed, until fatigue —due to the only act of rebellion I can think of or muster, stay up late, necessitates me dragging myself to bed.
Tomorrow is Sunday. I don’t want to think about tomorrow just yet. Then the next day is Monday and my workweek starts. Like I said, there is a storm coming and on Monday I will get the weather report. On Tuesday, I am getting my eyes checked and measured for glasses. Deterioration, erosion, old age.
I am not sure what to do with existence. I feel that too much of it has slid by without a whisper, these past decades. I would like to take more from life, before I don’t even feel the urge anymore. I am just not sure how.
*Photo: me, circa 1990