2025, So Far

I wish I had a time machine so I could go back in time and talk to my dad in 1988, just before I was born, and tell him what it’s like to live in the future. I’d tell him all the amazing things that are happening. Francis Ford Coppola is still working but it’s weird and he can’t get financing. The Rolling Stones are still together. Ringo Starr’s new album is better than you’d think. David Letterman has this huge beard and wants to look like a cross between a billionaire and a moonshiner. There’s a western nighttime soap called Yellowstone that you and all your friends are obsessed with. We all have pocket-sized computers now. You can look up encyclopedia articles and stuff but you’ll mostly use it for checking the stock market and playing a game called Candy Crush. It’s really just something to do with your hands, like cigarettes. Life is mostly a string of subscription services you get from the computer, nobody will ever buy a house again, and the American dream is dead but not in a way you’d immediately notice. (Then I go win the lottery a few times and put in a bid on the Sheats-Goldstein Residence.)

The first month of 2025 has been one of those “oh no, we’re living in history” moments. A singularly American onslaught of death and degradation, moving at the speed of light. I won’t list any of the bullshit that’s taking place because it’s not helpful. It just sucks and everybody knows it sucks and we can’t do much about it.

The speed of all that death and degradation deadens the brain, which those responsible are well aware of: they did it that way on purpose and it basically works. When I ask friends how they’re doing, I get a lot of sighs and long pauses. A lot of those poignant silences are about football, which sucks too, but still. Nobody I know is in a good mood.

I’m almost a year into my “launch a paid newsletter while also wildly cutting back on social media because I’m a genius” experiment. No idea what I’ve learned from that, but I know being online is a drug and so is news. They are both addictions that rewire your brain to be miserable and, maybe worse, to anticipate being miserable.

I also have advice. Everybody loves reading advice on the computer, so I’ll share it: the best thing you can do right now is log off as hard as you can. Go outside, talk to people in real life where it’s actually kind of rude to talk about the news, try to actually see the friends you usually just text message. Go for a long drive and turn the phone off while you do it. Get back into your hobbies or pick one and learn it for a while. Watch one of those studio movies that reviews called “wildly miscalculated” and you haven’t seen since high school. Play an album you like but find embarrassing. Go to free community events even if they sound stupid. If you take the freeway, try the surface streets. Go to a bad diner and just order some bad coffee because even bad coffee is good coffee.

You can’t help anybody when you’re exhausted and keep posting one million college-educated rewordings of “I would love to be dead right now” on the computer. Walk away from the thing and try out some of those normal things you hear about and if you get bored that’s wonderful because we’re not supposed to get bored anymore. It turns out boredom is the Cadillac of feelings.