The Work of Life Itself
We're all on the way out, so act accordingly
The guy checking his phone at 3 a.m. isn't happy. He's scrolling through his ex-wife's Instagram from a Best Western in Topeka. She's in Santorini with her new boyfriend, a periodontist who probably doesn't grind his teeth. He used to be a big deal first baseman at Seton Hall but now he sells medical devices to hospitals. Last quarter he moved three dozen arthroscopic cameras. His commission check came to $23,000. He spent $1,200 of it on a Peloton that might help him become half the man he once was. He's used it twice.
Neither is the woman with the corner office happy. Senior VP of Strategic Initiatives at a company that makes software for software companies. She's got the Herman Miller chair and the view of the Chrysler Building. She keeps a bottle of Tums in her Hermès bag and Xanax bars in her self-driving Tesla's glove compartment that look like the sort of gold bullion that belong in Scrooge McDuck’s money vault. Her assistant knows not to schedule anything before her 10:30 a.m. therapy appointment on Thursdays. The therapist charges her Cadillac insurance plan by the hour and alternates between asking her "how does that make you feel?" and telling her to "keep going in that direction."
There's this myth that somewhere, somebody's got it figured out. That couple at Whole Foods with the matching Patagonia vests and the rescue dog in the shock collar? She's on her third IVF cycle and he's been lying about going to AA meetings and spending his afternoons on Grindr instead.1 The startup founder who gave that TED talk about mindfulness? He snorts some ground-up mystery substance off his standing desk every Friday then spends the rest of the afternoon gooning to the real weird AI porn. The yoga instructor with 100K followers? Her eating disorders have developed eating disorders and she cries in her car after every class.
We're born screaming and covered in someone else's blood after emerging from an opening almost too narrow for our oversized,2 useless brains. That should tell us everything about what's next and what’s left, but it doesn’t.
The Climbing Disease
I know a fast-rising woman who has joked on LinkedIn about keeping her social media notifications on during intimate moments. Not on purpose, it's just muscle memory and she’s "leaning in." The blue light reflects off her face while her husband pretends not to notice by thinking about goodness knows what. She made Partner at Deloitte last year. The announcement got 21,847 likes. Her marriage counselor says they're making progress.
The hustle culture guys are fascinating specimens. They wake up at 4:47 a.m. because 5 a.m. is for amateurs. They drink grass-fed butter coffee in their fermented beef-fed urine and call it biohacking. Per Goodreads, they read 70+ books a year but they're all 500-word AI summaries of the work of the same five authors, all of whom are now using ghostwriters and AIs to fart out their thumbsucking content. They have morning routines that would make a Shaolin monk weep: cold plunges, facial scrubs, meditation, journaling, gooning, visualization, posting, gratitude practice, gooning, breath work, and posting combined with gooning. All before their first "meeting" at 5:30 a.m. They're optimizing everything except their ability to have a normal conversation.
Watch them at the overpriced co-working space, these modern climbers. They wear Allbirds and carry Herschel backpacks like uniforms, or whatever products made by single-item start-ups are popular now. They speak in acronyms: KPIs, OKRs, TAM, CAC, LTV, OGC, GGG.3 They're disrupting industries that didn't need disrupting, then disrupting that disruption with solutions to problems they’ve invented.
My old neighbor in Dallas quit an easy-peasy VP job at CBRE to found a startup. It's Uber for pet grooming. Or maybe Airbnb for storage units. I can't remember. In any event, nobody uses it, so who cares? He works out of his garage, which his wife converted into an office with a ring light for Zoom calls. He pitches VCs who won’t offer him money and would-be employees who demand it in exchange for their services while his daughter practices violin in the next room. He's pre-revenue but post-hope.
The handful of high-powered lawyers I went to school with are the worst. They bill in six-minute increments, so they think about money ten times an hour. They make $400,000 a year and feel poor because the partner makes $2 million. They lease BMWs they can't afford and buy watches that cost more than most people's cars. They do drugs in the bathroom at Capital Grille and write it off as networking. To a one, they’re grateful that the state bars are still protecting them from AI practitioners. Not for long.
Ambition is just anxiety dressed up for work in sweat-soaked cotton-poly athleisure. These people glance at their email during their colonoscopies. They answer Slack messages at funerals. They're on conference calls during their Jeffrey Toobin-style webcam seshes, mouthing "sorry" to the girl or boy of their wet dreams while making the money gesture with their fingers.
Money Sickness
One of my favorite meathead millionaire acquaintances day-trades between sets. Not on his phone; he brings an iPad Pro with a keyboard case. Sets it up on the bench press like it's his office. He lost $140,000 on GameStop but made $30,000 by shorting a pharmaceutical company that failed the FDA trial of a drug he’s been taking for years as a research chemical. He explains this like it makes sense, which it surely must because the market is rational. His buddy nods and spots him while checking Coinbase on his phone.
The rest of his crypto bros congregate on a Discord server called "Diamond Hands Legends." They're all in their 40s and still playing League of Legends between checking their portfolios. Made $500 on an ape JPEG when NFTs were hot, spent $600 on goon-tastic skins for Jinx and Ahri. They type "WAGMI" and "to the moon" while their MMR tanks because they're alt-tabbed watching candle charts. They've got .0534 Bitcoin and believe they're early adopters. They've been saying that since my acquaintance lost his life savings in a "hot wallet"4 back 2017. Their ranked stats are almost as bad as their portfolios, but put them up against a team of noobs and they’ll post some decent KDAs.
The richest ones collect anxieties like baseball cards. This "trad" Michigan billionaire I briefly met at a pre-law center charity event — his vast fortune supposedly came from inventing the modern version of the pizza box — spent the entire gala complaining about the IRS. He's got seven or eight houses and a disdain for property taxes. He owns a jet and an entire Catholic town in Florida and still complains about how the feds are bleeding him dry. His wine collection is insured for $25 million and he's terrified of cork taint. Nice guy, the way most of the .0001% are as long as you’re not doing business with them.
The New Addictions
The sports betting apps know you better than your priest, shrink, or OnlyFans findom. They know you bet on the Knicks when you're sad and the over when you're drunk. They know you chase losses after 11 p.m. and double down on Sundays. They send push notifications during the games you're already watching. "Live bet available: Will LeBron make his next free throw?" Of course you tap it. What else are you going to do, just watch the game?
My dad’s barber ran a shop on East Maiden Street for 22 years. His father started it in '58. Good location, loyal customers, cash business. Eventually lost most of it on a same-game parlay. Patrick Mahomes needed 300 yards, Travis Kelce needed a touchdown, and the Chiefs needed to cover. None of that happened. Now he rents a chair at a chain place in a Peters Township strip mall. Still makes good small talk that I can purloin for my Pennyslvania-themed columns while giving the best high fade in the "Little Washington" area. His hands shake when SportsCenter comes on the TV.
The online casinos have algorithms that would make Zuckerberg jealous. They know when you get paid (direct deposit hits at 12:01 a.m. Thursday). They know when you're vulnerable (Sunday night, football's over, work tomorrow). They offer bonuses that sound like free money: "Bet $50, get $200!" The fine print requires you to bet that $200 forty times before you can withdraw. Nobody reads the fine print.
This software engineer at a FAANG company plays online blackjack while he's in meetings. Mutes his mic, turns off his camera, and splits tens like a tourist. He's got a system — martingale betting, he calls it. Double your bet after every loss. Like everything else in life, it works until it doesn't. He learned that when he hit the table limit down $25,600. Had to sell some of that FAANG stock to cover it. Still tells people he's up overall. He is, in a way. Pride goeth before a fall, &c.
OnlyFans turned simping into a subscription service. These guys paying $49.99 a month for "exclusive content" from a thirtysomething lady in Romania pretending to be wheelchair-bound Latina teen with Down syndrome from Miami. They buy her wishlist items — lingerie, toys, gaming chairs. She calls them "daddy" in childlike voice messages created by an AI filter. The simps know it's fake but knowing doesn't help. Loneliness makes you stupid. What the heck else are you going to do?
Professional Miseries
The smart doctors are all on something. Adderall for the shifts, Ambien for the sleep, a shot of testosterone and a puff of esketamine for the in-between. They make life-and-death decisions on four hours of sleep and uppers downed with burnt hospital coffee dispensed by an unwashed Bunn system installed back when Ringgold’s Joe Montana was tearing up the gridiron. They drive Porsches they never have time to enjoy and buy houses they never have time to live in. They save lives all day yet can't save their own marriages, which eventually go somewhere but not where the doctors want.
The teachers are broke and broken. They spend their own money on essential supplies and their own time babysitting other people's snot-nosed kids. They get emails at 11 p.m. from parents who think their kid deserves an A for showing up (that was the curve I graded on). They bartend in the summer and drive Uber on weekends. They have master's degrees and make less than the custodian. Most realize they couldn’t land the jobs they have today even if they gave it the old college try.
Real estate agents are professional liars with license numbers. They tell you the neighborhood's "up and coming" when there were three suicides and four homicides — including the ever-so-rare police shooting where it’s the policeman who gets shot — last month. They say the foundation cracks and Imperial Roman-era plumbing add "character." Many have six-figure wardrobes financed by Klarna and live in studio apartments financed by mom and dad. They're always "crushing it" on social media and behind on rent in reality.
The consultants are colossal frauds. They fly to Cleveland to tell companies what their own employees already know. They make PowerPoints that say "synergy" and "leverage" and "paradigm shift." They bill $500 an hour to recommend firing people. They have no actual skills except making things sound complicated. Looks like AI has already begun to make them obsolete, because AI excels in cheap-as-free lorem ipsum: cliches, filler content, and makework charts and graphs that make the information even harder to parse.
The bankers are dead inside by 25. They work 100-hour weeks doing Excel models for deals that might happen. They order dinner to the office so often (that surge-priced $99.95 pad Thai) the undocumented folks delivering for the apps all know their names. They make $350,000 and feel poor because they never have time to spend it. They microdose LSD and coke to stay awake and Klonopin to come down. They're saving to quit and do something meaningful. They never quit.
The Pains of Modernity
The dating apps turned romance into a shopping experience. Swipe left on the teacher, swipe right on the lawyer. Everyone's holding out for better options. The guy you're texting is texting six other women who won’t meet him, either. The woman you're meeting for coffee has three other dates lined up this week. Everyone's a backup plan for someone else's backup plan.
The suburbs are where illusions and fantasies go to die. It happens in two ways: first slowly, then quickly. HOA fees and lawn care and PTA meetings. The guy next door with the perfect grass is cheating on his wife with some other lawnmower dad adulterer from CrossFit. The woman with the Range Rover and the inbred designer dogs is shoplifting from Target for the love of the game. Everyone's on antidepressants and pretending the American Dream they’re sleepwalking through isn't a pyramid scheme. "They’re ok," as MMA fighter Derrick Lewis likes to caption his Instagram videos.
The city people aren't doing better. They pay $3,500 for a garret with a hot plate and call it a kitchen. They wait 45 minutes for brunch and Instagram their $18 avocado toast. They're surrounded by eight million people and have no real friends. Perhaps "Big Z" Zohran Mamdani, the failed-rapper son of the woman who had the chutzpah to direct Reese Witherspoon in a film adaptation of Vanity Fair, will freeze their rents at that absurdly high level.
Social media made everyone a brand. The mom blogger who makes her kids pose for sponsored content. The fitness influencer who photoshops her abs. The life coach who's never had a real job. They're selling lifestyles they don't live to people who can't afford them, anyway.
A Final Accounting
I met a widower at a relative’s funeral who told me he'd figured it out. The secret to what Bruce Lee called "emotional content." He was 87, buried his wife a couple years before. Said it was simple: expect nothing, do nothing, give nothing, appreciate nothing. Then he asked me to help him bag up some desserts from the cookie table to take home to his doggos and puppers because they were his "babies."
The philosophers and theologians had it partly right. Life is suffering, sure. But it's also comedy, pure comedy. The same humanzees that split the atom can't figure out how to be happy. We've launched machines into outer space and buried them deep in our innermost spaces but can't cure loneliness. We can edit genes but can't edit our own stray, stupid thoughts.
The truth isn't complicated: You're born alone, you die alone, and in between you pretend you're not alone. Everything else is just timepassing. It is what it is until it isn’t, and if you’re doing it such that you wouldn’t do all of it again, you’re doing it wrong.5
The game's rigged and we all know it. But we keep playing because the alternative is admitting we don't know what else to do. So we climb our ladders and count our money and swipe our apps and take our pills. We optimize and maximize and minimize everything except our capacity to sit quietly in a clean, well-lighted place with these meat suits of ours, these bodies that are both temple and tomb. It’s swell when you can do that, though. Just sitting quietly and thinking to yourself. What a fine way to live, if I’m being honest. Yet who has the time, even if we have all the time in the world, an entire lifetime in which we could theoretically be having the time of our lives?
That's the human, all-too-human condition: smart enough to know better, too flawed to do better. Your complaint has been registered. Your ticket code is 420B69. The current wait time feels like forever but will be up sooner than you think — in the flutter of an eyelid,6 really. Thank you for your patience.
Spoiler alert: maybe they didn’t need that IVF after all!
Real ones know those last two!
Please don’t use a hot wallet this way.
As my dad would say, “I regret nothing except all of it, and I’d gladly do the whole thing over again and wouldn’t change a thing.” Or perhaps, more eloquently: “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it… but love it.”
Some wonderful Lynd Ward illustrations in that book.
one of the most thoughtful, genuine, human posts I've ever read.
thank you for this. also, I love your style.
My head and heart hurt.