Home sick today and feeling a bit wistful. I get this way a lot when I’m lying around alone with too much time on my hands. I went down a 90s nostalgia rabbit hole and found a couple gems.

The first is from a podcast episode titled “What did the 90s smell like?” by We Don’t Wanna Grow Up.

The other is a YouTube video of a guy flipping through a Seventeen School Zone Special magazine from 1996 that I remember purchasing on a grocery store run with my mom when I was 15. I used to love seeing how kids across the country dressed in the wake of the grunge era.

Isn’t the internet amazing?

The strangeness of putting yourself out there. The mere act of expressing that you indeed have social needs, that you crave the connection of others, is one that creates repulsion, in myself (and seemingly with others). The effort required almost makes the desired outcome somehow less desirable. 

Even in social situations of late, there is something different in the way we all speak to one another, something missing from the way things used to be. We are all tired, we are all distracted. Going through the motions. Feeding each other the requisite smalltalk. Single-serving “friends”.

Someone converted a dating app into one for making friendships. All you do is swipe right, how hard could it be? Except even if a connection is made, there isn’t enough time or energy to put in any effort in responding. Astonishing? Perhaps. Surprising? No. 

It’s easy to start to question what you have to offer the world, other people. That rabbit hole of self-analysis can engulf you too, if you’re not careful. To dilute all human interaction as transactional, conditional. To begin to see others as if through a small clerk’s window where someone on the other side is always expecting you to dance, or to make them laugh, or to provide them with some other entertainment or pleasure or connection. 

I start to question if I really even want what I think I want. The current assignment is to find shared activities and friendships will bloom naturally. I’m tired and retreat inward. Find comfort in others who might as well be fictional people on a screen. 

“Maybe I should sign up for a class,” I tell myself. Start writing more and care less about what others think. Maybe that’s what losers tell themselves, I think. 

Going through my memory of the people whose social lives you envied, the people who seemed to be a spiderweb of connection between everyone and everything. They all had something in common. They were the people who showed up to everything. Had dinner parties. Volunteered on boards and commissions. Went to happy hours. Played adult group sports. I remember one in particular falling asleep at the table while we ate dinner at her house. But everybody loved them. I still think fondly. 

This is certainly all my fault, the loneliness. Who else made the decisions that got me to where I am?  I’m not carving out enough “me time”. I retreat inward. Find comfort in others who might as well be fictional people on a screen. 

Wait, no. It’s our environment. The American built environment is killing us. The suburbs, it’s all their fault. It’s just middle age, this is normal. It’s the children, they take up too much of our time. It’s other men. All they want to do is talk about sports and play golf. Right? Female friends, wouldn’t that be great? Oh wait. We can’t form new, close relationships with women at this stage of life. They’ll think you’re a creep. Trying to pull something on them and sneak around behind your wife. What will be people think? 

Why do you need anything more than you already have? Isn’t that a sign of insecurity, of weakness? 

I retreat inward.