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Are you a vibe?

If listening is more your vibe, feel free to play the audio recording of this post:

Who hasn’t stared into the mirror after a long night in Williamsburg, Silver Lake, or Hackney, wiped from their left nostril a light dusting of powder that they hadn’t noticed in dim candle lighting, and asked themself, “am I a vibe?” Other than getting an invitation to a private play party, there is no greater achievement for younger, nomadic residents of California, the Northeast (except Boston), and bits of Europe who have joined the 1% through family money or the proceeds of a company acquisition and consider themselves polyamorous and spiritual – let’s call them Spiritual Poly Rich Millennials, or SPRM – than being called a vibe. Having a fellow SPRM call you a vibe is a life affirmation nonpareil. It means that you have achieved a unique frequency that people want to tune into, an energy that others strive to emulate, and a social media presence that people high-key stalk. Because none of these are quantifiable metrics (except looking at who has viewed your stories, which is not a vibe), and because one must be called a vibe by someone else who is universally agreed to a vibe, it’s hard to know your score on the vibe-o-meter. I’m going to help you determine for yourself your exact caliber of vibe and even help you optimize your vibe, because anxiously waiting for your vibe coronation is not a vibe. 

You may be wondering what exactly a vibe (vīb, noun) is. 

Despite the efforts of other publications to intellectualize and politicize its meaning, there is no concrete definition of a vibe, but when ~vibes~ (vībs, plural noun) are present, people feel that the odds are high of having sex with one or more people they have just met. ~Vibes~ can be created any time of day and anyplace in the world (except Boston), and ~vibes~ can be generated by a combination of candles, expensive functional elixirs that don’t actually function, bland vegan food decorated with edible flowers, deep house music that originates from someone wearing a flat-brimmed hat pressing a button on an Apple laptop, the stench scent of palo santo, and gratuitously sincere connection activities, such as staring into a total stranger’s pupils for a literally eye watering amount of time. The vibe of any location (except Boston) can be elevated when the majority of people are dressed in capes, kimonos, or culturally appropriated ethnic clothing that makes white people look like they shopped at Goodwill in a foreign country, because United1 lost their luggage, which is still covered in Playa dust. 

There are certain experiences where the vibe is likely to be particularly high or low. For example:

~Vibes~ are high at Brooklyn floor parties. ~Vibes~ are low at Midtown happy hours.

~Vibes~ are high at European football games. ~Vibes~ are low at American football games.

~Vibes~ are high in Southern Europe. ~Vibes~ are low in Northern Europe (except Copenhagen). 

~Vibes~ are high on the Upper West Side. ~Vibes~ are low on the Upper East Side. 

~Vibes~ are high in Topanga. ~Vibes~ are low in Calabasas. 

~Vibes~ are high in the Apple store. ~Vibes~ are low at the Samsung store.

~Vibes~ are high at Torrisi. ~Vibes~ are low at Carbone.

~Vibes~ are high at the new La Guardia Airport. ~Vibes~ are low at LAX. 

~Vibes~ are high in a bathtub. ~Vibes~ are low in a shower (unless it’s an outdoor rain shower in Bali and you’re on molly).

~Vibes~ are high when you’re summering. ~Vibes~ are low when you’re “on vacation.” 

~Vibes~ are high after a bump of K. ~Vibes~ are low after a shot of Jaeger. 

~Vibes~ are high on Delta. 1~Vibes~ are low on United. 

With these inanimate examples as the foundation of your vibe education, let’s progress to notable people who are a vibe and vibe-nots:

The Dalai Llama is a vibe. Deepak Chopra is not a vibe. 

RBG was a vibe. Amy Coney Barrett is not a vibe. 

Tommy Lee Jones is a vibe. Tommy Lee is not a vibe. 

Albert Einstein was a vibe. Robert Oppenheimer was not a vibe. 

Haruki Murakami is a vibe. Stephen King is not a vibe. 

Ai Weiwei is a vibe. Damien Hirst is not a vibe. 

Venus Williams is a vibe. Serena Williams is not a vibe.

Han Solo is a vibe. Luke Skywalker is not a vibe. 

David Remnick is a vibe. Anna Wintour is not a vibe. 

Art Garfunkel is a vibe. Paul Simon is not a vibe.

Cockatoos are a vibe. Parrots are not a vibe.

Oprah Winfrey is a vibe. Ellen DeGeneres is not a vibe. 

Johnny Cash was a vibe. Garth Brooks is not a vibe. 

Johannes Brahms was a vibe. Pyotr Tchaikovsky was not a vibe.

Barack Obama is a vibe. Actually Barack Obama is the only living politician who is a vibe.  

Sergey Brin is a vibe. Elon Musk is not a vibe.

Queen Elizabeth was a vibe. King Charles is not a vibe.  

By now many of you are probably wondering, “am I vibe?” 

If you have to ask, you are probably not a vibe. Most people who are a vibe were born a vibe – with a vibe trust fund, so to speak, or endowed with vibes through vibe nepotism (vibepotism), only vibes are usually passed on from the maternal side, like Judaism, which is a vibe. There are, however, things you can do to improve your intrinsic vibe. 

Some people need only a bit of tuning to become a vibe, and others require an entire vibe overhaul. For example, if you are a hedge fund manager living on the Upper East Side who spends summer weekends in East Hampton, goes to St Tropez for New Years and Aspen for a week in late February, shops at Vineyard Vines, considers a four-day weekend of golfing at Shadow Creek and strippers in Vegas with HBS buddies a good time, and will quietly vote for Trump in 2024, it will take extreme measures for you to have even the slightest chance of becoming a vibe. These measures would include quitting your job, doing a 2-year silent vipassana, attending every regional Burn in the world for three years, getting a masters in sustainable agriculture, adopting a three-legged rescue cat, learning to surf blindfolded, becoming pansexual, suffering from and recovering from a mild meth addiction, and moving to a communal fruit farm in Topanga. 

You must frame the process of becoming a vibe as less of an end and more of a means to an end. Think of it like physical fitness (which is a vibe), where training is the means and activities that require fitness are the end. Once you have achieved the means of being a vibe, the end is getting away with openly dating a lot of people at once even if they are not polyamorous, being entirely hosted at all manner of costly experiences (e.g., Burning Man, the US Open, and peak experience trips), and getting tagged in Instagram stories even if you are not in the photo in the hopes that you will re-share the story to elevate the vibe of the person who originally shared the story. Note that you will not re-share the story, because that’s not a vibe.

Like fitness, becoming a vibe is a long, slow process. For example, if you were to try to do an ironman triathlon (which is not a vibe) without any training, you would definitely lose and probably die. Attempting to accumulate a vibe too quickly will reveal you as someone who is trying to be a vibe, and the appearance of trying is antithetical to being a vibe. Foundational to becoming and staying a vibe is not giving a fuck about being a vibe. If this seems counterintuitive, you will never be a vibe. 

Now that you have a baseline understanding of what a vibe is and can associate ~vibes~ with a variety of experiences, places, and famous people, you are ready to discover your own personal level of vibe. To facilitate this important leap of self-awareness, I have created a vibe-rater. Use it on yourself, or use it on a friend. 

Does a semi circle form around you at parties (before everyone sits on the floor)? Yes: +1, No: -1 

2. Can you single handedly initiate a cuddle puddle? Yes: +7, No: 0

3. Are you sat at the end of a table at dinner parties? Yes: +3, No: +1 (for being invited at all)

4. Are you often made a co-host of a party even if you aren’t paying for it, doing any work to prepare for it, or providing any kind of tangible value? Yes: +13, No: 0

5. you on the permanent GA list at Gospel after going 3 or more times? Yes: +1, No: 0

6. Are you on the permanent GA list at Gospel but you have never once been to Gospel? Yes: +11, No: 0

7. Which text you are more likely to receive? “Are you around?” +3, “Are you in town?” +8

8. Has the date of a party ever been changed because you are not in town? Yes: +6, No: 0

9. Do people ask if you have a dealer in random foreign countries? Yes: +12, No: +12

10. Do people ask what fragrance you’re wearing when you aren’t wearing anything? Yes: +4, No: 0

11. Do people ask what fragrance you’re wearing when you’re wearing Baccarat Rouge 540? Yes: -54. This is a trick question. Baccarat Rouge is not a vibe.

12. Do people you don’t even follow watch your stories on the reg? Yes: +2, No: 0, I don’t know: +15

13. What is your text / DM response time?

1 second: 0

1 minute: +1

5 - 15 mins: +2

15 - 60 mins: +3

1+ hour: +4

1+ day: +10

14. What is your attachment style? Anxious: +2Avoidant: +9Secure: 0Anxious avoidant: +10

15. How many DJs phone numbers do you have under their real name? None: +6 One: +2 Two: +4 Three: +6 Four: +10 Five or more: -10 (you are a club promoter) 

16. Are you a DJ?Yes: +5No: +10

17. Do you have “a fund”?Yes: -3, No: 0

18. Where do you summer?

In the US: +2

In Europe: -1 (summering only in Europe = new money)

Europe in July, US in August: +12

Summer is not a verb: -12

19. How many times can you say you’re not going to Burning Man and people still totally know that you’re definitely going to Burning Man?

Once: +1

Twice: +5

Thrice: +15

Four times: +30

Five or more: -30 (you are Eric Schmidt, and the people who are asking are your second-string girlfriends)

20. Do people ask you to DJ when you don’t actually know how to DJ and have never had any kind of DJ training other than creating a Spotify playlist?Yes: +20, No: 0

21. Where do you live?

Please refer to the National Vibe Distribution map for scoring if you are American (if you are a New Yorker, you are not American – skip to #22), and the Global Vibe Distribution map if you pay 80% tax and drive a weird version of the cars we have here. Note: anyone living in Lisbon for the vanity passport and tax evasion who isn’t Portuguese gets -10.

If you live in NYC, use this more nuanced map, which shows Vibe Distribution by neighborhood:

22. Has anyone ever given you a vinyl record as a gift without knowing you have a record player?Yes: +5, No: 0

23. Do you go to Barry’s Bootcamp?Yes: -18, No: +20

24. Did you dress up for Halloween? Yes: +15, No: 20

25. Where do you keep your party costumes?I just order shit from Amazon and then throw it out the next day: -20In a drawer: +5In an entire dedicated closet: +8People just give me stuff to wear: +10

26. Are you 100% straight?Yes: -15, No: +15

27. How many plants do you have?None: -12One: +6Two to six: +12Seven or more: -20 (you are agoraphobic)

28. Do people often ask you if you got a haircut when you haven’t gotten a haircut remotely recently?Yes: +2, No: 0

29. Do designers ask you to wear their clothing?Yes: +5, No: 0

30. Do designers pay you to wear their clothing?Yes: -15, No: +20

31. Do you wear sunglasses at night?

Yes: -8 No: +8 So I can, so I can watch you weave then breathe your story lines: +30

Corey Hart was a vibe, RIP J/k he’s fine, but he’s Canadian so..

32. Do you have an aquarium? Yes: -20, No: +20

33. Do you do yoga? Yes: +5, No: 0

34. Do you talk about yoga?Yes: -50, No: +15

35. Are you vegan? Yes: -75, No: +20

36. Do you work?Yes: -3, No: -8, “I have projects”: +10

37. Do you own more than once vest?Yes: -30, No: 0

38. Are you a subscriber?Yes: +30, No: -100

Did you actually add all of this up? Yes: -30, No: +30

Should you feel drawn to vibe coaching to improve your score, I am available at the rate of $1,100 per hour.

#culture #satire #essays #social commentary #jokes #dark humor #vibes

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What is your Fall Identity? Choose one of these 5

There is a two-week period in Fall when it is neither appropriate to ask someone where they summered nor ask where they will winter. This creates an identity crisis for nomadic Millennials and Gen Zers as well as stunted Gen Xers, whose personalities are based entirely on their airline status, ephemeral residency, and bewilderingly itinerant Instagram stories. You are where you were or where you will be, so when someone asks where you summered, you are the fascinating, intrepid traveler who found that perfect Spritz and cacio e pepe in that nameless restaurant owned by an older couple, who now consider you their child, in that tiny seaside town in Calabria known to only you and the thousand or so Italians who live there. Come Oct 1st, everyone will begin asking where you will winter (when it is unfashionable to be in any city with an airport that does not have a fireplace, an outdoor bar, or unusually friendly TSA agents), and then you will become either the Rugged-chic Mountain Person, who will definitely break your personal record of 60 ski days, or The American in CDMX / Lisbon / Bali, who encourages everyone to come visit because your place there is sooooo much bigger than anything we have in the city. But who are you between September 15th and October 1st, when talk of Summer is cringe and discussing Winter plans is also cringe? You will know exactly who you are after reading about these five Fall identities.  

Fall Identity #1: Conference Person

These two weeks in Fall are a time when people briefly tire of leisure and return to work for a bit to pepper their personality with a dash of purpose. Being an Industrious Business Person is a very attractive identity during these two weeks, and to help become this Industrious Business Person, other Industrious Business Persons create conferences for you to attend. There are many different kinds of conferences that you can pay a great deal to stand in the lobby looking hopeful and embarrassed with a lanyard around your neck, and you can pay an even greater deal to have a speaking role, which gets you a special lanyard that provides access to the echo chamber that is the VIP room. Speaking roles at conferences are priced high because there is no dating app profile photo more coveted than the one captioned with, “thank you for coming to my TED talk.” The conferences that confer the highest amount of status are always to do with money, which can be real money or fantasy money such as crypto or NFTs. A conversation you might have about conferences will go something like this:

Person: “What can you tell me that will help me assess you during these frightening two weeks when discussing seasonal travel is cringe?”

You: “I attended a venture capital conference.”

Person: “Ah, so you went to a very expensive private school that had a gentle academic curriculum, got into a very expensive mid-tier university as a legacy, worked for two years at the bank that your great uncle founded, got into an excellent business school thanks to a questionable relationship with a very old white person, and live in an apartment that your parents purchased for you. May I see the photos of you at this conference, which I have already seen and dutifully liked on social media?”

You: “Here is a photo of me and a very old white person, who is a legend in venture capital. He is my mentor and was instrumental in securing my admission to Stanford Business School, because his name is on several buildings as well as a small tattoo on my lower back.”

Person: “He looks very old and very wealthy indeed.”

You: “And here is a photo of me speaking at the conference.”

Person: “You look like you will one day be very old and very wealthy, too.”

You: “And here is a photo of me and the founder of one of my portfolio companies.”

Person: “I see that you invest in people who do not look like you. This is an admirable trait, and my esteem for you has risen.”

You: “I am not the typical VC bro who perpetuates the patriarchy by investing only in companies founded by two former finance bros who wish to become tech bros and have a large exit which will enable them to purchase sparkle ponies at Burning Man.”

And so it goes, this conversation about you and your venture capital conference. You can have similar conversations about cannabis conferences, health and wellness conferences, and any conference to do with sex, relationships and intentional or ceremonial anything. 

Fall Identity #2: Art Person

At any given moment in September, there are 4,239 art fairs happening in Los Angeles or New York City. Attending even one of them is sufficient to establish your personality as an Art Person. Because people attend art fairs to be photographed, the lighting at these events is always excellent. A great example of an art fair that will provide a very credible Art Person identity is the Armory Show at the Javits Center, which has a very large VIP room. A conversation you might have about art fairs will go something like this:

Person: “What can you tell me that will help me assess you during these frightening two weeks when discussing seasonal travel is cringe?”

You: “I attended the Armory Show.”

Person: “Ah, so you are the only child of very wealthy parents in Los Angeles who were both big names in the movie world, but their talents skipped a generation and left you hunting for a way to be considered a Creative Person that did not require actual creative output, so as a younger person you dressed goth and acted perpetually bored. You went to a New England liberal arts school that was even smaller than your high school and discovered talking about art, which, coupled with your almost famous last name, led to a position at an art gallery in Chelsea that set you up to be an art columnist for a publication with a circulation even smaller than the population of your alma mater. You are dating a Finance Person, who underwrites your Summer travels in Europe and Winter travels in Aspen and the Caribbean despite the fact that all of these travels are supposedly to see your clients.”

You: “Would you like to be my client? I can tell you what art to buy so that you can talk about art at dinner parties.”

Person: “Yes, I would like to be your client. Please now show me photos of art that you could have sold me last week that you claim is now worth five-times what it sold for at the Armory Show.”   

And so it goes, this conversation about you and your art fair. You can have similar conversations about going to Dia Beacon or Storm King, but these day trips do not confer an actual Fall Identity as an Art Person. 

Fall Identity #3: Fashion Person

Fashion Week was invented for people who do not wish to work at any time other than September and October and want their work to be sort of like going shopping, only for things that can be purchased exclusively in large quantities and with someone else’s money. Like a really judgmental traveling rave, Fashion Week begins September 3 in NYC, moves to Milan in late September and peaks in Paris in early October. People who live in Los Angeles believe that there is a Fashion Week in Los Angeles, but no one else in the world agrees because of how people dress in Los Angeles. Fashion Week provides a credible identity for anyone who doesn’t like talking about money stuff but comes from so, so much of it. A conversation you might have about Fashion Week will go something like this: 

Person: “What can you tell me that will help me assess you during these frightening two weeks when discussing seasonal travel is cringe?”

You: “I attended Fashion Week.”

Person: “Ah, so you drew pictures of orchids during math class in 2nd grade, your grandfather started a very large company in a very small state, and your bangs have weathered the long stretches of time when bangs were not fashionable, because Anna Wintour is your spirit animal.”

You: “I don’t think that shade of green is quite right for you. I saw a piece last week that you would love, and I could probably pre-order it for you when I place my own personal order directly with the designer.”

Person: “Ah, so you sit next to your NBA boyfriend in the front row at fashion shows wearing The Row and a facial expression more befitting a neurosurgeon in the OR than someone watching animated mannequins walk in shiny, asymmetrical tablecloths, and you applaud soundlessly whether you love or hate the line. May I see photos of you and your extremely tall boyfriend that you have saved directly from BFA so that they still have the BFA watermark?” 

And so it goes, this conversation about you and your Fashion Week highlights. This conversation is structurally similar to the conversation that Big Football Fans have in November when everyone else is packing for Aspen. 

Fall Identity #4: Dinner Party Person

People host dinner parties to repay the social debt they incurred when they were hosted at dinner parties hosted by the people they invited, who hosted the dinner party to repay the social debt incurred when they were hosted by the people they invited, and so on. Dinner Party people have the most agreeable Fall personality, because they only talk with people who are on their Dinner Party circuit, and conversations are exclusively about inviting and being invited to Dinner Parties. A conversation you might have about Dinner Parties will go something like this: 

Person: “What can you tell me that will help me assess you during these frightening two weeks when discussing seasonal travel is cringe?”

You: “Your Dinner Party was delightful. Thank you so much for having me.”

Person: “You were such a delightful guest at my Dinner Party. Thank you so much for your hand-written thank-you note that, if we had a refrigerator that was not paneled in a very rare blond-colored Danish teak, would be on our refrigerator next to other hand-written thank-you notes that we received from our other guests with whom we attended Yale, Williams College or Amherst. Where did you get that wonderful textured ecru stationery with your initials printed in navy blue on the cover?”

You: “Ah, I love that stationery. I had it printed by a very old person in Calabria, who also owns a restaurant where I had the most amazing cacio e pepe this past summ–”

WARNING! Dinner Party conversations can easily derail into conversations about where you summered, because it is extremely likely that some component of your Dinner Party - the wine, the cured meat, the olives, the custom stationery you use for hand-written thank-you notes - will have come from your Summer in Italy. The best way to avoid falling into the unfashionable trap of talking of your Summer is to talk of the next Dinner Party. 

You: “ANYwho, I would love to invite you to my Dinner Party on Thursday, since hosting Dinner Parties on weekend nights is for people who live in Westchester, Connecticut or New Jersey.”

Person: “I am so looking forward to attending your Dinner Party on Thursday, since I leave on Friday for Aspe–”

WARNING! Dinner Party conversations can easily derail into conversations about where you will Winter, because it is extremely likely that everyone on your Dinner Party circuit will have a very short window during which to host or attend Dinner Parties due to their imminent departure for Aspen. The best way to avoid falling into the unfashionable trap of talking of your Winter plans is to keep conversation outside of Dinner Parties limited to Dinner Party gratitude and logistics and to keep conversation within Dinner Parties limited to conferences, art fairs, and Fashion Week. 

Fall Identity #5: Apple Picking Person

People who live in New York City or the half of California that creates tax revenue for the state and hostile political debate for the rest of the country can base their Fall identity on Apple Picking. Apple Picking is when you rent an entry-level BMW SUV for $200 an hour and drive anywhere from 90 minutes to 2 and a half hours north to take photos in an apple orchard that was founded by city people who wanted to take advantage of people who go Apple Picking. A by-product of this particular Fall identity is a very impractical volume of apples, which will sit on your dining room table as a centerpiece for your next Dinner Party and then be composted when unsightly concave brown blemishes appear. A conversation you might have about Apple Picking will go something like this: 

Person: “What can you tell me that will help me assess you during these frightening two weeks when discussing seasonal travel is cringe?”

You: “I am going Apple Picking this weekend!”

Person: “Ah, so you have a strong aversion to camping but you have an entire wardrobe from Patagonia and highly technical hiking boots for this one day when you performatively pick perfectly good food, destined for compost heaps, from trees that exist solely for urban young people who need to populate their wedding website with couple content or want new dating app photos.”

You: “Yes indeed, and in fact I met the person I’m not exclusively sleeping with on a dating app filled with my photos from Apple Picking last Fall.”

Person: “Nothing says I’m DTF like a good Apple Picking photo.”

[laughter]

Person: “Which apple orchard have you selected for your pre-engagement website photoshoot or, if your relationship is deteriorating, for that one photo on your Raya profile that’s meant to make you seem relatable and wholesome despite the volume of photos of you mostly naked on large boats holding one or more cocktails?”

You: “We selected the one that also sells apple cider donuts, which we will buy and not eat, and extremely expensive apple cider, which we will buy and never drink, because people who drink apple cider are entirely unfuckable. This orchard also had the highest number of reviews from people who appear to be wearing Patagonia vests with hedge fund logos in their Google maps profile photo.”

Person: “Ah yes, I have picked apples at this same orchard, they will make an excellent centerpiece at your next Dinner Party before you compost them at the farmers market.” 

And so it goes, this conversation about you and your Apple Picking persona. If you do not plan on wintering someplace, you can extend this Fall identity well into late October, at which point you can base your identity on holiday parties and either how much you love or dislike your family.  

<><><>  

In this day and age of social media based identities, you can change who are in approximately 8 consecutive stories and a single grid post. So if you try on one of these Fall identities and it doesn’t quite fit, simply archive the grid post and go get some new content that complies with the guidelines in this post. Take care not to be more than 3 of these Fall identities in the same two weeks, because your followers will become confused and mute you, at which point you will cease to exist until you make new friends at a conference, an art fair, Fashion Week, a dinner party, or apple picking.

Share this post with someone who needs a new personality.

#culture #satire #dark humor #social commentary #jokes #essays #comedy #humor #nyc

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BM decompression: reflections of a sparkle pony

“What is the fucking point of a helicopter if it can’t land in mud?” asks Carli of the air around her. I certainly didn’t have an answer. I doubt the blond woman who is somehow playing volleyball with herself in the distant background of the Zoom window did, either. “Like, you’re in tech–invent something, come up with a solution to this problem. DRONES or whatever. We had to walk for two hours in like, fucking quicksand. It’s a miracle we didn’t drown. And then I had to sit in the back of a pickup truck to Gerlach like a ranch hand. And I had to leave like twenty-thousand dollars worth of costumes in the RV, which, who the fuck knows where that is or if we’ll ever it see again.” She closes her eyes, puts both hands on her sternum, and takes a deep breath. And then another. I see the shimmer of a large infinity pool beyond the jumping blond woman, and I watch someone wearing white servant attire briskly cross behind her carrying a tray of beverages. She takes a third breath, opens her eyes and smiles. “It wasn’t the Burn I wanted, but it was the Burn I needed.”

“Where are you now?” I ask. I had spoken with Carli two weeks ago about the market conditions for sparkle ponies, and I was eager to know how she’d fared in the unexpected challenges that defined Burning Man this year.  

“LA,” she says, sounding a bit dispirited. “Decompression is usually in Tahoe or Tofino, but everyone was tired, so we just crashed at Eric’s.” Eric is Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google and a religious Burner, and Decompression is the variable amount of time after Burning Man (or any other recreational experience in harsh conditions that requires a great deal of substance abuse and deep house music) during which people with unlimited free time and resources continue to abuse substances and somewhat shallower deep house in a private, luxurious environment. 

“How long will you be there for?” I ask.

“At least two weeks, maybe longer,” she says. “I really need Decompression this year.” Five very tall men in robes–or maybe capes?–pass behind her carrying armfulls of long, light colored wood. “It’s just a lot to process. There was so much that happened and also didn’t happen. It all just felt so out of control, you know?” 

“But isn’t that the point of Burning Man, to relinquish control?” I ask. 

“No, that’s not the point of Burning Man at all,” she says. “Burning Man is about intention and connection, like, intentional connection. That’s something you can control, and there were a lot of intentional connections that I wanted to make that I didn’t get to make. I missed almost every single one of the best sets outside of our camp. Like, if Wes–sorry, that’s Diplo’s real name-”

“Yeah, I know, I matched with him on Raya-”

“Yeah, same–so if Wes hadn’t been in residence at our camp I wouldn’t have danced, like, at all.” I see her temper rising again. She takes another deep breath. “But it was the Burn I needed, I guess.” A man is walking towards Carli wearing black Wayfarer sunglasses, silk pajamas, and a Cheshire cat grin. 

“What the fuck is this, some kind ‘a interview?” asks Chris Rock. Carli turns to him.

“I’m talking with a journalist who’s talking with influential Burners about their impressions of the playa this year,” she tells him. 

“Well, move the fuck over, I’ve got some impressions,” he says sitting next to her on the couch. He leans in and slides the shades to the top of his head. “Here’s my impression of every lil’ white chick on Saturday morning who some tech dude flew in from LA: whaaaaaa, the generator don’t work and I can’t blow-dry my extensions or make my green smoothie, and the mud’s too deep to ride my e-bike that the tech dude paid for to my boyfriend’s camp for molly and sex.” He laughs. I laugh. She does not. “Alright, y'all have fun with your interview, I’m gonna go watch a bunch of rich white dudes build a statue of a white dude that they’re gonna burn tonight.” Chris walks back towards the volleyball court.   

“You’re burning a man tonight?” I ask. 

“It feels like the right thing to do,” she says. Chris Rock is now playing volleyball with the blond woman. “They’re building it out of palo santo, so it will be extra special and meaningful.” 

“Doesn’t palo santo burn very slowly?” I ask. 

“Not if you douse it with rocket fuel,” says Carli. “Elon is bringing some and a flame thrower for each of us.” This sounds like an exceptionally bad idea. “Everyone thought it was a great idea and a way to like, intentionally get all of our sadness out about how the Burn went down.” Three more tall men in capes–or maybe robes?–pass behind her carrying wood. I see that one of them is Diplo, er, Wes. The unmistakable profile of Elon Musk follows behind them, yelling something that I cannot discern. Carli glances back at them. 

“So what’s your intention for this little Burn?” I ask.

“I want to send good vibes to Carlos,” she says. Her eyes well up and she bites her lower lip, hopefully not particularly hard given the quantity of filler in it. Chris Rock spikes the volleyball (volley ball? Idfk), which hits the blond woman in the nose. He dives under the net to attend to her.

“Who’s Carlos?” I ask gently. 

“One of my favorite playa boyfriends,” says Carli, giving in to tears. Chris Rock is looking at the nose of the blond woman, who appears to be crying as well.

“What happened to him?” I ask. 

“He didn’t make it,” she sobs. I had heard that someone had passed away at Burning Man, and my chest tightens. 

“Oh god, I’m so very sorry,” I reply. “How did it happen?” 

“The back of the truck was too full,” she says, prompting a fresh round of unflattering snorts. “It was him or this totally random chick from Topanga who glommed on to us, and fucking Travis Kalanick chose her.” A tissue box slides in from screen-right courtesy of an arm clad in a staff button down. She takes one, blows into it, and hands the soiled tissue to a disembodied hand. “Thank you,” she says to the member of staff above her. She looks back at the screen. “I threw him the only two Wetnaps I had left and one of my Athletic Greens packets, and you only get like thirty a month. I did what I could.” She puts her face in her hands and sobs a few more times. Her nails are very long and painted in a tie-dye finish. “He wouldn’t have been a fit on Eric’s plane anyway.”

“There weren’t enough seats?” I ask. A member of staff–perhaps the owner of the hand–has run out to the volleyball court with what appears to be a bag of ice for the blond woman. Chris Rock steps back and sort of shrugs.

“I said a fit,” she corrects. “He would have been like, the only normal guy, you know?” As a normal guy, I totally know. “Ok, I’m tired, and I need a nap before tonight, because it’s going to be a lot, so….” 

“Of course, go take your nap. Thanks for talking with me again, Carli,” I say. She blows me a kiss, and I’m left staring at my own face in the Zoom window. I wonder how the blond woman is doing, if her nose is broken.

I wonder how normal people are faring at the moment. I imagine they’re trudging through drying mud in boots that they will absolutely not throw out after helping their neighbors and disassembling their own camps and barely making their commercial flights from Reno back to wherever it is they come from. 

The next day someone sends me a story on Instagram. I see in the still frame half of Chris Rock’s unmistakable face and half of the face of a nondescript white male in chrome goggles. Chris is wearing the same black Wayfarer shades and faded black baseball cap that he wore during his playa exodus, so I figure it’s another version of the same video of him and Diplo–er, Wes escaping the Playa, but the background is lush. I click the video. The frame jerks from the two of them to just Chris, who’s taking a selfie video. 

“Well, we got our motherfuckin Burn in, didn’t we Wes,” says Chris. He pans the camera to Wes, who shakes his head and smirks. Chris pans the camera back to himself. “What do you think would happen if a bunch of trippin’ rich white tech bros who have only ever lit the fuckin’ La Labo candle next to their king sized bed build a statue out of wood, drench that fuckin’ thing in ROCKET FUEL and then light it with twenty flame throwers?” Chris Rock takes off his shades and widens his eyes. “WHOOSH,” he yells. “That’s the sound of a forty or fifty or whatever million dollar house goin’ up in FLAMES.” 

Chris raises the camera above his head, revealing a residential inferno and a hoard of people in robes–er, capes?–following behind him. Among them I spot Carli and several other blond women (one of which has a white bandage on her nose), their extensions blowing in the breeze. 

“The good news is that everyone is fine,” continues Chris Rock, “and everyone set an intention before they set everything on fire, so it isn’t arson if it’s intentional.” Chris Rock laughs and puts his arm around Wes just as the video ends. 

It wasn’t the Burn they wanted, but it was the Burn they needed. I guess.

#burning man #satire #dark comedy #instagram model #social commentary #culture #jokes #essays #humor #dark humor

[quinnlarrabee]

The Sparkle Pony Recession

“I’ve gotten fewer offers this year,” says Carli, a 27-year-old Instagram model, fitness influencer, and TikTok mental health advocate, who is slightly less attractive over Zoom than she is on any of the channels listed on her Linktree, as Zoom’s FaceApp integration is still in R&D. “Like yeah, it’s free, but I may have to fly commercial, and I’m literally sharing a single RV with two girls who I’ve only seen on TikTok–and they don’t even have as many followers as me.” Lingering supply chain issues, tech devaluations, and the end of crypto have dealt the broader Burning Man economy a number of blows the past two years, but they have landed the hardest on its most vulnerable commodity: Sparkle Ponies. 

“2022 was how it should be,” continues Carli. “I had two RVs at two different camps and a hepa filter AC yurt at another camp for my mushroom journeys.” Her phone vibrates. She opens it, raises a finger and types furiously. A full two minutes of silence pass. She lifts her head, rolls her eyes, and smiles briefly with only her mouth. “One of my sponsors,” she says, and makes a masturbatory gesture with her hand. “Anyway, people on the outside don’t get it. They think it’s just one big party, but like, it’s a job. I got paid to show up at each of the camps because my aesthetic helps build their brand and better compete with Robot Heart for IG exposure. Appropriate accommodations, cash compensation, an outfit budget, and private travel are what I expect. It’s a fair value exchange,” she says earnestly. “The Burn is more than just a festival, it’s a part of my livelihood, and 2023 is not looking good.” This dispirited sentiment is ubiquitous among younger, architecturally attractive, sort-of-single (mostly) women who therapeutically consume psychedelics and much older men, are never not showing midriff, and always expect to be hosted by the best camps at Burning Man (and everywhere else in the world).

For those of you who haven’t attended Burning Man (hi, grandma! RIP!), you may be unfamiliar with the term sparkle pony. 

A Burning Man sparkle pony is a younger-looking, typically (but not always) female person (but not always) whose fungible currency is her outer appearance, who travels to Blackrock City with nothing more than a toothbrush, a spare thong (but not always), and two exceptionally large aluminum wheeler suitcases stuffed with costumes that are almost too large for any means of conveyance but a cargo ship. Sparkle ponies emerged from primordial vibes when Burning Man commercialized, scaled and became an expensive, coveted experience that younger, architecturally attractive (mostly) women wanted to attend but did not want to pay for. Much in the same way that architecturally attractive (mostly) women are able to source complimentary food and beverages from unattractive strangers in restaurants and bars, they began showing up at Burning Man without practical supplies or any kind of skill, clad only in sequined fur bikinis, in the hopes of being taken in by a camp (which is sort of like neighborhood, a cult, and a CPG brand all rolled into one) that wants to raise its vibe by increasing its population of architecturally attractive (mostly) women. 

More than any other component of the Burning Man ecosystem, sparkle ponies understand that Burning Man is a gift-based economy and expect everything at Burning Man to be gifted to them. 

Sparkle ponies exponentially increased in number and entitlement between 2018 and 2022 when the volume of dry powder in venture capital exploded and tech valuations became hilarious. Newly wealthy, early-middle aged men who wanted to be towered over and findomed by mostly naked, architecturally attractive (mostly) women in sequined fur bikinis and white, platform boots wearing the identical shiny Steampunk captains hat and mirrored heart sunglasses gifted to them by one of the aging 6’5 Robot Heart guys, who are never not just a bit frustrated by the quality of the sound at every DJ set and are perpetually tuning the speakers on their art car (“the Stradivarius”), began sponsoring multiple sparkle ponies in the hopes of winning the ephemeral physical affection of one or more of them. 

“It’s a funnel,” explained Tyler Kipperton, who founded a pre-revenue autonomous net-zero generative AI rocket company and achieved partial liquidity through a secondary offering that was completed in early September, 2022 with a family office in Europe and a holding company in China. “I figure if I fly in thirty sparkle ponies and put the best ten of them into an RV with an AC unit that doesn’t have a hepa filter, at least three of them will move in with me, and one of them will be into me when she sees me in black eyeliner and my Caravana Aztec poncho.” Tyler’s phone vibrates. He opens it, raises a finger and types furiously. A full three minutes of silence go by. He lifts his head, rolls his eyes, and smiles briefly with only his mouth. “One of my investors,” he says, and makes a masturbatory gesture with his hand. “I’m going to slay a whole heard of ponies at this Burn,” he says earnestly. “I am optimizing the shit out of my sparkle pony funnel.”

Tyler’s shrewd equation perfectly illustrates the economic problem: the number of viable sponsors has declined, but the number of sparkle ponies in a typical sponsor’s top of funnel has increased, which means that most sparkle ponies will be un-camped this year at Burning Man. 

“I get that people are upset about homeless - sorry, unhoused people in New York and California,” says a sparkle pony who–for the sake of anonymity–goes by her Playa name, Glittabug, “but the weather in these places is pretty chill, and there are homeless shelters. What’s going to happen to me at Burning Man if a camp can’t find me? There aren’t homeless shelters in Blackrock City, and it’s super hot and sunny during the day, and I’ve heard that the nights used to be really kind of cold,” she says with grave concern. “I think this is the most urgent housing crisis in the country right now. Why isn’t President Kennedy talking about this? Where’s our bailout?” 

“These young (mostly) women don’t have a firm enough grasp on basic economics,” observes Janet Yellin, secretary of the treasury for the United States of America. “Rather than trying to change the reality that there are fewer buyers in the economy, they should be focused on increasing their curb appeal so that the remaining buyers – Sergey Brin, Elon Musk and Eric Schmidt – select them during golden hour at Distrikt’s first set on the last build day, which is when sparkle ponies typically arrive.” 

Some of the more savvy sparkle ponies have taken the challenge and are upping their game by raising the height of their white platform boots, increasing the density of sequins on their bikinis, and adding extensions to their hair extensions. 

“We’re seeing a veritable sparkle pony arms race,” says Lloyd Austin, secretary of defense for the United States of America. “There is a run on glue guns at Blick Art Supplies in New York City, Miami, and California, and the crafting aisle is entirely empty at Walmart in Austin,” he said. “The nation’s sequin reserves are at their lowest since 1973.” 

“I’m going to outshine them all,” says Glittabug emphatically. “No one will sparkle more than me during golden hour on the last build day. “The thing about Sergey is that he’s like, really smart, but he’s basically just a magpie,” she continues. “You know those birds that like, pick up shiny objects and bring them back to their nest? That’s what he does. Only he brings them to his boat.” Glittabug hasn’t looked up from her glue gun, which she is using to add sequins to the rear string of her thong that will be entirely swallowed by her ass cheeks. “I will blind that motherfucker into setting me up in an RV with a hepa filter AC unit.”

“Our satellites have already picked up light reflecting from the bikini tops that are currently being beta-tested by sparkle ponies in Venice Beach, Las Vegas and Williamsburg,” says Secretary Austin. “Given the increase of UFO activity, we are actively concerned that the light reflected off of sparkle ponies could attract non-Earth entities and spark – er, no pun intended – an interstellar conflict.” 

Some Silicon Valley entrepreneurs see the sparkle pony arms race as less of a threat and more of an opportunity. 

“I think every sparkle pony has the potential to be an energy source,” says Elon Musk. “We can convert them from a resource suck – er, no pun intended, who just lay around complaining about the absence of raw milk and asking people to take photos of them at golden hour, into a value add,” he says, squinting his eyes and looking up at the sky to showcase his enhanced jawline, the way he does when announcing The Next Big Thing and making excuses for the poor performance of one of his companies. “Power generation is an issue on the Playa. Those generators are fucking loud and filthy. We can turn sparkle ponies into a mobile, dynamic power grid, where each one is covered in tiny reflective Solar City solar panels and given a Tesla battery backpack to wear. When they go to bed at sunrise, everyone just plugs into a sparkle pony.” Elon smiles at his use of double entendre. “It’s a win-win-win,” he continues. “sparkle ponies get space in an RV with a hepa filter AC unit, camps get clean energy generated by architecturally attractive (mostly) women, and Burning Man’s reputation among the 1% as a consumptive, filthy, hedonistic, drug-fueled orgy for the .01 percent is slightly mitigated.” At this point Elon looks even higher up into the sky, precariously stretching the skin on his protruding jawline. “Fuck–if we clustered them together as a solar array, we could literally make Burning Man a net zero event.” Elon abruptly ends our Zoom call. 

A notification pops up on Twitter–er, X from @elonmusk. 

“ATTENTION ALL #SPARKLEPONIES. I will fly you to #burningman from #teterboro, #vannuys or #haywardexecutive and set you up in an RV with a #hepafilter AC unit that is stocked with #rawmilk at a #turnkey camp with bottomless #belugacaviar. We need your sparkle to power the Burn!” 

Within seconds, Eric Schmidt re-posts Elon’s tweet (Xeet?), his first social media utterance in nearly a year, with the caption, “same offer + 24 hr hair and make-up staff and invite to my decompression party in LA. DM me.” 

Seconds after that, Barbie’s official IG channel posts the following:

“Attention younger-looking architecturally attractive (mostly) women who want to attend Burning Man but do not wish to pay for it! You are the true Barbies of the world, and we have dedicated 1% of the proceeds of the feature-length commercial that Mattel funded to create a homeless camp for sparkle ponies who have no Playa sponsor. Our camp, called Pink Plastica, will provide RVs with hepa filter AC units, all the raw milk you can consume, and unlimited bio-degradable glitter to every single younger-looking architecturally attractive (mostly) woman we select from our funnel of applicants. The only requirement is that, in addition to your white platform boots and heart-shaped Robot Heart sunglasses gifted to you by a very tall bald retired arms dealer, you wear the pink sugarpuss cowgirl outfit featured in Barbie, which we will gift you for your use during your time at Pink Plastica. To redeem this offer, simply scan the barcode on the inside of a new Barbie doll box and upload a selfie with your Instagram handle. If selected, we will DM you within 5 days with a tail number and the coordinates of Pink Plastica. Shine on, sparkle ponies!”

“We have not seen a bailout of this magnitude since 2008,” says Janet Yellin. “It seems we will narrowly avoid a sparkle pony recession thanks to predatory wealth and opportunistic consumer marketing,” she continues. 

“I’m going to accept each of the three offers,” says Glittabug. “Burning Man wouldn’t feel right without three camps,” she says as she scans the barcode on the inside of the Barbie box she has torn open. She tousels her hair, turns on her ring light, makes a fish gape expression with her mouth, and takes a selfie. “And Pink Plastica sounds like a dope place for a mushroom journey.” She smiles briefly with only her mouth. “Will you hand me that glue gun?” she asks.

I hand her the glue gun and watch her add sequins on top of the sequins on her sequined Steampunk captains hat. I imagine what her life must be like: free food and illicit substances, constant adoration and coddling laced with only trace amounts of disdain, and absolutely no responsibilities other than her skin and fitness regimen. Relative to people who attend Burning Man and actually contribute their creativity, physical labor or financial resources, sparkle ponies, who contribute nothing but sparkle, have it pretty good for completely replaceable depreciating assets. I wonder for a moment what it would feel like to get a text with a time and a tail number from a doughy, elderly tech bro who would cart me around the Playa on his e-bike like a trinket and feed me and eight other sparkle ponies frozen grapes injected with molly water.

“Will you hand me the Barbie box with the barcode, and could I borrow your ring light?” I ask as I practice my fish gape. Sparkle ponies are mostly women, but not only women.

Is someone you love a sparkle pony or sparkle pony sponsor? Share this with them as a helpful resource.

#burning man #sparkle pony #satire #dark humor #comedy #culture #jokes #meme humor #social commentary

[quinnlarrabee]

A Guide to Italy for Brooklyn Hipsters

Younger adults with US passports who identify not as Americans but as New Yorkers, Californians or Global Citizens have made Italy their official summer destination for remote-not-working, consuming illicit substances and expanding the boundaries of their unconventional relationships. While Italy has always had a gravitational pull for people who wear large sunglasses and refer to themselves as foodies at other people’s dinner parties, travel to the peninsula that’s shaped like a thigh boot kicking a pigeon has spiked within a certain US demographic as a result of the rise in elective unemployment and the realization that the food in Portugal—improved by vanity restaurants opened by post-work expats who relocated for the vanity passport—is still largely inedible. If you or someone you know uses alternative pronouns or has heard of Burning Man, it is likely that you will one day find yourself in Italy during the Summer months of April to mid-November for an indeterminate amount of time. This guide will ensure the peakness of the peak experience you seek out in the country responsible for pesto, pappardelle, and the Pope.

Preparations

Italy runs on the chips of American credit cards, and as such, the entry requirements are perfunctory. The only visa you need is your Chase Sapphire, and the only reason the border guard will stamp your entirely optional passport is to channel his disdain when you cheerfully mispronounce, “Ciao!” On the off chance you’re considering buying a round trip flight, this is ill-advised. ­It is inevitable that you will arrive and discover via Instagram stories (or Threads!) or an indiscreet comment in a WhatsApp group that a fringe member of your Burning Man camp (who considers you a fringe member of their Burning Man camp) is in Ischia/Capri/Como hosting a party to which you are not invited—but will weasel your way into by claiming to have “Unicorn K”—and due to FOMO and missing your flight because you slept through the alarm that you will be too high to actually set, you will end up changing your return flight so many times that the change fees exceed the average per capita income of North Dakota. 

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Packing for Italy is very easy, because you should bring only your flat-brimmed summer weight hat, amulet(s) gifted to you on Playa, and face chain. Everything else should be bought in Italy so that you can tell people back home that you bought that deadstock silk, abstract-flowered, vintage deepest of v-neck Miu Miu in Italy. 

For a certain kind of traveler, Italian fashion is third only to brightly colored rags sourced from the mercado in Tepoztlan and jeans made of selvedge denim the texture of Communist cement tailored by That Guy in the Shibuya district of Tokyo. If the label says Made in Italy, and the price tag gives your parents heart palpitations when they see it deducted from your trust, you can be absolutely certain that there is a one in twelve chance the garment you’re considering was indeed assembled by the adult hands of someone employed by the fourth generation of an actual Italian family in the factory that looks like a 1950s film set pictured in sepia on their .it website with materials produced by people employed by other (closely related) Italian families. However, you will almost certainly end up purchasing garments that are not actually made in the factory sketched on the tiny pamphlet attached to the label bearing a hand-written price. Despite this fashion fraud, any garment that says Made in Italy but is not actually made in Italy will still look great on you before it disintegrates during your first heavy sweat, because the Latvian children who made it out of Chinese fabric have even smaller hands than the Indonesian children who make clothing that does not say Made in Italy.

Language

As a “citizen of the world” who embodies American entitlement (a descendent of the British superiority complex), you are intrinsically international without speaking any foreign languages because of the geographic range of Saved Places on your Raya profile, the variety of countries in which you have reliable drivers and dealers, and the volume of foreign transaction fees that appear on your monthly Amex statement. The only Italian word you know is the pinched-fingers emoji, which you use every time you post a shot of Carbone’s spicy rigatoni. Luckily, most Italians over the age of 45 begrudgingly speak at least five words of English, and Italians under the age of 45 write best-selling romance novels in English, which they then translate themselves into 9 other languages. There is, however, one word that you should learn so that your travel posse will think that you are fluent when you use it during your very spotty call with Laura (pronounced LAO-rah), your Airbnb host, to complain that the key doesn’t open the door to the villa: (It does, you’re just super high.)

Ciao

This word to Italians is what vibe is to you: it is every third word spoken, and it means anything, everything and nothing at all. Depending on the time of day and context, ciao might mean hello, goodbye, and nice try dickface. Only if you were born in a 17th century villa in the Italian countryside (owned by your family for at least 600 years), make pesto from home-grown basil and pignoli nuts, and own a vintage green/white Vespa with a faded Italia FIGC football sticker above the wheel well will you ever pronounce ciao correctly, but you will sound cooler to your friends if you at least try not to sound like a Will Farrell character. Ciao appears to the naked eye to be a monosyllabic word, but it is actually a little more than three syllables. This is the phonetic spelling and intonation:

Since every single one of you is an accomplished DJ, you will recognize that the first syllable is a C, the second is an B, and the third is a G. Ciao is sung, not spoken. This is why all Italians are opera singers and most opera singers are Italian: one must literally sing every third word.

Other common words for the more ambitious include: allora (AHLL-or-ah), which means let’s go, what’s up, whatever, fuckit, and YOLO, and occhei (UH-kaiEEEE), which, depending on the context, can simply mean ok, or it can be a very chill way of telling someone to go fuck themselves.

Currency

Much to the chagrin of Italians, who still mourn the death of the long defunct Lira­–because being Italian means you must always be mourning something (the loss of a football match or a horse race, the last sip of your first coffee, your 45-year-old son moving out of your house to live with his wife and children, etc.)–Italy’s currency is the Euro. The cost of food, clothing, and Aperol spritzes is reasonable compared to socialist countries such as France and Sweden, isolationist monarchies such as the United Kingdom and Norway, and countries that exist purely to store and launder ill-begotten wealth such as Liechtenstein and Switzerland. 

To add more suspense to every purchase, Italy has a charming tradition of adding tiny, almost imperceptible incremental fees on top of the very perceptible EU VAT. One will overtly or tacitly agree to a certain price and then find that several creative fees have been added to the sum, much like how the cost of a rental car is enhanced by dozens of line items (airport fee, parking fee, moving fee, profit margin fee, creative accounting fee, incremental revenue directly to the private equity company that owns the rental car company fee, etc.). For example, you will be charged a €3 fee per person for sitting at the table on top of the cost of food and drink, which are the only reasons you are sitting at a table in a restaurant. This annoyance fee is called the coperto. Loosely translated into English, coperto means don’t ask me about my business. If you ask your server what this “coperto” is on your check, they will stare right into your eyes, channel their inner Cosimo de Medici, and tell you unapologetically that, “eet’s for seetting at-a tha table.”  

Climate

Because finding silk kimonos, sheer cotton tunics, and matching pastel chiffon tops and bottoms in winter weight is challenging, and getting high on chartered catamarans and retrofitted fishing boats equipped with Funktion One (or a Soundboks if you’re on a budget) speakers isn’t as fun when it’s cold, you will most likely only ever travel to Italy during the summer months. Summertime weather in all but the northern mountain regions of Italy is identical to that of Tulum, so it is helpful to bring your rose quartz amulet from Tulum to cool your heart chakra. The temperature ranges from a breezy 24 degrees just before the sun rises to a not as breezy 40 degrees, which remains consistent from sunrise until about an hour before sunrise. 

Air conditioning has not yet been invented in Italy or anywhere else in Europe, but fans are highly effective at moving warm air from the fan to your body. It is customary in Italy for people to compensate for the absence of air conditioning by eating spectacular volumes of gelato. Gelato is basically ice cream without the obesity stigma, and as such can be eaten multiple times every day. Unlike ice cream, gelato is only eaten in public and while standing in dense clusters right in the middle of streets and sidewalks.

For people who have read Peter Attia’s book or listen to Dr. Huberman’s podcast and have thus sworn off processed sugar, dairy, and joy: an alternative to consuming 4,000 calories of frozen lactose is a dip in one the many swimming pools that are found behind private villas owned by American movie stars, or a brisk swim in the ocean, accessible from the soaring, jagged cliffs that surround the entire country except for that tiny patch of sand in Calabria. For those who follow Wim Hoff or are Wim Hoff and use cold plunges as both a conversation starter in Aspen/Mill Valley as well as a personality type, do not fret. Simply find a Loro Piana boutique and walk inside, and you will feel like you are back home in your VC/PE dad’s $15k medical-grade cold plunge. The air in these boutiques is just a bit colder than a sushi fridge and not quite warm enough to prevent the occasional hypothermic cardiac arrest of staff. While Brunello Cuccinelli keeps their stores cool with the hearts of their customers, Loro Piana has the air in their shops flown in daily from Antarctica, which is why you can feel justified purchasing a t-shirt for €840.  

Food

The food in Italy is even better than the Fettuccini Alfredo invented by Olive Garden for people in Texas, co-opted by Lean Cuisine for people in West Virginia, and bottled by Bertolli for people in Wisconsin. If you are vegetarian, you can consume chicken and fish, as they are not considered meat in Italy. If you are vegan, you can choose from the country’s many different preparations of nightshade vegetables, which your nutritionist forbade you to eat because forbidding nightshades is fashionable. If you ask for a “salad,” you will receive a plate of sliced zucchini, and if you ask for an insalata mista, you will be presented with a bowl of sliced eggplant, zucchini, and mushrooms with slabs of parmesan flanked by exceptionally large bottles of olive oil and balsamic vinegar (made by the restauranteur’s uncle) along with monstrous olivewood salt and pepper grinders, which are multifunctional and utilized by the police for crowd control after football matches.

Italy is of course famous for its pasta, which is served al dente. Al dente loosely translates in American English to half-bat on the East Coast and half-chub on the West Coast. The range of pastas is dizzying, and even the most annoying eater will certainly find a dish that they can post in their Instagram stories. That said, most of you will not have any kind of pasta experience in Italy, because you have not consumed gluten since the Clinton administration. For the three of you who are actually gluten-intolerant, the majority of people with clinical dietary sensitivities find that native Italian wheat products do not arouse the bloating and inflammation caused by American wheat (which is made of soy beans and pork rinds). People whose gluten intolerance is caused only by an intolerance of being tolerable will find that eating wheat products in Italy still makes them feel less special.

Coffee

While most machinery in Italy operates sporadically and with the lethargy of a trust fund kid at Trinity or St Andrews, espresso (no x) machines operate flawlessly all over the country despite the fact that most machines predate WWII and are operated by men who predate WWI. It is known that Italy lacks a space program because the top designers and engineers matriculate to espresso machine companies, with Scuderia Ferrari a distant second choice of employer. ExpressoEspresso machine companies employ 1 in 4 people in Italy and the sale of these machines to Brooklyn and Venice Beach coffee shops are responsible for 23% of the trade between Italy and the US.

Despite the quality of the coffee, Brooklyn-based travelers will be frightened to find that Italy has not yet invented alternative milk. Along with your peptides, adaptogens and nasal k, travelers from Williamsburg and the more expensive parts of Greenpoint and Bushwick, Venice Beach and the US protectorate Portland, Oregon are permitted to bring their own alternative milk to Italy. Any barista will always happily take your special milk and froth it for you with their steam wand, which in Italian is called a cazzo. You will find that coffees in Italy are significantly smaller than their American counterparts. While the average cappuccino in the United States is one pint, Italian cappuccinos are just shy of a thimble. This is not only the reason for their accessible price – between €1 to €2 – but also why one can have twenty to thirty a day without becoming schizophrenic. Note that to order a cappuccino after 11am in Italy you will need to show a valid American ID or a note from your doctor explaining that you suffer from osteopenia due to calcium deficiency.

Wellness

Athletic travelers who don’t consider pasta a sport will find several gyms in the country. Two of them are in converted hotel rooms at Sheraton Four Points in Milan and Rome, and one of them is in the basement of a retired porn star’s home about an hour outside of Turin. Gym attire is somewhat more conservative in Italy. Women typically wear clothing, and men wear jeans and either a silk polo shirt or a linen button down with a braided belt and loafers without socks. (A reminder that cold plunges can conveniently be found in any Loro Piana boutique and the entire country is an infrared sauna from early April until mid-November.)

Traveling within Italy

There are countless delightful places in Italy to which you will be drawn. These places include Milan (for 7 hours of pre-travel shopping), Florence (to post a photo of David with a wistful, virtue-signaling remark about Michaelangelo’s repressed sexuality), Forte dei Marmi, Capri, Como, Puglia (POO-lee-ah), Stintino on Sardinia, Cefalu on Sicily, and, for those with staggering financial abundance who settle for nothing but the finest Fettuccine Alfredo, Il Pelicano. As such, it is essential to understand the nuances of mobility in Italy. Fundamental to this is the time conversion, which has nothing to do with the 6-hour / 11-hour time difference: in Italy, one US minute is equal to approximately 1 minute and 93 seconds. For example, when an Italian tells you that your table will be ready in 10 minutes, this means the table will be ready in just under 30 minutes. When you tell an Italian to meet you for a 7pm dinner, they will make a mental note that you must have a serious health problem, and will arrive for your 7pm dinner—entirely free of contrition—promptly at 8:25pm.

The only entities in Italy that operate on a universal timetable are the trains, which – unless canceled for no apparent reason – are never late. You will miss every train you book in Italy. This is because Uber has not yet been invented in Italy. AppTaxi, the Italian taxi-hailing app does not work because the drivers of the 5 taxis in the country carry Nokia flip phones. If you try to walk from your hotel to the train station, which in literally every Italian city is never more than 12 minutes on foot from your Airbnb, you will most likely suffer from heat stroke. On the off chance you make your train, you will be seated next to an older Italian businessman who works (works!) in middle management for a trucking company, refuses to speak any of the 5 words of English he knows, and knows that American millennials are the reason the world is terrible.

 Given the complexities of train travel, you will be tempted to rent a car. As a result of inflation and you, daily car rental rates hover between €400 and €900 for a micro-sub-compact vehicle, which is suitable for a polycule of five with five RIMOWA or Tumi rollers, three garment bags, and two designer hat cases. When you forget your dry cleaning bags and vapes at the AirBnB, Laura will gladly ship them to whomever buys them on eBay. Drivers drive on the right side of the street unless they are in a disagreement with another driver. Be advised that in order to give police sufficient time to drink espresso all day at gas stations, invisible speed cameras are placed every twelve feet on every road in the country. If you slip over the speed limit for more than six American seconds, your parents in Connecticut will receive a fine of €3,000 long before they receive your postcard.

Italian Romance

There is really only one rule in Italy when it comes to romantic pursuits. If you are a male, do not make the mistake of hitting on a woman who is with a guy. The more attractive the woman is, the more likely you will be followed to the bathroom by her male partner and not come out. The more attractive the guy is, the more likely you will be followed to the bathroom and asked in tears why you didn’t hit on him.  

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You may be tempted to follow your DJ friends (who are following your credit card) from one summer music festival to the next and leave Italy to the Fettuccine Alfredo crowd, but this is kind of like buying IKEA instead of an antique. You know what you’re going to get with an IKEA product—it takes a lot of sweaty effort to put it together, it doesn’t look nearly as good IRL as it does online, and you end up with buyer’s remorse and a weird rash. Sure, an antique isn’t practical, and it doesn’t really work, but it’s pretty and it has a story that people will at least pretend to want to hear. This kind of sums up Italy today: beautifully designed, and nothing really works (except for the espresso machines), but people would rather hear about your multiple gelato orgasms than Solomun’s set at Destino Ibiza, because they saw him at Pacha last week. 

#culture #dark humor #comedy #satire #social commentary #jokes #essays #italy #travel #hipsters #brooklyn

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Palo santo 101

Before you click play on the audio recording and blithely ignore the written guide, be sure to review the important science-based charts and insight-rich visuals sprinkled throughout it.

If you’ve ever walked into a party hosted by someone under 40 in Brooklyn, Lisbon, California, Condesa or Roma Norte, or Venice Beach and not smelled palo santo, then you probably had covid. Over the past decade palo santo has become the official scent of good vibes. It is an olfactory assurance for anyone who recognizes the scent that conversation will be limited to polyamory, regional burns, and adaptogen supplements. Despite the fact that no one ever doesn’t want to smell palo santo, it’s important to know when to use it and when to relegate your surroundings to their default odor. This guide will ensure that you know exactly how to make the most of the palo santo you carry in the shoulder bag you purchased at the Sant Jordi flea market in Ibiza during the off-season.

Like most cultural appropriations, no one who burns palo santo knows what it is, where it came from, why they use it, or why it’s even called palo santo. Let’s uncover the facts. 

Bursera Graveolens is a tree native to the dry tropical forests of South America. Its discovery by white people dates back to 1972 at a now defunct swingers resort in Quito, Ecuador, where a guest from New Jersey named Paulo Santonicola noticed a stick with a burning ember on the end of giving off a fetid, wispy trail of smoke. He pointed at the burning stick and asked the guy holding the cocaine tray, who would now be called a consent educator, “por que?”

“Plaga,” he replied, and gnashed his teeth and made a flapping-wing motion with the hand not holding the cocaine tray. Paulo brought the wood back to his central New Jersey home as a last-ditch effort to ward off the deer that were eating the tomatoes in his garden. He started burning the wood around the clock in the steamy summer of 1972, during which he and his girlfriend hosted dozens of play parties. 

“I didn’t care if people at my parties had a problem with the smell,” recounted Paulo. “Those frickin’ deer were jumping my fence and chewing through wire to eat my tomatoes. When I caught a whiff of that wood down in Quito, I thought, ‘they won’t come near my garden if I burn this shit.’” 

Mr. Santonicola had achieved some level of notoriety in the adult film industry in the early 1970s, and his parties were well attended by neo-hippies, the disco elite and the first generation of yoga professionals. Over the course of the summer, a pavlovian association formed between the scent of the wood and casual sex, and his friends started asking him for sticks so that they could take the vibe home with them. At the sunset of his porn career, he saw an opportunity not only to rebrand his legacy, distancing himself from grainy adult films with problematic titles, but also to make oceans of cash: import the wood and sell it through his readymade network of yoga instructors under his stage name, Palo Santo. 

Palo santo’s ubiquity today grew from its two foundational use cases: repelling pests and masking the odor of too many naked bodies in poorly ventilated New Jersey basements. Palo santo is still used today as a repellent of sorts to ward off bad vibes and people who do not use the word vibe in place of most nouns at the end of a question, such as scene, weather, temperature, culture, menu, rules, culture, law, opinion, suggested attire, relationship status, sexual proclivity, net worth and so on. It is also still used during group sex, but only when the group sex is intentional and/or ceremonial. There are many other ways, however, that you can improve the vibes of the world through the smoke of this wood, which was recently added to IUCN’s Red List of “near threatened” species, making it even more important to burn palo santo as a way of calling attention to its growing scarcity. 

Airplanes 

For a brief, blissful period during the pandemic, the only people who traveled were intrepid hipsters who had already contracted the virus and been instrumental in scaling it to global significance through music festivals, long-distance polycules and global nomadism. Commercial airlines from the spring of 2020 through the summer of 2021 were basically private air travel for people who know to always ask if party buffet chocolate is psycho-active. Air travel today is a much lower vibration experience, and it’s important that assertive restorative steps be taken by conscious travelers to make flying chill again. Hanging a dreamcatcher from the back of the seat in front of you and burning palo santo on the tray table is a great way of making a public flight experience feel more private. Be sure to light your palo santo only after the aircraft reaches cruising altitude, because tray tables must be stowed until then. 

Other people’s parties

Not everyone with whom you may socialize is aware of how critical palo santo is to creating and maintaining a vibe. Some less experienced hosts try to make do with incense from India, Japan or other countries that have been annexed by Brooklyn or with candles from La Labo, and it may be up to you to rescue the vibe. Back when people consumed alcohol, bringing a nice bottle of wine was a way of showing a host your appreciation, but these days bringing palo santo, immediately lighting it and waving the stick around like Harry Potter on quaaludes is the optimal way of saying thank-you to someone who has invited you into their home.  

Hospitals

While palo santo has not been proven by any form of science to deliver the healing benefits touted by people who sell or use palo santo, be assured that it does all of the things people say it does. Burning palo santo creates smoke, and smoke is pretty to watch and - like cardiovascular exercise - creates a healthy challenge for your lungs. Medical facilities are places where people go to heal, and bringing palo santo to visit a recovering friend is a beautiful contribution to not only their journey back to health but also the recovery of every patient within a twenty to fifty foot radius. 

Conscious uncoupling ceremonies

Modifying your relationship trajectory in a direction that disappoints the person you are with might seem like a low vibe experience, but you can make it a high vibe experience by burning palo santo. While explaining that the rules that you set last week for your ENM pairing have become too confining, burning palo santo will deflect negative reactions and in some cases even seduce your partner into being amenable to a situationship that has absolutely no structure, rules or expectations. This can add to your sexual abundance and also serve as a pillar in your temple of confidence that helps you acquire new lovers at floor parties. If, rather than just undefining the relationship, you are certain there is no future with the person to whom you have exposed particles of burning wood, palo santo will prevent your ex-partner from making an opposing case or lingering too long after you have had uncoupling sex. 

During sex with someone you don’t want to fall in love with you

In a rare moment of cultural relevance, Science has proven that pheromones strengthen the bonds of attraction between two or many more people during sexual activity. Sometimes, though, it is undesirable to strengthen bonds with a sex partner. Sometimes, it is optimal to maintain a totally impartial, unattached, stoic distance between the person who you are inside / is inside of you, given that attraction can lead to unintended expectations. Burning palo santo is an excellent way of muting the potency of pheromones, leveling the olfactory playing field and creating a piney through-line for all the people participating in a sexual experience. 

Any kind of intentional wellness space

Because the smell of palo santo is so potent and distracting, burning it during intentional experiences (e.g. yoga, journaling, meditation, tantra classes, tantric sex, facials or any kind of PRP therapy) compels participants to step up their intention-setting efforts. It forces deep focus and concentration, kind of like how the deafening emo whines of RY X at a RY X concert force you to lean in, cock your head and make that weird squinty-eyed, mouth-agape listening face to be able to hear the unsolicited story of how literally anyone you happen to be standing next to was in an intentional polyamorous relationship with RY X.

Ancient actually sacred genuinely authentic real cultural events that were not invented by white people to extract money from other white people

Many people who attend Burning Man have begun to explore other intentional gatherings outside of Nevada that don’t involve metallic gold body paint. Some of these gatherings are thousands of years old and are led by people who have trained their entire lives to uphold traditions that have been passed down for generations within their culture. Particularly if a gathering takes place in its country of origin (rather than being exported, diluted and branded, like an ethnic fast food franchise), you may encounter native smells that don’t smell like palo santo. In these cases, it is not only permissible but even advisable to add palo santo to everyone’s experience, which you have probably been very reluctantly allowed to attend. Burning palo santo will communicate to the religious or cultural leaders of the gathering that you are on their level and (despite having never read anything about the gathering other than first few words of the top Google result you saw while standing on the Premier Access line into your Delta flight at JFK / LAX / SFO) have a deep respect for whatever they are chanting in a language that you cannot understand while you record the most intensely sacred moments for the Instagram story that you will post at the appropriate time in your home time zone so that everyone will know that you are an internationally intentionally spiritual person who gets access to authentic cultural events. 

Despite its countless unproven benefits and its universal appeal within a very small circle, there are certain times when palo santo should not be burned. Palo santo can trigger flashbacks for people who first encountered the scent of it during acid trips. If someone walks into your container, smells the palo santo you’re burning and begins behaving erratically, just ask them to immediately return to their own container, lest they harsh the vibe you’re cultivating. The only other times that do not call for burning palo santo are when you’re alone, and no one else will see you lighting the stick and waving it around the room, bringing it within inches of everyone’s face whether they’ve invited it or not, while making awkwardly long eye contact with them, nothing but the winding trail of smoke in front of your your vulnerable gaze, thus communicating to them that you are a spiritually endowed person and care deeply about them knowing that you are a spiritually endowed person. So, a helpful rule of thumb is this: as with masturbation, you should always and only be burning palo santo when someone is watching, otherwise what’s the point.

#comedy #satire #dark humor #culture #burning man #essays #hipster #palo santo #woo woo

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Do you work?

“Do you work?”

I looked to my right at the person who asked me this question, which sounded like a typo. He was around 28, tall with a messy head of brown hair and blue eyes, and he was wearing a perfectly fitted dark blue suit with a faintly pink shirt barely buttoned to his navel, a thin decorative scarf, a gold pinky ring, and a watch that could fund the average midwestern couple’s retirement. He was looking askance at me – peering, really – and seemed bored.

Given the context, his question was reasonable.

For a stretch in the mid-aughts I accidentally ran around New York City almost exclusively with fashion editors, Upper East Side trust fund kids and European nobility. During this brief, surreal window into an alternate universe I received fuckoff-sized paper invitations to museum galas, found myself on the guest lists of the most exclusive clubs (Beatrice, Double 7, and Bungalow 8), and humored a lot of fraught conversations in Spring and Fall about where people were summering and wintering, which were new verbs in my plebeian vocabulary. I never had to break stride to walk through any door preceded by a line or velvet ropes, because I was walking in behind people who had names that were preceded by hereditary titles, immortalized in social registers, and printed on the mastheads of then important but now irrelevant publications. I don’t quite know how it happened, but suddenly no one in my entire social circle really did anything but attend.

These were people who don’t work (PWDW, pronounced pee-dub-dee-dub).

The bored toff and I were seated next to one another at a dinner in the subterranean wine cellar of a very buzzy, flash-in-the-pan restaurant on the Lower East Side, which at the time was chic and favored by the jetset because it was still an overlooked, underdeveloped home to other jetsetters pretending to be poor artists. Among the dozen or so people around the table were a few leggy, bright-young-thing Vogue editors who lived off of bottomless expense accounts, but most of the guests were Counts and Barons and Ladies from Europe and the UK. It was like the United Nations for landed gentry. They were of the variety of restless, angsty rich children who in their mid-twenties leave behind their medals and sashes and ride into New York City on the magnetic strips of their parents’ debit cards to befriend DJs, abuse drugs, and have a lot of sex until their family sends a prim attaché to quietly fetch them from rehab or, worse, extract them from an inappropriate relationship. Funded by heaps of ill-begotten aristocratic wealth and powered by nouveau socialite influence, the dinner was a perfectly balanced sycophantic ecosystem.

I felt sorely out of place. My inseam is barely 32 inches after yoga, my family doesn’t have a coat of arms or a castle, and back then, the only thing I attended with regularity was an office where I worked.

This brings me back to the essential question, which sounded like, d’jooWEHK?

In the only two and a half syllables that he uttered at me, I could hear in his accent where he sat in the House of Windsor’s extended family tree: a branch far enough from duty to be making small talk with me at 10pm on a Tuesday night in NYC, but close enough to be wary of who he was seated next to. I decided there was only one direction to take this conversation.

“God, no,” I said, looking slightly away from him, furrowing my brow just a bit and lacing my two-word response with a touch of disgust. I took care not to expend more energy answering the question than he had expended asking it. People whose generational wealth and privilege have spared them the drudgery of working for a living ironically speak as if they are perpetually exhausted—as if every word that emerges from their pouted mouths requires Herculean effort. (Watch Prince – sorry, King Charles speak. You’ll see what I mean.)

“I have no living family who have ever worked,” I pronounced flatly, meeting his gaze, entirely committed to wearing his birthright as a costume. He laughed, very pleased by this.

“I thought all the money in America was only a generation or two old,” he said, sneering a bit. “Barely even a patina on it.” I imagined how annoying he must have been at Eaton. I bet he’d been a flamboyant fencer and a closeted bisexual.

“The proper families in New York sorted themselves out in the late 1800s,” I said, “not long after we sent your lot bleeding back to King George.” He raised his eyebrows and laughed. How is it that even the most handsome Brits look like horses when they laugh? The young woman to his right leaned in and addressed us in a very thick Italian accent imbued with plummy British.

“What are you two laughing about?” She was arrestingly beautiful. She probably would have been a model if her family hadn’t forbidden her from working.

“This American is explaining how peerage works in his country,” he said, his sneer-laugh reduced to a fatigued chuckle and a lazy smirk. I couldn’t tell if I was now in on the joke or the joke itself.

“Do you work?” I asked her. She smiled very sweetly and slightly shook her pretty head. 

“Not yet, maybe I will not work – at a job,” she said. “I like reading and studying. I like learning about Italian art and history.” EEE-storee.

“Contessa Constantina’s family owns most of southern Italy,” announced the disdainful Brit. “Her studying art and history is just sort of reading the diaries of her ancestors.” He laughed at his joke. Constantina playfully slapped his arm and bared her perfect teeth at him. I realized right then and there that if I didn’t stop RSVPing to cursive invitations and gliding around with bored aristocrats and laughing at jokes about being bored aristocrats, I’d lose my drive, my self-respect, and certainly my savings.

I never saw the Brit or his Italian heiress again. They probably now have two kids in boarding school, split their time between Soho, Southampton, Surry and Sardinia, and both keep thinly concealed boyfriends on the Upper East Side or in Portugal. I distanced myself from PWDW and found friends who wanted to do things and build things (DTBT). I did things and built things.   

Today, I am again surrounded by people who do not work.

But it’s a different kind of idleness. It isn’t rarified or earned over generations. These PWDW are not confined to secret dining rooms and donor circles and the fashion shows of young people bankrolled by ancestral conquests depicted in oil paintings displayed on the walls of their families’ crumbling villas. They’re everywhere.

No one really works anymore.

We check our many inboxes. We toggle between our employers’ email account, Instagram DMs and iMessage. We affirm things, rearrange things, and every once in a while, emphatically disagree with things to show that we’re paying attention. Like toddlers pretending to eat peas to appease their parents, we just move things around on our plates and occasionally throw fits. White collar digital work apes social media: everything has been reduced to likes and the shrug emoji.

Many of the PWDW I know these days have had an exit, and they are no longer required to even performatively work. An exit is when you build something that someone else perceives to be valuable or threatening, and they give you an eye-watering sum of money to allow what you’ve built to be digested into a larger business, where it will eventually wither, or to be extinguished immediately out of competitive spite. Post-exit people are a funny lot. They work insanely hard for three to twelve years, usually in relative poverty, and then a single event rockets them into the socioeconomic stratosphere, where they meet other people who don’t work—often the gilded European and posh Brit types from whom I extracted myself back in 2006. Together, they attend thought leadership conferences where they exchange tips about places to summer and winter that working people have never heard of.

The only people I know who actually work are people who do things with their hands, and this does not include typing. I’m talking about the kind of work performed by surgeons and landscapers and carpenters. People whose vocations have proper names still work. Florist, butcher, fishmonger. If you are something, you work. If you work in something, you don’t actually work. If your money comes from something, you definitely don’t work.

So, I ask you -

Do you work?

#dark humor #satire #social commentary #essays #culture

[quinnlarrabee]

8 hacks to change your relationship attachment style to seem hotter

“What’s your attachment style?” asked every upper middle class person under the age of 55 in a blue state city on a second date. If you’ve never heard of attachment theory, you’re probably reading this post by mistake, and you should increase the font size on your desktop PC and google “mall walking” or “assisted living facility.” Books have been written about the books about the books about attachment theory, and there are more online clickbait quizzes to help you figure out your attachment style than there are pronoun variations, genders and sexualities in Northern California. These books and quizzes are a massive waste of your time. If you want to know your attachment style and change it without spending a dollar or more than 4 minutes, read on. 

Let’s start by explaining attachment theory. 

If you text someone you’re into, and you lose your shit when they don’t write back within 60 minutes, you have what’s called an anxious attachment style. If you get a text from someone you’re into, and you force yourself to wait 60 or more minutes to read their response because you want to seem like you’re not that into them, you are anxious-avoidant. If you get a text from someone you’re into, and you leave them unread in favor of cleaning your bathroom, you are avoidant (and probably also OCD). Supposedly there is a fourth attachment style called “secure,” but this style is a myth and definitely irrelevant, because no one who bothers to read about attachment style is actually secure or ever will be. 

It’s highly uncool to be anxious, it’s totally exhausting to be anxious-avoidant, and it’s fucking fire to be avoidant. Being avoidant makes you much sexier during sport-dating, and it gives you a ruthless, unfair advantage in your healthy, long-term, nourishing relationships. 

What’s cool about attachment theory is that you can pretend to change your style to seem more attractive. 

Given that all of you - literally every single one of you - have an anxious attachment style in your polycules, I’m going to give you 8 (because I couldn’t think of 10) simple hacks that will enable you to give the aspirational impression of being avoidant without spending a decade in therapy, half of which would have been devoted to you asking your therapist if someone you went on two dates with will respond to the text you sent two weeks ago (they won’t). Therapy is for people who don’t take the initiative to find far more efficient shortcuts of seeming well-adjusted. 

These are 8 hacks that you can use to quickly and easily transition from anxious to (seeming) avoidant in your romantic relationships: 

1. Date down

Thinking back to the relationships in which I was at peak anxiety levels, I realized something blindingly obvious. I was punching above my weight. I was out of my league. I was constantly afraid of being abandoned, because I never had any business dating these people to begin with, and we both knew it. So, they were naturally avoidant, and I was anxious. The solution to this problem is to lower your standards. If you date someone who isn’t bonkers hot, you naturally tend to give fewer fucks. They cancel plans? Dope. No need to shower, pizza is two clicks away, and look at all the variations of Yellowstone on Paramount Plus. Dating people you aren’t particularly excited about helps you find that perfect level of chill.  

2. Masturbate more

Anyone over the age of 30 probably doesn’t masturbate as much as they should in order to not have an anxious attachment style. And by anyone, I mean straight men. Women of all ages still masturbate frequently to compensate for straight men being unsatisfying sex partners, so if you’re a woman, this hack isn’t for you. Masturbation is an entirely overlooked tool for men who want to become avoidant, because when you want sex less, you become less needy, which is a shorter way of saying “anxious attachment style.” Men: the next time you send a text to a woman you’re into, stop whatever you’re doing and masturbate. Women: if you send a text to a guy you’re into and after weeks of anxious communication behavior he suddenly doesn’t respond, you will need to pursue the nuclear option: send nudes. 

3. Wear a kimono 

Everyone knows that the most chill people on the face of the planet are the Japanese. Based on their declining birth dates, the entire population of Japan is avoidant. A great way to simulate their legendary level of avoidance is to dress like you are a Jedi living in Kyoto, which is how most grown men in Williamsburg dress: draped in kimonos. You will find that the moment you put on a kimono, especially one that you have custom-made for you through that guy who knows the guy with the contact at that one store in the Shimokita neighborhood in Tokyo, you will become serenely avoidant. This is partly because you will spend more time looking at yourself in any reflective surface, which is what all guys who live in Williamsburg and wear kimonos do, and also because no one will want to date you in that stupid kimono, so you won’t have anyone to be anxious about. 

4. Be polyamorous 

Polyamory is generally just compensatory behavior in relationships between two people who never wanted to have sex more than a few times but stayed together because they impulsively adopted a dog the summer of 2020, but sometimes polyamory can be more than just glorified promiscuity without short term consequences. If you’re dating someone, and you are anxious and they are avoidant, I suggest that you “open up the relationship.” This will be very hard for you at the beginning; because your partner is avoidant, they will meet this suggestion with intoxicating apathy, which will make you exceptionally anxious. But the moment you come home at 2am smelling like someone else and don’t have the desire or energy to even kiss them goodnight, the power dynamic will instantly shift in your favor. You will become less anxious, they will become less avoidant, and this will create a secure attachment-style-equilibrium until you inevitably break up two months later.

5. Start a company

You’d be amazed by how few fucks you will give about anything in the world that isn’t your startup when you become an entrepreneur. You will find that dating is an afterthought, because you’re constantly getting fucked in your professional life. You will also start sleeping very poorly, which will adversely affect your sex drive. Because you’ve forgone an actual income in favor of “equity,” you won’t have the disposable income to date, which costs adult men in New York City an average of $2,366.66 a month ($4,000 if you live in Manhattan, $3,000 if you live in Williamsburg, $100 if you live in Bushwick). There is a catch with this tactic, however. While you will achieve avoidance in your romantic life, your anxious attachment energy will be redirected towards venture capitalists. You will have first call after first call with dozens of men in their early thirties who attended the University of Pennsylvania, did two years at Citibank as an analyst in healthcare investment banking, worked in business development at a fintech business, started a company that failed after 18 months, and were then hired by whatever venture fund you’re pitching to know about all the possible deals that could be done but not actually deploy any capital. These young men – all of whom are 5’9 and have frizzy, receding hairlines – are suddenly the hottest women you have ever seen, and they are as avoidant as you are anxious. 

6. Become a Republican

Anxious attachment is a personality trait endemic exclusively to liberals. Fretting about being abandoned by your partner is really only for blue state people who are in favor of democracy, equality and recycling. Think about it. Does your khaki pants-wearing, golf-loving, bourbon-drinking, hair-parted-on-the-left-but-votes-on-the-right cousin who was social chair of his fraternity at University of South Carolina and runs supply chain operations for the pesticide company your great uncle started have an anxious attachment style? Do you think he’s ever read into the choice of punctuation in his girlfriend’s texts? Of course not. That dude got married at 26 to his 24-year-old girlfriend, had his first kid at 28 and second at 31, bought one of those flat-bottomed bass fishing boats and hitched to his Ford F-150 to avoid them, and has literally never had a moment of anxiety in this entire romantic life other than that one time he did coke sophomore year and couldn’t get an erection while watching Survivor. This is because he believes in trickle-down economics, pork chops and country clubs. If you aren’t afraid of losing your soul and are willing to leave the Northeast or Pacific Northwest, try voting red in the next election, and watch how quickly your anxious blue attachment style becomes a bright, avoidant red. 

7. Switch from iPhone to Android

Apple products and their interfaces create a tremendous amount of anxiety. This is because anxious attachment styles are at their worst during realtime text communication, and on iMessage you can see when someone is actively writing a response because of the so-called typing awareness indicator. This is perhaps the greatest euphemism of all time. It should really be called the cortisol level enhancer. Have you ever watched those three fucking gray dots undulate not felt like you’re having a cardiac event? Just imagining the myriad different directions your entire life could take based on the outcome of those dots is enough to spark a panic attack. How much better would your entire life be if you just got a blunt, unambiguous, unceremonious green box of words without the reality TV show visual fucking drumroll? I think the Apple design team are sadistic assholes. Never mind Covid-19. It’s actually the typing awareness indicator that have caused the precipitous drop in American lifespans. Want to achieve a healthy level of avoidance in your romantic life? Switch to Android. 

8. Get old

Have you met any 90-year-olds who have anxious attachment styles with anything other than their own mortality? Of course not. Old people have a delightfully avoidant attachment style, because they’ve either been putting up with their spouse’s bullshit for sixty years, or they’re widowed and just want to watch Matlock reruns. What’s interesting about getting old and avoidant is that it isn’t actually an exponential curve that spikes at like, 70. Studies have shown that people who have an anxious attachment style gradually become more avoidant over time and finally achieve optimal avoidance when they are dead. So, if none of these other attachment style transition tactics prove effective, there is hope for you. You just have to be patient. 

#psychology #culture #dating #humor #satire

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St. Patrick's Day in NYC: all your angry questions answered

Like every single holiday in the history of time, St Patrick’s Day originated with death, was briefly a day of solemn and civilized remembrance, and then devolved into a day of messy commercial gluttony punctuated by regret. Today, St Patrick’s Day is a shitshow everywhere, but it’s the worst in New York City. While plenty of news outlets document in photos this spectacle of green polyester covered marathon drinking, off-key singing and sloppy bathroom-stall make-outs, there has been no quantitative assessment of St Patrick’s Day in New York City beyond just how many people pass through its bridges, tunnels and tolls on their way to Celtic-themed misery. Adding data makes everything more interesting, and it’s time New Yorkers get the answers to the semi-rhetorical questions they mutter under their breath when they walk past all manner of unspeakable spectacles every year on March 17th. 

Why is St Patrick’s Day so ghastly in NYC?

In tertiary cities like Boston and Chicago, everyone participates in St Patrick’s Day because there’s nothing else to do, so no one realizes how inherently gross it is. In NYC, there’s an abundance of bad life decisions masquerading as culture that people can make every single day of the year, and wearing an unflattering shade of green and abusing cheap alcohol pales in comparison to most of them, so real New Yorkers opt-out of St Patrick’s Day.

The only actual New Yorkers who participate in St. Patrick’s Day are the elected officials, who must pander to the 5.3% of New York City’s population of Irish descent (who do not leave their homes on March 17th and totally disassociate from their heritage) and police officers, who are there to make sure inebriates don’t step into traffic or steal street signs that are similar to their names or the names of their mothers. The rest of NYC avoids St Patrick’s day like a sweaty coughing person on the subway, fleeing their city home for their country house or - if they live in Park Slope - just staying home and re-reading old issues of The Atlantic.

None of the over three million people who participate by choice in St Patrick’s Day celebrations are from New York City: most train in from the state of New Jersey, drive in from Long Island, Uber in from Connecticut or hitchhike in from fringe states like Delaware and Maryland, which don’t provide any kind of cultural experiences to their residents.

New Yorkers execrate (that means really, really hate) any kind of parade (except maybe Gay Pride, but only when The Gays aren’t super angry about something) or public spectacle that causes street closures, prompts police to line streets with those cheap steel crowd control barricades (that cause you to walk 40 blocks out of your way to go around the corner to your local bodega, which might still get you arrested), or causes even the slightest increase in foot traffic in their neighborhood, but they particularly hate when a lot of people who are shabbily dressed, walk slowly / aimlessly and talk loudly flood into their city from undesirable locations and congregate in any place where they might go once every three years. 

This literally defines St Patrick’s Day. 

Aside from the fundamental rhetorical question, “what the actual fuck?”, New Yorkers have a lot of persistent questions each year that never get answered, because everyone is too hungover the week after to do the research. I don’t drink (I just do drugs), so I’ve answered all of your angry, permeating questions.

“Where do all these fucking people come from?”

“What the fuck are they wearing?”

“What got them so fucked up?”

 “Who the fuck after junior high school would drink so much that they actually puke?” 

“What the fuck are they arguing about so loudly in front of literally anyone who walks by?” 

“What the fuck are they eating with their eyes shut on the corner of 33rd and 8th Avenue?”

“Where the fuck will I step in some B&T idiot’s puke?”

“What are the fucking repercussions of this lurid green dumpster fire?”

“How fucking much is this shitshow costing me in tax dollars?”

There are a lot of bad things about St. Patrick’s Day for New Yorkers. It’s crowded. It’s logistically inconvenient. Unattractive people flood into NYC and bring down its average per capita attractiveness ranking from 7.75 (7 in Brooklyn, 8.5 in Manhattan) to just under 7. But it gives New Yorkers the thing that they love the most in the world: the ability to look at someone else and think, “I haven’t fucked my life up quite as spectacularly as they have.”

Here are some photos to make you feel better about yourself:

#nyc #dark humor #satire #comedy #culture

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Oat milk fad over, Brooklynites buying cows

I’ve spent over $600 on upcharges for oat milk in coffee shops. I actually sat down and calculated it: I caffeinate outside of my home on average twice a week, I started requiring oat milk in my cappuccinos in the winter of 2017, and it cost me one dollar each time I eschewed cow’s milk for oat. Hence, $624. I could have done a lot of meaningful, sensible, and fun things with that money. I could have bought a round trip plane ticket to somewhere kind of interesting (provided I bought the ticket a month in advance, which I never do). I could have saved an additional two dollars a week and, with interest rates being what they are, had like $20k by now. I could have upgraded my iPhone, which terrifies me, because the app I use to store the unsolicited nudes people send me now requires a cloud subscription if I want to access them on a new phone. With $624, I could have gone on four really nice dates, or about seven if I wasn’t super excited about the people I was taking out. I could have done a lot of things with that $624, and I could have also prevented 624 barista eye rolls if I hadn’t inexplicably jumped on the oat milk bandwagon. Why did I start drinking oat milk? 

I am not lactose intolerant.

I tolerate lactose like a fucking champion. I could suck milk right out of an udder on an empty stomach and then crush an ironman triathlon. I could eat whole milk yogurt (eat never seems like the right word for consuming yogurt - we need a word between eat and drink) for three meals a day and have cottage cheese for dessert with nary a single fart. I process dairy like a ravenous midwestern 6-month-old. 

I am not particularly bothered by the environmental implications of the 1,024 ounces (8 gallons) of frothed milk I consume each year in espresso drinks. I do not drink milk in any other format or context, because I’m over the age of 13 and I’m not a frontier vigilante who lives with his grandmother in Nevada. So really, how much methane is emitted by a cow in the time it takes to produce the paltry 8 gallons of milk I drink each year? To save OCD dairy-haters the trouble, I googled that for you. The whole milk cappuccinos I gave up for five years saved a scrape under 10 pounds of methane. Giving up cow milk in my coffee didn’t exactly make me an environmentalist. 

Lactose and environmental concerns ruled out, it would be reasonable to assume that I started drinking oat milk because it was trendy, but I derive more pleasure from mocking trends than following them, usually at my own expense. For example, I think guys look ridiculous in those billowy, drop-crotch, bedoin harem pants, but I cannot deny their inexplicable sexual magnetism: if you put harem pants on a scarecrow at dawn they’d be around its ankles by dusk. Did I fly to Bali and buy a pair? Absofuckinglutely not. Same with man buns. I have yet to see an aspirational man bun, but just try to find a guy with a man bun who doesn’t have four supermodel girlfriends. I’d probably have at least one catalog model girlfriend if I had a man bun, but I’d rather be celibate than be a guy with a man bun. When everyone was moving to Williamsburg to “create community” and ended up meeting the loves of their lives at floor parties and then marrying them at Burning Man, I bought an apartment in the West Village and got to know the vendors at the farmers market across the street. I’m probably still single as a result (the many other reasons I’m still single will have their own post). I am not a man who follows trends. My oat milk upcharge habit wasn’t because it was cool. 

I truly have no idea why I started drinking oat milk. 

One day I just woke up and had a violent disdain for cow’s milk and felt a fierce allegiance to oat milk. I think the same thing happened to millions of other people who are not lactose intolerant environmentalist trend whores. I have some theories. 

Beauty.

The more beautiful someone is, the more insufferable and excruciating their dietary restrictions are, provided they’re American and from a blue city (everyone beautiful in America ends up in a blue city or gets fat). In America, beauty correlates to trivial but tedious dietary decisions. This isn’t true elsewhere. Beautiful Europeans will literally eat pork schnitzel, duck fat french fries and an entire block of cheese followed by twelve cigarettes and still be totally chill. Not beautiful Americans. If there is an edible substance that has a more expensive or difficult to find substitute, a beautiful American will feel entitled to it everywhere they go. I think oat milk was added to the portfolio of irritating substitutes demanded by beautiful people, and people wanted to belong to the rarified club of entitled beautiful people who could get away with off-menu ordering a grilled lemon with wild-harvested salmon roe and vegan sour cream at Del Friscos. Asking for oat milk at a coffee shop became tantamount to saying, I’m beautiful enough to be annoying and get away with it. 

Scarcity. 

Related to the previous trend, scarcity drove demand for oat milk. There was a time when oat milk existed but wasn’t available in the United States. It was like when you could only get Spotify prior to 2011 through your annoying British friend’s VPN. Similarly, I remember being in Waitrose in London in 2016 and spotting Oatly on the shelf. I was so excited by this rare and innovative beverage with playful, self-deprecating carton copy that I stashed a gallon of it in my checked luggage and paid an excess weight fee to fly it across the Atlantic. It was probably the most expensive gallon of milk ever purchased, but I had to have it because it was hard to get. That initial frothy (pun!) scarcity drove demand for oat milk, and even after it was no longer obscure, it still wasn’t the default milk at coffee shops, so it still felt scarce.   

Sweden. 

Oat milk was invented in the early 1990s by a Swedish food scientist called Richard Öste. Because oat milk was Swedish, everyone wanted it. Name one bad thing that comes from Sweden. I’ll wait a few weeks for you to think about it. You’re back empty handed? Exactly. Literally everything that comes from Sweden is amazing. Abba. Volvos. Prefabricated houses. Meatballs. Subtle socialism. Cheap unpronounceable modern furniture that takes longer to assemble than it lasts. It became known that oat milk was a Swedish export, and suddenly everyone who described their aesthetic as “clean” had switched to øat milk. 

MAGA. 

Trump was elected in 2016. Between 2017 and 2019, oat milk sales increased ten fold. Coincidence? I think not. Trump and his MAGA zombies represented good old fashioned American values. Trucks. Steak. Misogyny. Incest. And yes, dairy. Could you imagine Donald Trump asking for oat milk in his coffee? No, you couldn’t, partially because he doesn’t even drink coffee, but also because he has the diet of a petulant seven-year-old boy.

I think anyone who hated Trump instinctively, reflexively gravitated to anything that was antithetical to him. Switching from cow’s milk to oat milk was a political statement, an act of rebellion. If Trump had lost in 2016, oat milk would have lost, too.

Woke mylk. 

Prior to 2014, very few people knew what oat milk was, and very few people knew what “woke” was. Before it was weaponized by both ends of the political spectrum, staying woke in the Black community meant being aware of institutional deception and evolved into a watchword for activists on the lookout for police brutality and injustice in law enforcement. For a few minutes, woke was a productive rallying cry to combat racism and the marginalization of all minorities. Woke was then co-opted by privileged white people who wanted to feel victimized by the system that afforded them the privilege to feel victimized. These white people started drinking oat milk because it kind of rhymes with woke milk, because they decided that any industry that could have the word “Big” in front of it was inherently evil, and because milk that wasn’t dairy could have an alternative spelling, which woke white folks go apeshit for. Thus, oat mylk - with a “y” - became the elixir of political correctness run amok and the official beverage of annoying white people who sequestered themselves into an echo chamber of righteous ultra-left ideology and turned a blind eye to the fact that they were alienating swing voters away from voting blue and driving them into the clutches of the political party that preys on the fear of children dressing in drag at Christmas mass. Woke white people will abandon oat milk for pea milk in 2025 when they realize that their appropriation and dilution of woke single-handedly got Ron DeSantis elected. 

Oat milk is as over as Silicon Valley Bank.

All of the forces that propelled oat milk into the spotlight have withered. Oat milk is so common that even unattractive people drink it, Oatly is now made not in Sweden but in China, there’s a democrat in the White House, and with the economy looking like the Hindenburg and scared raccoons at the helm of the Fed, no one has an extra dollar to burn on the oat milk upcharge. People have slid down from the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, where the performative woke flag had been planted, all the way to the bottom where simplicity reigns supreme.  

The world is gravitating to what it can understand. Have you ever looked at the back of a box of oat milk? So many ingredients, and some even have triggering names: oats, water, low erucic acid rapeseed oil, dipotassium phosphate, calcium carbonate, tricalcium phosphate, sea salt, dicalcium phosphate, riboflavin, vitamin A, vitamin D2, vitamin B12. Like the failing startups that SVB lent $200B to, that shit is way too complex for these uncertain times. Have you ever looked at the ingredients label of a gallon of cow’s milk? Of course not, because the ingredient in cow’s milk is cow’s milk, and that’s the kind of no-bullshit (pun!) milk people want right now.

When times get weird, people go back to the dark ages, which today is buying $12 a quart raw cow’s milk through friends who have houses Upstate because raw milk - which is having a moment with yoga influencers and stay-at-home girlfriends on TikTok - can only be purchased on the farm where it’s produced. I think the synthetic milk backlash will be so swift and the allure of wholesome milk straight from the family udders so strong that Brooklyn hipsters will buy their own cows.

I can see the Park Slope listings on Douglas Elliman now: “backyard space for not only your cow but also your goat for households with lactose-sensitive family members - room for all your ruminants!” Hooved milkable animals will become bigger status symbols in NYC than flying out of Teterboro to Aspen. The ultra-rich will keep buffalos on their own floors in Park Avenue penthouses and stock their Hamptons compounds with camels and yaks. Wine cellars will be replaced with milk cellars. They’ll host exotic milk tastings in Southampton and play milk drinking games like, Guess Which Endangered Animal My Milk Mustache Came From. 

The closest I’ll get to any of this will be a raw cow’s milk mustache in the West Village. Maybe if I wear it outside my apartment I’ll finally attract a supermodel. 

#dark humor #comedy #culture #essays #social commentary

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What we'll lose besides weight because of the new obesity cure

Rippling abs may no longer require a life of deprivation and misery, says science.

New drugs called GLP1-agonists, developed by people who love cake and hate exercise, claim to make you thin with just one injection each week and a bit of insurance fraud. By slowing down the rate of “gastric emptying” (which sounds like the clinical term of puking) and telling the hypothalamus not to be hungry, it prolongs feelings of fullness and reduces appetite, which gradually turns obese people into magazine centerfolds. As someone whose fragile self-worth is based primarily on my body composition, for which I’ve sacrificed all manner of edible joy, months-worth of sleep and probably several relationships, I find this pharmaceutical innovation troubling. The prospect of this drug not only eliminates the excuse I use to justify being obsessive about exercise and annoying about food, it also makes me feel like I studied my whole adult life for a test that suddenly no one even has to take. Now I know what it feels like to be a post-calculator era mathematician. I don’t remember a day when I didn’t do some form of mindless, compulsive exercise, and I regularly decline dinner invitations not just because I don’t like people but also because of the lack of control I have over what restaurants put into their hedonistic devil food. I think the world (I, especially) stand to lose more than we will gain from this weight-loss wonder-drug.

It’s true that we’ll save billions of dollars each year on healthcare, lifespans will extend, and entire continents of cotton will be spared when there is no longer a buyer for size XXXL, but let’s quantify what this miracle cure for fatness will cost us:

Yo-mamma-so-fat jokes. Yo-mamma-so-skinny jokes just aren’t as funny.

Santa Claus. Who wants to sit on the lap of a jolly skinny guy?

The cultural identity of Wisconsin.

Exciting extra-marital affairs. Why else will people stray after 7 years of marriage?

Arm rest disputes on airplanes. No more hilarious, silent, passive aggressive fights at 37,000 feet.

The revenue generated every time someone says, “super-size it” at McDonalds. How will this affect the already teetering economy?

Spanx.

France’s myopic, xenophobic perception of America.

Late night infomercials for specious diet fads.

78% of the subject matter of magazines targeted to women. What’s next – a pill for having a real orgasm with a man without months of ego-sensitive coaching, meditative fantasizing, and hidden vibrators?

Skinny mirrors.

The enduring relevance and rising value of vintage Jane Fonda VHS workout videos.

Mumus.

Sumo wrestling.

Man bras, aka bros.

Inspiring gastric bypass surgery success stories.

Daytime makeover television shows.

Academy awards given to perfectly fit actors called Brendan Fraser, who are enjoying a very brief career resurgence, for wearing fat suits in gripping, tragic films called The Whale.

Whales.

The income of unqualified / uncertified Instagram trainers and nutritionists who are just capitalizing on their own genetic lottery win.

Using being bullied for being a chubby preteen as an excuse for being emotionally stunted and eternally single, even though they didn’t have this drug when I was a chubby preteen.

Therapy.

The list of what we will inevitably lose with this miracle drug (that will make the entire world happier, healthier and wealthier) is endless, or at least goes to 24 or 25. I can only hope that the éclaire lobby pressures the FDA hard enough to discover some lethal side effect so that the world can continue to benefit from obesity and that I can continue to compensate for my personality defects with a rare 31-inch waist.  

On that personal note, I’d like you to consider what I will lose if the weight loss drug hits pharmacy shelves.

Overweight people make me feel better about my ennui. I see merry fat folks in the world, and I think, they may be happier than me, but I have cum gutters. Maybe they wake up and eat chocolate chip scones in bed with their equally plump life partner who finds their love handles endearing, because they’re good enough people to see past a few extra pounds, recounting over cups of whole milk cappuccinos their fond, shared memories of the dumplings and gravy fries they ate for dessert last night, while I wake up alone in the mocking expanse of my king sized bed (that does not have even the slightest body depression) before riding to the gym on my superficial high horse where I’ll stare at the black rubber floor while holding a plank for so long that I pop a blood vessel in my left eye so that I can fit into sample sizes and wear a speedo in Europe with American impunity. Sure, they’re better liked by everyone because they order fries for the table and have joy in their lives, but people I don’t even know ask me in domestic airport lounges for kale juicing tips when they sense how skinny and sad I am.

This drug will force me to find meaning outside of a mirror, and I’m just not ready to do that caliber of self-work. I’m not ready to distinguish myself on the talents that I’ll be forced to discover and hone when everyone has no more than 7% body fat. I want to remain a special snowflake purely thanks to my v-shaped torso, which I’ll probably be able to maintain for only another year or two. If I had the discipline and grit to do anything in life but squats, bench presses and body-judge other people, I would ask you to sign a petition demanding the end of research into drugs that eliminate obesity and level the beauty playing field so that we can focus instead on what someone looks like on the inside. In lieu of a petition, please just forward this to someone you know who spends far too much time on their abs along with the caption, “lol jokes on u.”

#dark humor #big pharma #satire #humor #cringe

[quinnlarrabee]

2023's subversive relationship trend: monogamy

Last year, if you were in a stylish social setting and you asked anyone remotely relevant - e.g. under 40, not quite employed, technically residing in the more expensive parts of Williamsburg, Greenpoint or Bushwick but actually flitting between CDMX, Lisbon and Nosara - about their relationship status, they’d launch into they-splaining why having two or many more significant others was vastly superior to having just one. They’d tell you that being with just one person was an unrealistic construct forced upon us by religion and habit, and that humans evolved to have multiple meaningful partners concurrently. After pausing to do a bump of k and ask someone what deep house set was playing on the Sonos, they’d go on to assert that the more evolved and secure one becomes, the more natural it feels to be in an open relationship, a throuple or a polycule. Jealousy is a sign that it’s time to do more self-work and yoga, they’d conclude, eyeing you for signs of dissent. You might have reflected on your many failed relationships and wondered if they’d have been more fulfilling if there’d been a bunch more people in them. But along with higher prices and much higher anxiety, 2023 has brought a much lower body count within the average relationship. The coolest people in the world are now experimenting with a concept called monogamy. 

Unlike polyamorous relationships, which have no boundaries and impose vague, capricious rules that mean different things to each member of the relationship, which isn’t actually a relationship, monogamy is when two people decide to be together and aren’t with other people at the same time, either openly or secretly. Monogamy is what happens when two people don’t feel like they’re settling and don’t need to hedge their bets, and actually like each other enough to be with just each other, potentially for a long time (i.e. greater than three months).

Before digging further into this new concept of monogamy, it’s worth taking a look at the origin of polyamory. Like everything that was once creepy and weird that ultimately becomes breathlessly cool and globally on-trend, polyamory was born in Brooklyn. 

There were a number of factors that led to the ubiquity of polyamory in Brooklyn. 

There was a time - prior to 2008 - when no one in Brooklyn was attractive enough to have sex with more than a few times without introducing lavish distractions, such as lots of other mildly attractive people in the same double bed. People would meet each other at coffee shops that only sold drip coffee with cow milk and unethically sourced sugar in granulated format, talk about their favorite Proust passages  or quote their favorite lines from the movie, Sideways, and then find themselves having mediocre, clenched-eyed sex in someone’s double bed with beige sheets and foam pillows followed by bodega burritos and Seinfeld reruns on their medium-blue sectional sofa.

These furtive pairs rarely woke up together, partly because of double beds, but also because of large pores in unforgiving morning light. Inevitably, they would grow to like each other enough to spend time together, but would need additional stimulation to continue having sex. This is why the sadly discontinued Craigslist Personals was invented: to find other people to spice up these three- or four-week-old relationships that had gone stale because of terrible facial hair choices and cankles. Polyamory became a way for couples, who had the same obscure interests and could share a unisex American Apparel wardrobe, to tolerate their sex life.  

Polyamory was also a practical solution to the resource scarcity that defined Brooklyn up until the past few years. There were no restaurants that served mezcal negronis or truffle fries, so dates were exceptionally dull, and since everyone in Brooklyn was a freelance urban planner, a Human Design practitioner or a spoken-word poet, no one really had the money to go out on dates anyway. The residents of Brooklyn resorted to neighborhood potluck dinners, which featured rice and beans in various shapes of yard sale pots, and all different shades of dark homemade beer. These parties were ostensibly low-cost ways to socially eat, but everyone knows that potluck dinners always were and still are just wholesome pretense for polyamorous play parties where throuples are born of attrition.

Another less obvious cause of polyamory is ayahuasca. For those of you who don’t live in Brooklyn or California, ayahuasca is a hallucinogenic tea made from the bark of a Peruvian tree that makes you regret your entire life and compels you to torch everything the moment you get back from the jungle or Upstate. Taking the medicine has many prerequisites, chief among them interrupting one’s dependence on brain and nervous system medications - like SSRIs and attention-deficit disorder prescriptions. Everyone in Brooklyn is on one of these, because everyone in Brooklyn thinks they have anxiety, depression or ADHD. Around 2012, everyone in Brooklyn started sitting in ayahuasca ceremonies, and after being forced to stop taking their meds by their shamans, they decided prescription medication was for people who hadn’t seen the secrets of the universe in a yurt after throwing up for 90 minutes. Fueled by their new delusions of wisdom and entirely unsedated, having sex with lots of people at the same time and talking openly about it with everyone except for their parents suddenly seemed correct, transcendent and essential. Hence, ayahuasca as a root cause of polyamory. 

So, because Brooklynites were poor, ugly and attention-deficient, polyamory became de rigeur. 

But when attractive people who lived in Manhattan lost a lot of money in 2008, they moved to Brooklyn in shell-shocked droves, and they brought their facial symmetry, yoga bodies and shiny hair to these potluck-dinner-cum-play-parties. Like spiking rusty-pipe tap water with Spindrift, Brooklyn got incrementally hotter, but the romantic constructs remained the same, because migrating Manhattanites are always desperate to ape whatever is indigenously cool in the lower-cost place to which they retreat. Good looking people kept moving to Brooklyn even after white collar incomes stabilized, which meant not only synthetic mylk lattes, truffle fries and mezcal negronis but also shockingly attractive polycules all over Brooklyn…but especially in the more expensive parts of Williamsburg, Greenpoint and Bushwick. 

Because Brooklyn was suddenly the coolest place on the planet, polyamory became cool. 

Fast forward to today. Everyone in Brooklyn is poor again, because its sources of prosperity have evaporated: crypto was revealed to be one massive ponzi scheme, NFTs are now understood to be worthless jpegs, you can basically buy weed at CVS, no one can afford a new logo, and the rates of Human Design practitioners have plummeted to zero dollars an hour because it was dumb to begin with. With Brooklyn’s sweeping gentrification and soaring prices, dating multiple people has become far more expensive than the humble days of beans and rice potlucks, and everyone has become ridiculously good looking (except in Park Slope). The pandemic eliminated hallucinogenic tourism, so people stopped taking ayahuasca and needed a drug to tell their friends they were taking on the reg, so they renewed their Adderall and Zoloft prescriptions. 

With the three root causes eliminated, polyamory is no longer necessary, and its many challenges are suddenly more apparent and seem super stupid when recreational drugs wear off. Monogamy offers a practical solution to all of them:

It’s way cheaper

Only one name to remember

Only one that-one-thing-that-gets-them-off to remember

Only one name to shout when you (pretend to) come

Agreeing on the rules is pretty intuitive and don’t require a 5-day workshop in Rhinebeck with a $300/hour moderator to write

Max of two types of milk / mylk in the fridge

You know you’re the primary partner

Holidays with family who don’t live in Brooklyn or Santa Cruz are slightly less of a cortisol-bath dumpster-fire sham-fest clusterfuck

Only one person whose IG stories you are required to ❤️ / 😂

Only one person to dump when it get boring 

Polyamory had a good run, right alongside chlamydia, that quirky little bacteria that rose to prominence underneath Z Cavaricci jeans and neon boy shorts in the 90s and was passed around modern Brooklyn like a dodgeball in gym class. But these sobering, penurious times require a simpler, more efficient romantic container for a more beautiful, gym-fit, botoxed and face-lasered population. We thank polyamory for the wild memories, ceaseless drama and poorly edited art films, but the next few years will find bleeding edge hipsters walking the gangplank above the perilous waters of a flailing economy and detonated geopolitical climate into the Noah’s ark that is their parents’ Greenwich guest house in pairs of only two. Long live monogamy…at least long enough for the favorable terms of the prenup to kick in.  

This essay was made possible by a generous donation by the Divorce Attorneys Special Interest Association (DASIA)

#dark humor #jokes #satire #humor #culture #essays #news