This isn’t really a new decade. I’ve always been a firm believer that the new decade starts when you turn thirty one, and thirty is still technically the last year of the previous decade. It is, however, true that I am no longer in my twenties, which seems significant.
Where to start? This year was, objectively speaking, awful. I’m not exactly the first person to say it, but I still think it’s universally underrated just how godforsakenly terrible this year was. and godforsaken is the right word for it – it’s been empty and barren of anything warm or important or meaningful, like a land abandoned by God. And this needs to be said, because it is important, because for all the many, many posts on how awful society’s response has been, I’ve still found nothing to convey how empty life is when you sit at home all day, sometimes working from home, occasionally in a zoom work meeting or even social event, but never meet new people in person, never get to hug strangers or fall in love or go to a party where you feel surprisingly welcome and warm and surrounded by friends. I’ll try to do what I can to explain.
Part of it is, I suspect, that this aspect is worse for me than for almost anyone else. I moved to a new city where I hardly knew anyone back in February, just before this whole thing began. I started a new job where I worked from the office for all of three weeks before we switched to working from home. The friends and social connections I do have are mostly the type of people who worry pretty hard about pandemics and wouldn’t agree to see me in person even if they were nearby. I’m naturally disposed to be lonely. I’m single, I live alone in an apartment without much in the way of windows, and my family all live thousands of miles away – and due to a combination of work requirements and global travel restrictions, I haven’t been able to visit them in eight months.
I know some people have it hard in different ways – they’ve had to take care of kids without school, or had to go to work in unsafe conditions – but the sheer emptiness of life like this is hard to bear. And it wouldn’t even be fixable if I decided to stop worrying about getting infected myself, because everyone else is worried, and the social isolation costs of caution are less high for most people.
A few illustrative examples:
- There’s an old story that says the people of London were never as happy as they were during the blitz, with bombs being dropped on them every day. I completely believe this. They had a purpose, they were fighting back, and they were united. They all went out to see the bombed sites and work together to work on them with their friends, every day. Our current situation is the exact opposite of this, except people are still dying no matter what we do. It all still feels meaningless.
- Years ago, I tried to write a story about an idea I had, about a man who lived life completely isolated. He woke up, did some web design work on his computer for clients that made orders online, went to the grocery store and used self-checkout, played some computer games and went back to bed. The story turned out to be too boring to be really readable, which was kind of inevitable. But it was supposed to be an exaggerated fiction. This last year, it hasn’t been very exaggerated. Not for me, and not for a lot of people. We don’t see isolated people much, but I think there’s a lot of them out there. I have at least seen a few, on the rare occasion they somehow communicate with the outside world.
- I’ve gone back on Twitter. I think the mainstream criticisms of Twitter – that it’s a low-information outrage bait machine that lets you ragesurf and pretend to have social interaction but doesn’t actually do anyone any good – is correct. But I still use it a lot, because the alternative is having no social interaction and that is just that bad.
- I saw someone on twitter suggest that everyone who turned thirty this year should officially get a bonus year added to their twenties. This seems only fair (if difficult to implement).
Some good things have happened this year. I found out, somewhat to my surprise, that I actually like my new job (money and values aside). And while socializing overall has been harder, dating has actually been a bit easier than in the past, even with the pandemic – I guess it’s a nice side effect of being somewhere that’s not math grad school or the bay area. I don’t exactly keep count, but there’s a decent chance I’ve had more sexual partners in the past year than I had in total before then.
But on the other hand – this is sort of a mixed bag, overall. The classic saying that sex doesn’t really matter compared to things like personal communication and chemistry feels like a self-protective lie when you aren’t having sex, but it turns out it’s just true. And I haven’t really managed that much this year.
I had a dream the other night where I ran into my ex, and I somehow managed to find all the right things to say to actually get back to talking and (more or less) being together. Not to get her to forgive me – there was still anger – just to move things back into being partners again, to being in a relationship and interacting instead of apart. And then I woke up, and was sad. (As an aside, I know I do an annual mopey birthday post – but the birthday before I started this tradition, the one where we broke up, probably still takes the cake for objectively worst birthday, even if this year takes the cake for worst year overall).
But that sadness is, once again, a mixed bag. One benefit is I think I can genuinely learn how to do the romance and communication stuff from dream-me. He was pretty smooth, and not just because he was in a fictional environment where he controlled the outcome. But another side is just a change in perspective – I can look on dream-me as the baseline and be sad that I’m not him, or I can look at IRL me as the baseline, and dream me as setting a hard but achievable goal that would make me really happy. Not getting back with my ex specifically (as sad as I am about her right after waking up from a dream where we got back together, I’ve fallen hard enough often enough for various other women in the years since then), just… being in a relationship where we have the comfortable level of talking. I remember once finding out and being surprised that two friends of mine who were engaged to people who lived far away had hour-long phone calls to them in their phone records pretty much every day – how did they find so much to talk about? – but now I think that sort of thing can actually be pretty easy. So I just have to find the circumstances to make it happen. It should be doable.
Still, if I’d never broken up with my ex we’d have been together for something like five or six years now. I know it’s unfair to compare to an idealized relationship that never happened, probably for good reason, but… it still makes me sad to think about it, a little.
There’s some other nice stuff. Paul’s quiz nights on Zoom have been great. The first friend I made on the job got fired in May, which was sad (more for me than for him I think… he seemed about ready to be done with it). Brian and his sending me videos of Larry eating mealsquares, and my mother and aunt and their videos of the vase cats, have been a boon.
The old blessing says “next year in Jerusalem!”. The year before I moved to San Francisco, I ended this with “next year in SF!”. On the whole I think that was good and was a good place, even if in the end I couldn’t stay, and now I think the pandemic has killed too much of it for it to live again. But maybe this year – or maybe the year after that, I’m not sure I’m quite ready – the blessing really will be “Next year in Jerusalem” again. I’ve been in America eight and a half years now – maybe roughly ten years overall is the right amount of time, and it’s finally time to think about heading home again. As the old song we all learned in kindergarten goes, more or less:
Please don’t uproot what is rooted
Let me not forget the hope
Send me back from where I wander
To the good old land of home
And since for now I still am in America, I will end this year with a link to an American song. Not necessarily the most significant song of the year, just one that’s stuck in my head today.
shakeddown 