the loneliness epidemic is the dating hellscape is the job hunt humiliation ritual is the ambient panic we just have now

I think we're all worrying about the same thing...

“Louvre heist aesthetic” is the rare TikTok we can enjoy guilt-free. As Caity Weaver put it: “How nice to read about a heist rather than a massacre.”

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Last Friday, my friend Adrian Horton took me to see the Broadway play “Liberation”; by the time you’re reading this, her official review for The Guardian should be up. My less professional take: I didn’t think I liked it much at first. After all, a play about some mostly white Ohioan women in the ‘70s forming a consciousness-raising group to talk about their work and home lives felt like attending an outdated lecture myself—the set was designed to resemble a high school gym, after all—but over the weekend, I found myself explaining the second act to anyone who’d listen (and not just because of the full-frontal-bush-included nudity!).

The simplest way to describe the plot of “Liberation” (spoilers ahead) is that the protagonist, Lizzie, becomes the de facto leader of this group as it sorts through some feminism 101 with various members embodying certain archetypal voices—the elder housewife, the Black moral conscience, the blonde secretary, the bandana-wearing lesbian, the Italian hothead in leather boots. They gripe about their sick mothers, visa problems, personal finances, yes, but also a lot about the men in their lives. It goes without saying, of course, that it’s easier for some of these members to achieve personal liberation than others.

The climax of the play hinges on the moment when Lizzie’s boyfriend, Bill, proposes and asks her to move to New York with him. Everyone in the group is verklempt about whether this constitutes some kind of personal selling out of Lizzie’s personal politics: Yes, it’s better for Lizzie’s career, and New York is more exciting than Ohio, (and Bill is kind of sexy, with his mustache and the fact that he plays basketball in jeans), but it isn’t very Miss Women’s Lib of her to drop everything and follow a man, is it? There’s a line at one point where a member of the group declares that romantic love and freedom are contradictory. Later, someone else tries out a new version of this, arguing that “Maybe love is freedom.” But it’s frankly far less convincing.

The play doesn’t really settle on an answer one way or another; the best Lizzie can do personally is to tell the elder housewife that her marriage is going to be different, and that’s what progress is all about. Right? It made me think about the deluge of discourse that surrounds us, particularly those of us of a certain gender and sexuality and life stage, and the greater cultural hand-wringing writ large by the Modern Marriage Agenda going on about dating, sex, trad culture, gender essentialism, heterofatalism, relationships and therapy and therapized relationships, marriage and its eternal permutations, the general shrill persistent tenor of the messaging that even now, or rather, especially now, finding a romantic partner and then relentlessly monitoring, analyzing, and protecting that partnership has both never been harder and yet also never been more necessary. Women of this age are threatened at every corner of the culture (to say nothing of regular IRL polite conversation) with the reminder that choosing correctly and maintaining that choice correctly is quite literally the most important decision we’ll make about our future. Despite all the newly accessible knowledge and the sharp increase (though by no means guaranteed) of basic rights post ‘70s, it appears that for most of us, at the end of the day, wind up in quite a je suis Lizzie predicament, in that we realize marriage is still something of a personal cheat code in practice, despite whatever loftier beliefs we held in theory.

I guess what I’m trying to articulate, in a way beyond just Breaking News! Resource Sharing Still Desirable!, is the link that grows clearer and clearer to me with every conversation I have with a friend about dating or work, in every viral carousel I read about green flags vs. red flags, every podcast about the “secret” to finding a partner; which is that: between the shrieking volume of the Modern Marriage Agenda (the Trad Agenda?) and the constant threat/reality of financial precarity stalking this same generation in particular, when we worry about work or dating, we are worrying about the same thing, which is: am I going to make it? Will I find security? Will I be able to attain the level of comfort in life that I want? Will I be protected? Is someone going to protect me? Or am I going to slip through the cracks of this economy—and this society?

After all, you don’t have to read the viral gooner story to know that those cracks exist. Or Sarah Thankam Mathews’s report for The Cut about the humiliation ritual of the job hunt in small doses, which I had to digest in small chunks over several days. STM’s investigation of the psychic consequences of job insecurity these days, multiplied by the indignity of AI and tech-smoothened processes but also expectations, gives a perfect name to the ambient panic that has been in the air since the pandemic, or possibly as long as most of us have been adults:

What sets this downturn apart from the panics and busts of the past is that now every layer of labor, from hiring to firing, is increasingly mediated by automations and algorithms that cannot hold the irreducible realities of human life. The person-based relational constellation that once transmitted skill, mentorship, and mutual obligation, however imperfect, has now been replaced by a digital loop: workers feeding prompts into the same systems that eventually gatekeep, surveil, and smoothly replace them. When David talks about the job search as a ritual without belief, or Mia describes the erosion of even small gestures of connection, they’re naming something deeper than frustration. It is the feeling that the relation between worker and employer — never benevolent but ideally cooperative — may without a course correction be whittled down to the point of rupture.

No wonder, in the face of this new economic machine, which has finally achieved full facelessness and impersonality, that all but the happily delusional and the lucky have lost all sense of agency in the realm of work and careerism, which we as Americans have been told since The Beginning was our path toward acceptance and security—and which we as women have been told since the ~70s was the much more superior path for our own autonomous good. No wonder it feels logical to quit the time-suck of billable hours and LinkedIn trawling, and to invest mightily instead in demystifying matters of the heart and dealing in the partner hunt—a venture that is actually fully within one’s agency to effectualize, right? RIGHT??? To focus on that tried and true path toward resource acquisition and social capital. It’s not regression if it works!