Member-only story
After a short while, maybe twenty or thirty minutes, drinking with friends — the adult equivalent to hanging out and playing video games in someone’s basement — I get antsy, and if not bored, a little spiritually worried: rarely does the conversation amount to anything more than a skimming-the-surface. The primary contact of adult social gatherings involves nervous jokes, half-references, complaints about work, bragging about work, side-conversations that make the main conversation jealous. I’m always a little ashamed to be ‘out for drinks’ — it’s a ritual I participate in unwittingly: out of habit, or perhaps because I feel a need to maintain my social contacts, my ‘network.’ I don’t know why I don’t assert my independence more — bow out earlier, or never bow in to begin with; I guess I always hope a sudden manifestation of soulfulness. I guess I believe that soulfulness ought be the goal — that, secretly, everyone wants something vivid and living to weave itself out of the disparate topics of Millennial smalltalk. And maybe they do — but they don’t acknowledge it, don’t leave room for those existential longings.
