When you leave your house you see how there is a cloud of rigidity, rejection, closedness, paranoia over accomplishments, keeping up with the Jones stress, hanging over people.

People have become a lot less fun. I remember a different time. Not sure what changed. Some blame it on social media, some on Covid, some on the widening gap between the poor and the rich, some on the rise of individualism and narcissism and the collapse of a bigger narrative giving meaning to our lives, holding us together, the fragmentation of beliefs, with people cherry picking ‘facts’ as they please.

I don’t know what it is. I just know that being among groups of people in the public arena (note the word arena) has become decidedly less fun and I sure as hell don’t like it. I actually love communicating with people and finding out what makes them tick and figuring out what we can mean to each other. 

Luckily I have a lot of that in my job – I essentially get paid to listen to people and find some common ground to have somewhat deeper conversations – , but not much of it outside of my job.