Yesterday I swung by my former employer: a coffee shop near downtown Des Moines called Smokey Row, notorious for mediocre coffee and being the place national journalists swarm to whenever it’s election season. When I arrived, I immediately ran into my good friend, Morgan, that I hadn’t seen since September.
In Midwest Futures by Phil Christman, Christman makes a throwaway comment about a friend of his that was going to teach him how to box. He says, in the brief parentheses,
“(An anarchist friend of mine was going to teach me, until he left town for vague but important-sounding reasons, as one’s anarchist friends are prone to do.)”
I always chuckle at that description because it’s also a perfect description of Morgan and I’s friendship. He’s an anarchist, and he’s always out doing stuff I don’t fully understand and disappearing for various reasons. He’s out living his life, spending long stretches living in vans or working in a city for a few months before moving somewhere else. It’s a nomadic life that I certainly couldn’t pull off, but I respect him for it. He’s the anarchist. I’m the “democratic socialist” or whatever fake label I’ve made up who works a comfy insurance job and has knocked on a door once or twice for Bernie.
I hadn’t seen Morgan since September because he’d disappeared on one of his various adventures, but he was back
in town visiting, so I plopped down next to him and we talked for about an hour, giving eachother all the updates. His year-or-so was tumultuous, mine was pretty boring. I’ve been working from home since last fall.
Morgan also used to work at Smokey Row. There’s a lot of jokes among former employees of the place that, if you spent more than a few months there, you will be haunted forever by your past employment there. You will make close friends, you will find a weird temptation to return to it, your memories from it will live on. I think it might be less that the job itself haunts people, but that barista jobs—at least in Des Moines—tend to be snatched by embittered liberal arts students or artistically minded folks in their early twenties (sometimes late teens) who end up stuck there for a really impactful period of life. I think most people are just haunted by their early twenties and return to those emotions a lot. There’s a reason films like Clerks are so successful.
Smokey Row combined that with understaffing and a business model that just wasn’t conducive to how busy the store always was. There is a sort of trauma bond you develop with coworkers when you’re frantically trying to handle an understaffed evening with lines out the door, being stuck there until midnight because you were too busy to clean until close. It’s not an experience I would really wish on anyone, but it also formed strong friendships.
After talking for an hour or so, Morgan and I noticed that one of the workers was an old coworker, Max—a guy I hadn’t seen since COVID-19.
I quit the job during the pandemic. When I got thrown out of school due to quarantine, I was forced to move in with my parents. My Dad has respiratory issues, and so when Smokey Row’s owners contacted me and told me I needed to either return to work (and risk my Dad’s health) or quit. So I allowed them to “quit” me (which also lead to issues with unemployment benefits later on, so thanks for that).
Max also quit for the same reasons at the same time. Living with immunocompromised people, he refused to return and was “quit.” He returned recently just to have some work while he finds something better. I chatted with him and Morgan for a while before returning home. And on my drive home, I felt elated, but also incredibly sad.
Before 2020, my relationship with coffee shops and with Des Moines overall was based around people. I joked with Max and Morgan that I “used to live in Cheers.” See, on my off days, I would go to read at a coffee shop like Smokey Row (or one of the ones in town that has better coffee). While reading, I would run into someone, usually sit down with them and talk. Another person I recognized would come over and say hi, and then we had three people, and the group would grow and eventually we all are grabbing drinks or dinner or something. This happened all the time.
On top of that, I played in bands. And I did stand up comedy for a year. And I was in college where this kind of thing was facilitated by student buildings and the fact that everyone lived walking distance from each other on campus.
This all ended during quarantine, of course. I replaced this a bit with online friendships. I got a similar feeling from Discord voice channels, where various online friends would slowly show up until it suddenly felt like a party. It was fun.
And I still love my online friends, but what I was struck with yesterday after that interaction is that… this just doesn’t happen to me anymore. I don’t run into people and suddenly decide to hang out. I don’t grab drinks with peope very often.
It’s likely that a few of my friends, if they were reading this, would object and say, “We do invite you out, but you don’t come out.” They would be right. Part of the time, it’s because I do have stuff I need to do at home, but sometimes I just don’t want to go out. The problem is that that’s most days for me.
So it’s partially self-induced, but I also struggle to understand why I’ve had such a hard time leaving the house. I get that I’m doing it to myself to some degree, but why? Ever since 2020, I seem to have lost a lot of my social ties.
The thing is, I don’t think I’m the only person who has been having this issue. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking that this isn’t just solely my own vices and mental issues, but I think a lot of people have lost their ability to participate in public spaces comfortably.
The pandemic also didn’t have a satisfying conclusion—a big sigh as we all strip our masks off and declare “wow, finally. It’s all over. Hello, brave new world!” No, instead of that, we just kind of faded back into the real world. No clear transition or sense of conclusion. As the vaccine came out, there was a collective decision to return, even when experts were warning this was not the best idea.
No one really wants to return to quarantine, of course, so we all maintained a vague, middle ground between the pandemic existing and not, leaning one way or the other, but always still somewhere in the middle. (Unless, of course, you never believed in the pandemic in the first place, but I highly doubt you’re reading my Substack. If you are, hi! Welcome.) Morgan was wearing a mask when I ran into him, but Max was not, and it wasn’t remarked upon by anyone. We just accept everyone’s approaching it their own way anymore. There’s no clear instructions or “right” answer anymore, it feels.
So in some sense the pandemic is over, but in another sense, I feel trapped inside just as much as I did during the pandemic. I still don’t see people as often as I did. Most of my socialization comes from online friends, my girlfriend, and our three cats. I’m vaccinated and not masking anymore, and yet it seems that I’ve maintained all the habits of quarantining.
I can never tell how much of this is the result of the time of life I’m in—I’m 26, I’m reaching my late 20s on the road to 30s, and that’s notoriously a time of losing friends as people move on, and constantly wondering how to make friends as an adult since high school and college makes it so much easier. Maybe it’s just an accident of timing that the pandemic hit the tail end of my college experience and made that transition into post-college life feel like specifically the result of the pandemic.
But even if it is just how being 26 feels, that still feels worth reflecting on? Why are we so bad at forming communities? Why is it that most people struggle to make friends after college? Why is it that we turn inward? I don’t think it’s natural, I don’t think it’s just “part of life.” I think it’s something we’ve accepted about how society out to be organized. I think we accept isolation and loneliness as intrinisic to life, despite the fact that society—by definition—is supposed to be people coming together or working together.
This is only one aspect of why I feel like shit all the time right now, but it’s a major one. It’s one I know I need to work to fix (and say yes when people invite me out more often). Even during the hardest periods of my life, I can feel the emotions and see the memories of friendships that I associate with those periods of my life. Right now, though, my life is a blur. I feel like I’m losing years. I wonder how many of you also feel like that. Time is moving fast and it’s starting to feel more and more indistinguishable.
I want to have a bigger takeaway, but I don’t really have one. This is my first entry in a new section I’m starting on my Substack to get me to write again, in part because I’m trying to get my life to have shape and texture again. So welcome to Josiah’s Journal, where I’m going to work on just actively writing rather than trying to form a coherent thesis. Hopefully some of you will find it insightful. If not, that’s fine. It’s more writing practice for me.
I hope we can find a way to feel alive again.