a vacation from the future
the future is a village
Memorial Day beckons, Southern California’s May Grey has been blasted aside by the sun, and for my friends and colleagues, the annual ritual of sharing summer plans has begun. Should I go to Patmos? I’ve only been to Athens and Hydra and am curious about the other Greek islands. An overnight ferry seems to be involved though. I wince. “No worries!” Someone helpfully chimes in, “there’s a helicopter service from Piraeus!” Only $5000 direct from the port! Unfortunately, poor me, not in “this economy.” My astrologer reminds me Patmos is where St. John the Divine wrote the Book of Revelation. Apocalypse is on vibe for the summer so it makes the list.
At Chateau, I ask an haute-bourgeois in town from Paris what he thinks about Marseille. He practically spits at the mention of France’s second city. I tell him a friend is spending a week in a suite at Hôtel du Cap near Antibes. He says I should stay there instead. Unfortunately, I do not know a son of one of the owners. Again, in “this economy,” poor me.
It won’t be Italy this year. The placid white noise of the beach was interrupted by one too many screaming matches with con-artist cabbies last year, arguments with the Airbnb hosts, accusations we secretly had six guests after a Prosecco toast with friends following a birthday dinner. They were vacationing on the same island. How did they know? It wasn’t the hidden camera. (Of course there was a hidden camera.) We knocked it off the wifi the moment we discovered it. The precision of the number is curious. It’s not the number of people in our party. But it is the number of flutes borrowed from the cafe next door. Village politics.
“It’s just like that here,” a Romanian friend-of-a-friend I’m traveling with offers. Raised in Milan, she knows.A friend-of-a-friend in nearby Naples, he would throw himself in front of cars, then sue and collect the insurance money. “There’s even a word for that here. Isn’t that crazy?” She tells me, but I forget. The last time he tried it, he died.
I stop frequenting the neighboring cafe for my morning espresso. I go to the one across the piazza instead. At first, the proprietor gives me sad, confused look when I walk by. Then, pursed lip. A grimace. I feel the evil eye on my back.
By the end of the month, I yearn for the hazy chill of England, even though it was a year without a summer. A barista gives me a pound coin as change for a transaction fee, feeling guilty about it. The English won’t cheat a man out of a coin. An Uber driven politely suggests I go to Farringdon station to avoid the traffic at King’s Cross. “It will be cheaper,” he assures me. I never feel the gaze of the evil eye in London, the downside being the only swimming on offer is the ponds at Hampstead Heath.
From a rented flat in Holborn, I field more accusations from our Italian hosts. Allegedly, we have flooded the house! For all the damage we had caused, there is curiously no evidence and we are never charged—which reminds me, as a I plan this summer, I still have a nasty review on my profile that I need to have removed.
I don’t want to leave the wrong impression. The trip was good overall. My friend and I decided early on we would be like Ken. Our job would be beach. And we would beach until we couldn’t stand to beach any longer. We’re discussing other Mediterranean options. Maybe Spain. Maybe Corsica. It’s cheaper to be on vacation than to be in LA, and oddly I get more work done.
They say you have your best thoughts in the shower, out for a walk, distracted, ambulatory, soothed. It reminds me of advice Don Draper gave Peggy Olsen in Mad Men: “Just think about it. Deeply. Then forget it. And an idea will jump up in your face.”—the lightbulb moment. I imagine my subconscious a computer, rendering the haze of impressions into an insight sharper than I could achieve with conscious effort, white-knuckled, staring blankly, as I have been asked to do so often in corporate workshops, where session leads complain if you pee too much, or as they term it in horrifying business-speak: “taking too many bio-breaks.”
It’s more than just the season that has vacation on my mind. It’s a few reasons, actually:
First, the second Trump administration has recharged a certain flavor of Middle American europhobia—and what do Americans resent more about Europeans than their exceptional skill at vacationing?
I remember years ago, in the fall of 2021, meeting a certain right-wing podcaster at a Sex Magazine launch party in Austin, Texas. I didn’t know who he was and so after brief introductions, small talk turned to what all small talk was about then: COVID. I told him I had just gotten my back from Paris, my first post-lockdown vacation, and how the contrast in manners between the United States and France had really underlined how grubby and paranoid and rude everyone had gotten on our side of the Atlantic.
It’s a known-known that American tourists are tolerated more than welcomed. With our monolingualism and insistence on the universality of the customer-is-always-right principle, we oftentimes deserve it. Hence, the French are rude stereotype. (Though considering the behavior of certain haughty maître d’s, it may be as deserved as the ‘ugly American’ tourist caricature…)
I didn’t see arguments about masking on the banks of the Seine. There was no snitch video surveillance of strangers “breaking the rules” in the Marais. The French, in all their wisdom, had older codes about how people should conduct themselves in public. They’re unwilling to rip up the social contract just because technology enables it.
Wow! did this podcaster not like my positive opinion of the French! In a heavy lisp flecked with spittle, he went on a tirade ripped from the Freedom Fries era, circa 2003. “Old Europe!” and “Europe is dead!” and “Surrender monkeys!” and “They should pay for their own defense!” and “They don’t even work!” It was a premonition of the current dysfunction in transatlantic relations. While intrepid Americans do the difficult work of building the future, decadent Europeans luxuriate in their palatial past.
This flavor of conversation has occurred with some regularity since then, especially with people who work in Silicon Valley or associate with the tech right. “Europe is a museum!” they will tell you. “The only industry they have left is tourism!” People on X argue about GDP per capita statistics. They insist Mississippi is wealthier than Switzerland. If you disagree, you are a “europoor.” Isn’t the United States’ most important alliance NATO, a consortium of mostly European states? No, posters insist. America’s greatest allies are El Salvador, Argentina, and Israel. Is this a diminishment from our once globe-spanning post-war order? No, you just don’t get it, the posters plead. The future is Salvadoran president Bukele’s volcano-powered crypto-metropolis!
That’s the vision at least. That’s “the future.” That’s “the real world.”
Europeans: they’re just on vacation.
Which brings me to the second reason vacation is on my mind. Americans pride themselves on living at the cutting edge of technological civilization. Work hard. Play hard. Their economy runs on an unsentimental embrace of innovation, creative destruction, and at least publicly, an unrepentant embrace of the Protestant Work Ethic. Our Calvinist ancestors brought with them a deep belief that work and wealth were worldly demonstrations of God’s favor. America’s expansion, first territorially, then economically, and finally technologically were expressions of our predestined favor.
And we prove our worthiness by getting up and grinding. Every day.
Only, it seems as if the grind has changed. Yesterday, New York Magazine published an essay so viral, that dominated Twitter discourse so thoroughly, it felt like 2014: “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College.” Beyond the morality of the mass adoption of cheating, beyond the horror at a generation outsourcing their cognitive abilities to a chatbot subscription, beyond the risks of embracing a mass illiteracy—what was most interesting was the rationale for why the students were cheating. The students claim they need to cheat because they are too busy. What students have replaced the reading and writing and seminars with is the tell.
Screens. TikTok. Instagram. Netflix. Xbox.
Yes, the “life of the mind” mythos surrounding college has worn thin. Explicit credentialism, cutthroat admissions, sky-high tuition, and craven, corporatized administrations hellbent on maximizing profits at all costs have reframed education as a pay-to-play scam necessary for to become a member of the American upper middle class. A rarefied, consciousness-expanding experience, sadly, it is not. But this spiritual crisis is mere pretext. The void is in the black mirror.
The American embrace of work has become the American embrace of the phone. But the phone, that double-edged sword is as much a distraction from work as a conduit to productivity. You cannot work without one, even though, ironically, the distraction of the phone is the biggest impediment to work in the first place.
All that GDP and what does American life look like for the next generation? Cavernous white condos where we hide under microplastic shedding blankets with our phones on Do Not Disturb while we scroll and scroll and scroll, waiting for the DoorDash delivery to be left at our door with a ghostly knock we are too agoraphobic to answer. Economists and thought leaders hand-wring and speculate over what a future where all the upper middle class jobs are done by AI will look like—but we already know. It’s the student in their self-imposed pod: bedrotting, doomscrolling, dissociating. Yet somehow, more anxious than ever.
Look in the mirror. As Erik Rittenberry said last week in Poetic Outlaws: “The Comfortable Life is Killing You.” This technological version of “the future” that we Americans have adopted in so self-congratulatory a fashion is anti-human.
It is a future we all need a vacation from…
Which brings me back to the counter-intuitive way in which a vacation can be more productive than everyday life. In a Mediterranean village, there’s no elevator, just stairs. There’s no delivery apps, just cafes. The sun glinting off the sea and the sand makes your phone hot to the touch. Angrily, it shuts off, giving you a warning that your device is overheating. The wifi is bad and sometimes doesn’t work at all. I write longhand in a cheap notebook stained with seawater and snap photos to later be transcribed by ChatGPT. (See: I’m not a total Luddite.)
And before you think I’ve gone utopian on you, no, I don’t think this is “fully automated luxury space communism.” When all the fake busyness is wrung out of your brain, you discover new bullshit is seeping into the cracks. Like the petty drama, between myself and my Airbnb hosts or the paranoid eye of the cafe-owners next door.
Anyone who has spent any time with truly wealthy individuals knows that gossip and drama drive their lives. The upper middle class types with careers look on in disgust. All that time and money and what do they do with it: pick at each other, find new excuses for petty fights. See: The Real Housewives franchise for a master class in this lifestyle. But I have a question: is the superficial drama of the idle rich really any different than the passive aggressive bullshit that pervades office life?
In so many ways, we already live in an age of super-abundance, and yet over and over again we discover new and novel techniques to totally fuck it up: divorce and drugs and lies and betrayals. All the wonderful things that our lives are made of! In the midst of a major depressive episode in high school, mother told me, “You just have to choose to be happy. Or learn to live being unhappy.” Probably the best advice she has ever given me. If there’s one lesson we all should have learned from all the fabulous wealth and convenience and comfort tech has given us these past few decades, it’s that creature comforts won’t fix us. If anything, they may give us just enough tools to never fix ourselves.
And so when I imagine where the future is headed, I picture two paths. One is the path of the bugman, the illiterate Ivy League students, my friends and I, who sometimes can’t get out of bed, despite having lives we carefully curate to inspire envy in others via social media. The other is some version of tradlife—though I would distance it from its politicized connotations.
When I imagine Year Zero, after the AI achieves some super-intelligent sentience would look like is a Jane Austen novel or a Merchant Ivory film, Pride & Prejudice, Howard’s End. Feel free to sub in tales of cloistered village life more fixated on the social than the economic that you feel is relevant to you.
The future is village life. For this week that’s all I will say.
