The Loneliness Time
Christos Yannaras, Carly Rae Jepsen, and the recipe for a maple bourbon smash
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Targeted ads are always a wild ride, especially on Instagram, which (I hope) is my only connection with the terrifying mega-AI tracking system known as Facebook. I’ve trained the algorithm to show me mostly beautiful clothes that I can’t afford, usually a comfortable symbiotic relationship. This week, though, I was served ads featuring two articles, accompanied by chaotic surrealist illustrations: “I Feel Like I’ve Been Sleepwalking Through My 20s” and “My Average Life is Smothering Me.”
At first I wondered if I should be offended (or alarmed) at being targeted by pieces that were such screams into the void, but they were interesting reads, submissions to an advice-column Substack that is somehow related to New York Magazine-offshoot The Cut. The first writer complained of “the persistent slumber I feel like I’ve been in for the past few years, even when accounting for the pandemic.” From the second one: “Every week I feel like I’m waiting for the weekend, and every weekend I’m anxious about the monotony of the upcoming week. It feels like an unbearably average life.”
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