At one point in Matthew Perry’s memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, there’s a story about his 2021 stay at a swanky five-star rehab facility in Switzerland, where he was housed in a villa with a breathtaking view of Lake Geneva and assigned a personal butler and gourmet chef.
Cultural upheavals can be a riddle in real time. Trends that might seem obvious in hindsight are poorly understood in the present or not fathomed at all. We live in turbulent times now, at the tail end of a pandemic that killed millions and, for a period, reordered existence as we knew it. It marked, perhaps more than any other crisis in modern times, a new era, the world of the 2010s wrenched away for good.
People, trends, companies, culture—they live, and then they die. They come and go, and when they depart, it’s not by choice. Habituation breeds solace, but too much of that solace flips it into folly. The pillars of life became computational, and then their service providers—Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, iPhone—accrued so much wealth and power that they began to seem permanent, unstoppable, infrastructural, divine. But everything ends. Count on it.
