That mid-20s impulse to have a quiet evening at home is what we used to call being ready to settle down

Plus: CT's all-new website, Trump's betrayal of pro-lifers, and more

Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here’s this week’s post.

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A take I haven’t written elsewhere

That mid-20s impulse to have a quiet evening at home is what we used to call being ready to settle down

(via)

If you’ve read much on Substack in the last few weeks, you’ve likely seen this post:

The Mainstreaming of Loserdom

I wasn’t previously familiar with the writer, but the article has gone viral, and I finally got around to reading it. It’s an entertaining piece that accurately describes a real phenomenon I’ve come across many times in the wilds of the internet:

Over the past few years, something has shifted in the perception of acceptable recreational behavior, or the way people talk about their hobbies: people are gleeful to admit they have no hobbies, no interests, no verve. Somehow, one of the main “hobbies” accepted by the masses is staying home, laying in bed, scrolling on their phones and watching television.

This is true, though I might quibble with the “past few years” timeline; I remember seeing a version of this on Tumblr a dozen years ago. But certainly this behavior—and, crucially, the willingness to speak approvingly of it online—has loomed larger in the pandemic and post-pandemic years.

I’m not only blaming the pandemic for the change, though I do think that’s part of it (and find it odd that COVID isn’t mentioned in the piece). But even accounting for it, the pandemic would only be one element of what the writer, posting as

Tell the Bees

, characterizes as a big cultural shift, and one significantly driven by technology.

It’s about phones and dating apps and loneliness, remote work and individualism and “declining social etiquette,” and now we’re at a point where “the activity [many] people crave the most is scrolling on their phones, watching other people live their lives.” Or, at least, they do this a lot and claim to crave it in a tone of brave truth-telling and superiority to any who’d dare to claim to crave anything more exciting.

Tell the Bees

is critical of this, and rightly so. There is, in fact, “fun to be found outside of the phone,” and people who declare their favorite hobby to be lying in bed on their phones do, indeed, “need to be brought into community”: church, civil society, friendship, marriage. (Read

O. Alan Noble

on the need to be doggedly intentional about this.)

But toward the end, the critique takes a turn with which I’ll do more than quibble:

On social media, we’ve seen this belief that once you get a partner or turn 25 the “adult” thing to do is to be home with them every night, and that going out is childish. … There isn’t some switch that flips when you turn 25 that makes you believe leaving your house is ungodly. 

The part I’ve cut from that quote is about how some jobs routinely require you to party, to network. True enough. But setting aside those relatively unusual roles, I’d contend that discovering a desire for a quieter life—not a phone life, a quieter life—around 25 is actually super normal. It’s what we used to call being ready to settle down.

The problem here is not the impulse to stay in. It’s the impulse to stay in on your phone, rotting in bed and watching TV shows you’ve already seen three times, doing nothing of use for anyone, yourself included. All things being equal, I’d say 25 is a very solid time to be done with the club, to find it increasingly feels like an empty and, yes, childish pursuit. Yet this shift is only a turn toward loserdom, to borrow from that post’s headline, if your alternative to being out with your friends consists of:

• phone

If the choice is wild parties vs. phone, then yeah, phone is pretty dismal, and I too might mount a defense of sticking with parties as long as your body can handle it. But that’s not the choice—or it doesn’t have to be. With all due caveats about how difficult modern dating is, how awful the apps are, how getting married is not a unilateral decision that can be made at will, I’d suggest that the modern mid-20s impulse to bed rot is a good thing distorted, not a bad thing from the start. It’s a sad misdirection of the impulse to settle down.

My most universal case for having kids

Settling down chiefly means marriage, of course, but historically it typically would’ve included children, too. And if you’re looking to avoid a future of bed rotting with your phone after losing your appetite for wild partying, let me tell you: Kids do not let you bed rot. They require active management, many snacks, walks to the park, so much ride-a-horsy and pat-a-cake.

But they generally will have you home early, which sounds like what you want. They’ll even leave you some time to do phone in bed—I’m about to do some right now. But not in an aimless loser way, in a good and useful way, because someone’s got to hang around this hotel room while our youngest naps.

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Intake

• Really trying to focus on a stack of books right now. Several for fall reviews—I’ve just finished The Web We Weave and hope to draft that review this week, though it won’t run until October—and several to contribute to decision-making for CT’s annual book awards, which will publish in December. Can’t tell you about those, though, or it’ll spoil the surprise!

• Also spending a lot of time looking over CT’s brand-new website! Still plenty of little tweaks to be made as we figure out how things work, I can’t tell you how excited I am that this is finally live.

• “When victimhood takes a bad-faith turn,” by Lily Meyer for The Atlantic

• “How far can Trump push pro-lifers?” by

  Andrew Egger
  for
  The Bulwark

Donald Trump’s monthslong tack toward the center on abortion has accelerated in recent days, with the former president telling CBS News last week that he would not try to restrict access to abortion pills if reelected, pledging to veto any new abortion restrictions Congress might pass, and posting over the weekend that “My Administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights.”

How far will Trump push his abortion-agnostic messaging? Yesterday, The Bulwark asked Trump’s campaign whether, if he were elected president and a Congress run by Democrats (not entirely inconceivable!) were to pass a bill restoring Roe v. Wade, he would veto it. The campaign didn’t even offer an explicit answer.

• “Do we really need more magic words?” by Freddie deBoer

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Output

New work:

• Nothing! It’s been a hectic month, and what I have been working on has been long-term print stuff, etc. Back in the normal swing of things next week.

Newly relevant work:

• RFK’s weird evangelical appeal is on shaky ground | Christianity Today, August 2023

• Trump’s Georgia election meddling didn’t just look wrong. It was wrong. | Christianity Today, August 2023

• The foreign policy questions Trump and Biden should answer | Reason, October 2020 (about half still relevant, unfortunately!)

• The uncertain future of presidential debates | The Week, October 2020

• Just allow presidential indictments | The Week, July 2019

• America’s presidential debates are broken. Here’s how to fix them. | The Week, September 2016

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