1. It’s the last weekend column of the year, and what better way to begin than by looking ahead to 2026 (and beyond). Cue Derek Thompson’s wide-ranging summary of the “26 Most Important Ideas for 2026,” which brings together an assortment of studies on human behavior and what they might suggest about the future. Some of his predictions are more shaky than others (the rise of anti-AI populism seems like a stretch to me), but others are on firmer ground, simply envisioning the continuation of trend lines (people will read less, stream more). The whole list is worth reading, but this summation of a few items sticks out as noteworthy:
The rise of marijuana is coinciding with a weight-loss drug revolution that will significantly reduce spending on alcohol, which is coinciding with state-by-state changes that are making it easier for people to get access to cheap weed. The age of alcohol is over, and the future looks ominously like hundreds of millions of people getting high alone rather than getting tipsy together. In the last two decades, Americans under 25 have reduced the time they spend partying by 69 percent, which is not nice. Humanity will be extremely attractive, with better weight-loss drugs, better face lifts, better plastic surgery … and fewer friends and parties. The future will be hot, high, and lonely.
Sorry-not-sorry for beginning on a downer — I promise the holiday cheer is coming! — but knowing where you are is the first step to changing course. And in a season of year when there are more social gatherings than normal, what better time to buck the trend?
Not all the news is terrible, thankfully. At least from where I sit, there was one graph that sticks out like a sore thumb:
The politics of this will graph will get all the attention, but the “religion important” lines are actually more significant. It’s not every day that you find empirical data that reports how religion stands as a bulwark against despair. I couldn’t think of a better advert for youth ministry (or for Josh Musser Gritter’s recent article on the subject).
2. I’ll return to Thompson and his bad news further down, but the good news is that you’re getting older. Yep, you read that correctly. Getting old isn’t just an expected rise in aches and pains and physical decay. As Arthur Brooks reports in the Atlantic, there are plenty of other aspects of life that are markedly better with time. For starters, you have fewer, but closer friends:
Older people selectively narrow their social circles to focus on the individuals with whom they share common passions, experience positive emotions, and derive satisfaction.
Another trend of aging? Increased altruism (i.e., a decrease in self-obsession):
In a 2021 survey of research on self-reported altruism and observed charitable behavior, four psychologists found that 14 of the 16 studies they reviewed revealed that older adults are more focused on others than younger ones.
In the third trend, Brooks saved the best for last. The older you are, the more resilient you become to ebbs and flows of life.
As a person ages, they usually get better at both avoiding and dealing with life stress. One 2023 longitudinal study involving nearly 3,000 adults ages 25 to 74 found that 70-year-olds felt stress on 40 percent fewer days than 25-year-olds did. Part of this is because the elders exposed themselves less to stressful events, but it is also because they were less reactive to stressful situations. Some of this is surely down to life circumstances: Retired 70-somethings no longer have demanding jobs. But another factor is that when old people encounter a stressful situation, they tend simply to shrug it off.
One shouldn’t, of course, “mistake approaching senility for sanctification.” But there is something to be said for how the back third of one’s life — on the other side of youthful control and accomplishment — might provide more unexpected benefits than a perpetually sore back.
3. Returning to the darker side of modern life, it’s not exactly news that the men are not alright. From the masculinity crisis to the loneliness epidemic to the rise of gambling addictions to their increased deaths of despair to the collapse of dating to the rise of solo exercising. Putting all the various trends and crises together into a coherent collage, the picture is bleak, but after reading Derek Thompson’s account of “The Monks in the Casino,” even bleak feels like an understatement. Men, Thompson argues, aren’t lonely; they have traded one prosocial script for an antisocial script. Instead of careers with family and friends and a house, there is gigs and crypto and porn and gambling and isolation:
You might suspect that the phenomenon I am talking about here is the infamous “male loneliness crisis.” In fact, I object to the term. Loneliness, the NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg told me, is a healthy instinct: “that cue is the thing that pushes you off the couch and into face-to-face interaction.” A gambling addict who sits in front of a slot machine until the small hours of the morning and forgets the passage of time is experiencing neither loneliness nor the active desire to be around other people. What he is principally feeling, I’d suspect, is more akin to a neurochemical rollercoaster ride so arousing that he forgets other people exist to be missed.
While I know that some men are lonely, I do not think that what afflicts America’s young today can be properly called a loneliness crisis. It seems more to me like an absence-of-loneliness crisis. It is a being-constantly-alone-and-not-even-thinking-that’s-a-problem crisis. Americans — and young men, especially — are choosing to spend historic gobs of time by themselves without feeling the internal cue to go be with other people, because it has simply gotten too pleasurable to exist without them. […]
The pro-social script — date around, marry, settle down, buy a house, have a kid — feels more like a luxury every year. The anti-social script — porn, posting, parlays — feels easy and even costless. If young people are throwing out the old script, it’s because they’re hunting for a deal, just like everybody else. […]
When a society pushes its citizens to take only financial risks, it hollows out the virtues that once made collective life possible: trust, curiosity, generosity, forgiveness. If you want two people who disagree to actually talk to each other, you build them a space to talk. If you want them to hate each other, you give them a phone.
It is a rotten game that we’ve signed up to play together, and somewhere deep down, beneath the whirl of dopamine that traps us in dark places, I think we know that a better game exists.
As for how we got here, Thompson takes a page from his Abundance book: In the last century, “America has over-regulated the physical world and under-regulated the digital space.” Which certainly has some explanatory power, but it’s more correlation than causation. And it certainly doesn’t explain why the many social forces have so acutely affected men (especially white men). Writing in Compact this week, Jacob Savage offers a window to what happened. Examining entry-level hiring trends over the last decade, Savage notes how from newsrooms, academia, Hollywood, medical schools, and even the tech sector, for an entire generation, “The doors seemed to close everywhere and all at once.” Admittedly, we are in terrain that garners little sympathy. The plight of white, middle-aged men feels far more like karma than tragedy to many. But the journalism major to Substack/podcasting/crypto bro pipeline (industries famous for their ease of entry) isn’t the stuff of fiction. Nor is the very real despair.
4. Perhaps you don’t remember a time when having a cell phone felt like freedom. I certainly do. It felt like having a car in 1920. While everyone else was paging through a 1,000-page phone book, printing out MapQuest directions, or physically going to a store, I had a magical device right in my pocket. My first smartphone was a gadget unlike any other that actually made life easier. It supplemented everyday tasks with increased productivity and new possibility. But as Paul Skallas writes, what happened with the cell phone — and with everything else in life — is the transformation of option to obligation:
This pattern repeats everywhere. Change whether technological, social, cultural, arrives as an option, spreads as convenience, and hardens into requirement. […]
If you want economic security, you may need a college degree. Jobs that once required a high school diploma now demand a bachelor’s. Opting out means narrower opportunities and lower earning potential.
If you want a middle-class life, you likely need two incomes. Housing, childcare, and healthcare have adjusted to assume it. The same standard of living your parents achieved on one income now requires two.
If you want to build a career with real upside, you need expensive cities. Cheap rent in New York or San Francisco is gone, but the networks are still there. You can’t opt out of the cost anymore.
The pattern repeats everywhere. Intensive parenting is expected, being active on LinkedIn is expected for careers, etc. What makes progress feel burdensome is the obligation just often just gets you back to baseline. You run faster just to stay in place. […]
The moment those same technologies become mandatory, they stop feeling futuristic. They become infrastructure. Plumbing. You don’t feel like you live in the future when you’re forced to download an app to park your car. You feel annoyed.
At the risk of a ham-fisted theological segue, this insight on the nature of options vs. obligations is exactly what the Reformation tried to reverse, to reframe the divine commands of obligation as expressions of freedom. Not only that but to halt the ever-accelerating burden of commands their status as obligation creates. Because, as Martin Luther knew too well, the only limit to obligations is personal failure.
On the subject of accelerating technology, over at Plough Paul Kingsnorth isn’t so optimistic (to say the least!):
We are trapped within this Machine, whose momentum is always forward, and which will not stop until it has transformed the world. To do that, it must raze or transmute many older and less measurable things: rooted human communities, wild nature, human nature, human freedom, beauty, religious faith, and the many deeper values that we all adhere to in some way or another but find difficult to describe or even to defend. Its modus operandi is the abolition of all borders, boundaries, categories, essences, and truths: the uprooting of all previous ways of living in the name of pure individualism and perfect subjectivity. Its endgame is the replacement of nature with technology, in order to facilitate total human control over a totally human world.
5. In humor this week, Points in Case‘s “Reasons My Library Book Is 47 Weeks Overdue” is spot on. So is Waterford Whispers News’ “Hairdresser Entering Into ‘Ignoring Everything You Asked For’ Phase Of Haircut.”
But my favorite piece this week is Belladonna Comedy’s “Our Inaugural Peace Prize Goes to HomeGoods“:
We, the middle-aged women of the United States, a population running on the fumes of our emotional-support scented candles, are pleased to award our inaugural Peace Prize to HomeGoods for its heroic, continuous support as we navigate daily crises fueled by the state of the world, ill-fitting bras, and anyone blocking the grocery aisle.
In awarding the Peace Prize to HomeGoods, we recognize the home décor superstore’s unwavering efforts to provide us with a well-lit respite from everything on our to-do lists, devastating headlines, and the tragic animal stories flooding our social media feeds.
We note the courage with which HomeGoods has stepped into the role of frontline support, given that our best shot at release comes from the memes we text our besties at 2 a.m. and the go bag we’ve already packed should the school send one more email begging for holiday-party volunteers.
We also laud HomeGoods for its leadership in addressing our needs as perimenopausal, sandwich-generation women — women whose schedules, bank balances, and dinner options are dictated by people who cannot find the ketchup in the fridge.
6. A little light on Christmas reflections this week (keep an eye out on this site for some splendid ones coming your way!), but over at Christianity Today, Brad East’s “In Bethlehem, God Chose What Is Weak to Shame the Strong” is pure gospel. Christmas, and the Incarnation more broadly, is not about sentimentality or “humanizing” God as one of us. Jesus, for example, never had to make a mortgage payment. Instead, the Incarnation reveals God’s self-giving, and fundamentally gracious, character:
While we are right to see humility at Christmas, the question is: What does it mean to call God humble? To be humble is to be lowly, and God is not lowly in himself. Rather, he becomes lowly for our sake. Nor is God weak, though he assumes our weakness to grant us his strength. Nor still is the humility of Bethlehem imposed upon God, as if it manifested an incapacity or lack.
No, the humility revealed at Christmas is the willingness of God, in his infinite love for sinners, to stoop down to our level, regardless of worldly appearances, regardless of the consequences for himself. In this sense we might apply the beloved line from Hebrews 12:2 — that Jesus scorned the shame of the cross — to the manger as well. To be found a weakling in a bed of straw is, from the vantage of the powerful, nothing if not shameful. But the Lord scorns the infamy of the high and mighty to join himself to the low and weakly. […]
Christmas sets God’s attributes in relief in beautiful and unexpected ways. For instance, think again of humility. There is nothing surprising in the weakness of a baby. All newborns are utterly dependent on their mothers for life and sustenance. What is surprising, then, is what the gospel adds to this: namely, the child in Mary’s arms is one and the same as the God who created her and even now sustains her in existence. The nursing babe is none other than he in whom all things hold together (Col. 1:17) and apart from whom nothing has been made (John 1:3).
Only a God with whom all things are possible (Matt. 19:26) can become incarnate in the form of an infant. The old hymn is therefore right to say, “Jesus, Lord, at thy birth!” For God’s “power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9). When we peer into the manger and glimpse the Christ child, we need double vision. We are seeing weakness, yes, but also the matchless might that made the universe. […]
In short, Christmas reveals God to be wholly unlike the gods of the nations, beyond myths and legends and idols of every kind. Only the God besides whom there is no other (Isa. 45:5) can become one of us without ceasing to be himself — without leaving heaven vacant. The Lord who sits on the throne also sleeps in Bethlehem. This is the mystery of the Incarnation.
Strays:
- The Temptation of Control
- The Ancient Roots of Doing Time
- The Curse of Comparison (Great new substack from recent Cville Conference speaker Josh Bascom)
- The Twin Poles of Advent
