Love the Ones You're With

It’s so weird right now, yeah?

Every thumb flick brings a new reason to gnash our teeth and toss back another antacid: Oligarch coup in progress! Bird flu conspiracies! Another plane falling out of the sky!

Yet outside it’s business as usual, people clocking into work and going to Pilates and bringing their dogs to restaurants like everything’s normal. So confusing.

One minute it’s all the despotic megalomaniacs and their child army of ketamine-addled racist incels have seized all our private data and when do we start rioting over the price of eggs?! Then five seconds later all anyone’s talking about is Kendrick Lamar’s symbol-stocked sick burn on white America and did Seal really sell out so hard he became an actual CGI seal?

I can’t tell; is civil society on the brink of collapse or how cute is Brittany Mahomes’ date night purse? Which is the bigger waste of time and money, Bud Light’s “come back bro” commercial or Georgia grand doofus Buddy Carter introducing a bill to rename Greenland as Red, White and Blueland? I’ve got whiplash trying to parse out which distractions matter—and make no mistake, they’re all distractions.