Let me tell you a little about my weekend.
For various reasons, we didn’t have our normal editorial meeting at work last week, so I spent a fair amount of time on Saturday logged on to X, scrolling around seeking inspiration for stories. Dominating my feed were images of the riots in France and, even more so, annoying takes on the riots in France.
I wasn’t even so much seeing people tweeting dumb takes about the riots as seeing sensible people executing good dunks on dumb takes about the riots. But I still had to see both the underlying dumb takes and also the under-underlying riot images. There was also plenty of discourse (some of which I ended up contributing to) in the broad space of “people who agree that Abdul El-Sayed winning is preferable to Mike Rogers winning but are fighting about El-Sayed.”
The France stuff I kind of find entrancing in a doomscrolling kind of way, but El-Sayed discourse is real catnip for me in terms of getting into it with other people. In both cases, though, X engineers are evidently pretty smart and good at their jobs and were successfully executing on their mission of keeping me engaged.
Did it make me feel happy and satisfied with my life? No. Did it help me execute on my actual goal in logging on to X? Also no. But it’s not their job to make my life better. Their job is to keep me scrolling — and mission accomplished.
It’s good to do things
Some other things that happened over the weekend:
I met up with two friends to see the new “Street Fighter” movie. It was incredibly dumb, but I have to admit that it contained individual scenes — from video game nostalgia to hearing White Zombie’s “More Human Than Human” for the first time in years — that brought my lizard brain joy.
It was also good to see my friends, albeit briefly. I like those guys! Later I drove to a middle-school debate tournament where I was supposed to pick up my kid and one of his friends. It turned out that it was running late, so I went in to sit with my son and watch the handing out of awards. In the auditorium, I ran into a writer whose book I like but who I’d only met once before, and we chatted briefly. She introduced me to another dad who I’ve seen around the neighborhood but never met. I said “hi” to some kids who I know slightly, and one of them said something funny. Then I drove up to my kid’s friend’s house to drop him off while he and my son bickered in the back seat like an old married couple. Driving back to our house, my son and I listened to Stan Van Gundy on “The Zach Lowe Show,” and they were saying Boston is going to be good this year, so my son and I talked about how The Ringer spent the whole summer melting down about the Jaylen Brown trade but is now coming around to our view that the Celtics are in good shape for next season and the trade set them up with better flexibility for the future.
Soon after we got home, two adult friends of ours stopped by. They had plans, but one of them has two kids, and we’d agreed with them that the kids could hang out at our house while the adults went out. Our friends’ adult plans turned out to be a bust, so they came home early. All of us adults wound up hanging out while two of the kids played Minecraft and the third read a book. Eventually everyone went home, probably slightly late relative to everyone’s statutory bedtimes. But a good time was had by all.
What really struck me about all of this was that none of it was particularly perfect, or even planned.