Normally, on the East Coast where I live, the weather is the clearest indicator that time is passing. But for me recently, it was being at a bar and overhearing a woman complaining to her friends. “The only thing more embarrassing than being single is having a fucking boyfriend,“ she said, as I listened, enraptured. “What am I supposed to dooo???“
The jubilation I felt from overhearing a tidbit of someone else’s life was so powerful that it felt like I was swimming in it. It was a perfect moment after a stretch of time when, as Sarah Larson described in The New Yorker in June, we had little of such interactions, if one can even call them that. “You don’t want to befriend all of these people, but you’re glad to have them around,“ she noted, reflecting on the nature of eavesdropping. “These thinner threads of contact, though they form and fray in an instant, create our sense of being both of and apart from a place; they also help put our own lives in perspective, which is especially welcome after a year when perspective has been hard to come by.“
Like Larson, I’ve found that being around people I don’t know has been one of the things I have missed the most during the pandemic—even just commuting to work so I could be physically forced up against the humanity of others. In a period of time when protecting everyone required denying ourselves basic human contact, indulgence started to mean something else: What felt the most indulgent was what used to feel like the bare minimum.
In this issue, we aimed to think critically about those aspects of life that are so frequently treated as excessive, debauched, or extravagant—sex, travel, food, wealth—after a stretch defined by austerity. Through it all, I kept circling back to one thing: the idea, as simplistically cheesy as it might sound, that what we really look for in all these realms is each other. Once you can be with others in whatever way suits you, nothing else feels as good. One person’s joy may be another person’s waste of time, but what we have found to be repeatedly and overwhelmingly true more than anything else is how much we find joy in each other.
—Kate Dries, Editorial Director