How Other Things End

"This is how the text exchange ends.Not with an explicit farewell but with a two-day pause followed by a thumbs-up-emoji reaction. This is how the career ends.Not with a retirement party and a gold watch but with a second career in the gig economy. This is how doing laundry ends.Not with crisp, clean bedding but with your sheet coming out of the dryer balled up in your duvet cover, still soaking wet."

"This is how the smartphone era ends.Not with a cultural rethink of the role that technology plays in our lives but with scrolling past a video of Jonathan Haidt musing about the harm of narrative-free content to watch a clip of a broccoli-haired teen-ager punching his grandpa in the back while Hozier sings, "I take my whiskey neat." This is how the "couch to 5K" ends.Not with a 5K but with shin splints."

Text exchanges often end not with explicit farewells but with multi-day pauses and a thumbs-up emoji reaction. Careers often shift not to retirement ceremonies but into second careers in the gig economy. Household tasks yield imperfect results, such as sheets balled inside duvet covers and still soaking. Dinner in the thirties can resolve to a single square of dark chocolate. Smartphone-era cultural reckoning often gets displaced by viral, narrative-free clips of violence. Fitness goals like 'couch to 5K' can end in shin splints. Medical care can default to telehealth referrals that require separate in-person billing. Fashion choices collapse into practical REI pants on date nights.

Read at The New Yorker