We can’t buy things anymore in Fort Collins. We rent them forever in ninety-nine cent increments under the thinly veiled lie of convenience.
Your razor blades, movies, dog food, meditation app, heated car seats, printer ink, music, storage (physical and digital).
I think I saw a dystopian movie where they took healthy people and siphoned out their blood until they were dry husks but not too much at one time or they would die. And so we give $7.99 here and $15.99 there and $1.99 because that’s basically nothing and shrug.
But the thing that keeps boring a hole in my brain is:
If everything is becoming a subscription, friendship is the obvious next step.
It’s not because capitalism finally figured out how to sell us friends. But because we spent decades falling for every lie in the book about how we are supposed to be independent, resilient, bootstrapped and desperately, achingly alone.
-First they told us to leave our multigenerational households.
-Then they told us to go to work all day and put our kids in daycare.
-Then they told us to work remotely, build a home office, build a home gym.
-Make your bedroom a sanctuary.
-Make your backyard a private oasis.
-Stop putting front porches on houses.
-Drive everywhere.
-Click to buy anything and leave it on my doorstep.
-Don’t ring my bell, and definitely don’t call without texting first.
We didn’t just build physical walls around ourselves, we swallowed individualistic hustle culture without community and car-centric urban planning like it was a cure-all.
We optimized our lives for privacy, efficiency, independence, and control. And now we look up from our devices on our pinterest-worthy couches we suffered through buying online and wonder why everything feels so desperately “off.”
So now friendship-based businesses are thriving: coworking spaces, social clubs, climbing gyms, pottery studios, pickleball leagues, trivia nights and third spaces with door codes.
If you are feeling isolated, the fix is not more self-optimization or “the morning routine that changed everything.” The fix is going to be making yourself a bit more permeable to people by showing up over and over again to the same group.
And now I’m worried that I just wrote an entire think-piece on why coworking in Fort Collins is a terrible business model but I’m going to keep doing it because friendship is the consequence of membership and I believe in it more than almost anything.
Love,
Angel