Produced by Eve Lyons and
Text by
It’s very nearly 2020, an election year in the United States, and by the look of the country on TV and in the newspapers, you’d think every day was spent in bitter acrimony over health care and environmental catastrophe, financial inequality and discussing if we all work for Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos.
Well. Yes. The acrimony was every day! But we still have our hobbies: our jobs or lack thereof, our love lives or lack thereof, and our favorite pieces of streaming intellectual property.
Even as we grip the big toboggan that is our complicated national conversation, slushing downhill together toward something scary just out of sight, the thing we hear most from people is that they’re lonely.
MSNBC and Fox News shout down at us. The perpetual red carpet divides the famous from the nobodies (that’s us!). Instagram influencers create fake dramas — very riveting — while standing on our necks to cut brand deals.
Netflix and Hulu and Amazon and Apple and Disney battle for each of our finicky streaming clicks. Our cardboard boxes with rat traps and kitty litter arrive each day from random warehouses in contracted trucks where every driver’s forward and reverse is recorded and judged; our clothing is made by brands that don’t exist; in big cities now, our food may be delivered from a restaurant that is just a nameless kitchen with a number of brand logos on delivery websites.
The museum has evolved from a place to admire drawings of things from far away to a place to take photographs to a place to take photographs of yourself. Frankly, the video games have gotten so good that they threaten not just episodic TV and other pop culture but also, why spend time with your family even?
As a generation of young punks ages into grandparenthood, the younger folks look at the mess we’ve made with some fair disgust. We built car-dependent communities that ensure we’ll grow old alone. We powered right through the climate crisis, deadline after deadline. We built this isolation for them.
But … then we also left them 97 episodes of “NewsRadio” and the collected works of Janet Jackson.
This year, Styles traveled America, looking for the decadent emblems of excess and inequality, and the quieter pleasures that make up life. We saw fans and creators, lovers and frauds. We may be nationally obsessed with talking about our internal divisions, but also people really want to hang out, work out, make out and dance it out. We just don’t always know how to get it together. Here’s a look.
