Is it possible to access real fun in 2025?

Post-covid nostalgia for pre-covid misery.

A few years ago, I wrote a post called “Shit Slope” about how much I hated Park Slope for its nerdiness and fake righteousness. But here I am, back in Shit Slope. I live with my boyfriend, a few blocks away from where I once lived with my ex. I much prefer the circumstances and the day-to-day of my present life, but sometimes I reminisce, from a safe distance, about the era before this one, which was not good, but preferable to this dismal present, in which we are living under an autocracy, on a burning planet etc.

I hear people talking and have read thought pieces about the pre-covid vs. post-covid culture. 2020 marked a rupture, but what this rupture represents isn’t so clear to me yet. Maybe a more dramatic departure from reality, or authenticity. Capitalism has somehow made things feel more fake, and less fun. I keep thinking about my pre-covid life, imagining I was present for something lost.

From 2017 to 2019, my ex-boyfriend and I lived on 20^th street in South Slope, around the corner from Greenwood Cemetery. I was 29 when we moved. On my walks around the neighborhood, I would note the absurdity of a mural on the side of a private residence depicting Basquiat, who was buried somewhere across the street. As if proximity to his decomposed remains lent these homeowners a coolness.

The building I lived in was owned by a nervous Austrian woman who lived on the premises. Her frequent text messages, detailing our breaches of building rules regarding recycling, top and bottom locks, and the schedule for our communal laundry machine, made me wish I lived somewhere else. She was morose and so was the building. I never liked living next to the cemetery. And as I’ve written about before, I didn’t like the bathroom. While sitting on the toilet, I could make out the word “wife” etched into the bathroom wall, beneath layers of paint.

My ex and I spent good and bad times in that apartment, but we ended our relationship disastrously. And for a long time, the way we parted colored even the fun memories. For instance, we once threw an MTV Laguna Beach-themed new year’s party. I wore low rise flare jeans. I didn’t know my nostalgia outfit was ahead of a Zoomer trend to come. Looking back now, it’s impossible not to think of the money I could have made on the clothes we wore. Or the credibility I’d gain from younger co-workers for the looks we put together. I think of how the fashion trends come and go in warp speed, and how we are running out of historic trends to feel nostalgic about and can only fetishize the recent past.

I also remember that the Laguna Beach party it was a fun night. We drank a case of Coors Light; we did shots of Fireball. No one drinks anymore, I lament. We smoked outside, we danced in the living room. It’s one of the last parties I remember from before Covid, and before the breakup.

This winter, I stayed home often, baking or cooking or watching movies. Before Covid, I hated to stay in. If I had a free night, I would walk aimlessly up and down 5^th avenue and end up getting a drink at the bar at Sea Witch where I could zone out and stare at the fish tank. I didn’t know how to sit still. Maybe Covid taught me how to be alone, and how to be quiet. I don’t know if that’s a good thing.

Currently, I work a lot and feel broke. Before Covid, I worked a lot and was even more broke. I was always trekking back and forth from South Slope to the Upper East Side to teach freshman rhetoric at Hunter or Hebrew at Park Avenue Synagogue. Being an adjunct at Hunter was probably the most unforgiving job I’ve ever had. I graded 50 or more terrible research papers per semester. I did this while feeling like an imposter because I have never understood the MLA style guide. On a good month, I made about $2,000, which I squandered on artisanal almond flour crackers at Union Market or online purchases from Madewell.

I hid the Madewell purchases from my boyfriend because he paid for most of our rent and all our drinks and dinners. He worked as a consultant and made about 100k a year, but I remember him saying he felt like he couldn’t afford a can of tuna. This was because he was stupid enough to try to save money. I thought he should give up the pretense of trying to save for a future. He believed in a future in which we would buy a house. For me, the future was always nebulous. I’d heard Steve Bannon on a podcast talking about how Millennials are serfs who will never own anything.

I was 31 when my ex left me for his best friend, a millionaire heiress. He left me with $500 in our shared bank account for the movers. When the truck arrived, the Austrian landlord came to my door and asked what was going on and I cried to her, “he left me for another woman!” She hugged me, awkwardly, then asked if we would still be paying the full rent.

I left the neighborhood in a cab to my parents’ apartment in Soho. I was nauseated with grief and motion sickness but felt some relief when we crossed the bridge into Manhattan. I got out of the cab on Prince Street and stood in front of the green awning of the Vesuvio Bakery, taking comfort in its familiarity. The bakery beneath the awning is an inauthentic rip-off, benefiting from the nostalgic imagery of the original business. I took what little comfort I could get in the imagery.

Those first days home in my childhood bedroom were a strange simulation of my youth. My parents were in the middle of a long series of doctor’s appointments, which eventually led to my dad’s diagnosis of dementia. He wasn’t the same, and the neighborhood wasn’t the same, but I stayed because I longed for familiar surroundings.

When I was about twelve, Chanel and Prada opened on Prince Street, creating an amused hysteria among my parents and their neighbors. I saw the influx of tourists and rich girls and Jack’s Wife Frieda. Now, I like to watch Parker Posie in Party Girl. I like to look at old rave flyers for venues in Soho and the East Village. I try to imagine what I was born into but did not get to fully experience.

The bad and good associations with different places and eras keep reshuffling. I’ve been thinking about the relationship between trauma and nostalgia. The historian Svetlana Boym has written about our collective desire to revisit even the most terrible past, because it is preferable to what exists now, or because we want to uncover something lost. I find it difficult to determine definitively what was a bad time and what was a good time. Especially since there are some moments in my past, such as the period in which my boyfriend left me and my father got sick and the world shut down, that were so obviously terrible, it feels good to revisit them now because it reminds me of how much has changed.

I recently re-read my journal from 2018/19, which was mostly boring. I was really stressed about my weight and money and not writing or writing but I thought it was bad. I avoided any real exploration of my feelings about my relationship with my ex-boyfriend. There was a passage about how I had just returned from a week in Paris on vacation with my ex and I did NOT want to talk about it. One might wonder what was so bad about being on vacation in Paris. I was on vacation with him. And I couldn’t access my desired aesthetic or mood for the trip, which was supposed to be leisurely and meandering and free. But he was, I believed, too much of a bureaucrat to go with the flow. We weren’t fucking enough or partying or chatting aimlessly by the banks of the river. We weren’t having the real fun.

In my journal, I describe days spent yearning for another way of living I struggled to articulate. I desired disparate foods and interiors and experiences between which I imagined a unifying thread of bohemian freedom: whole milk in coffee, salted European butter and bread, industrial spaces with exposed plaster walls and rich-pigmented velvet drapes, a hand rolled cigarette (nicotine makes me nauseous), a bottle of club matte, or a dark room, vibrating with bass.

In my journal, I complained I was stuck in a world I was itching to escape. I describe delays on the subway, ugly Brooklyn streets, the policed and the dilapidated hallways of Hunter College, overpriced Califia Farms dairy-free coconut creamer, amazon packages, and our shitty Ikea furniture.

The 2010’s were also an consumer hell, the era of Trump’s first presidency. And these years are also viewed with nostalgic distance as the beginnings of New York’s underground electronic music scene. This was the beginning of Bossanova and Nowadays. I wasn’t really part of an underground music scene, but I went to a few Spectrum parties in Ridgewood and to Bossanova soon after it opened. I remember microdosing acid at Spectrum, getting paranoid, watching a cis-male orgy, and using my ex’s card to pay for a cab back to South Slope. I also remember getting cornered in a conversation with a Polish couple outside Bossanova. They were complaining about how expensive the city was. They wanted to go back to Poland where they attended raves in the old coal mines. I thought, why am I stuck here when I could be in a coal mine?

And I also remember a couple of parties that felt euphoric. I’ve wondered why the fragmented memories of the party have been so important to me, and I’ve wished I experienced more of them. There was never enough freedom in my life. I feel I have always arrived at the tail end of something truly liberatory.

At Hunter, the theme of my freshman rhetoric class was “cities and politics.” My syllabus built a narrative of cultural decline, from the gritty lawlessness of 1970’s New York City to the neoliberal restructuring of the city under Kotch, Giuliani and Bloomberg. The academic papers I assigned, which the kids rarely read, were the sources to explain our discontent. In this research, I located my longing for the lost third spaces—the parties I continue to chase.

In a recent talk at the New Museum Emily Witt said, “A good party is a point of reference that lives inside of me…a rave at its best counters the reigning logic of the world we live in—a logic that is materialistic, that is self-promotional, that’s advertorial, that’s motivated by profit, rather than sustenance, that equates style with status…we need places that challenge that logic or we will literally lose our minds.”

It's June now and I am on summer break. I’ve been trying to go out more to make up for lost time. And to prove to myself there is still fun to be had. I encourage the 26-year-old’s I work with to go out more, imagining they missed formative years of partying while in lockdown. When I talk to them, I talk as if I were a “rave elder” who witnessed a once-in-a-lifetime party. What I really experienced were years of binge drinking and occasional dance parties. But even this seems to be an experience slipping away from accessibility.

I went to Nowadays and had an OK night. Everyone I know hates the intro speech at the door, in which the political aims of the space are too clearly articulated, killing the vibe. “We have zero tolerance for violence, racism, transphobia, sexism or other discriminatory language or actions…remember that if you want to touch another guest…ask first if it’s okay.” These rules feel almost corporate. There is something so aspirationally edgy but ultimately self-policing and chaste about Nowadays. I kept knocking into girls in futurist pleated miniskirts. I figured they’d done too much ketamine. “They don’t know how to do ketamine,” I told friends, as if I do know how to do ketamine correctly. As if I, a seasoned raver, had earned my chops in the stalls of Studio 54. They weren’t doing ketamine back then anyway, I don’t think. In our group chat, I complained the crowd was dressed up in “rave costumes.” One friend said, “I don’t think these are outfits. Everyone is pretending it’s the rave from the Matrix Reloaded.”

I complained about the vibe drought, which Michelle Lhooq describes in her Substack, Rave New World. She describes our current era of “hot topic” raves, surveilled by security, documented on Instagram.

“I guess I was never cool and I dont know about the clubbing scene but for music I feel like all of the DIY spaces were pretty much gone by the time I graduated in 2013 like monster island basement, market hotel, shea stadium, 285 Kent…” someone in my groupchat wrote.

“Bossanova started in the 2010s” I said.

“That’s true. I remember going there after graduation.”

“We witnessed it before the vibe draught!” I insisted.

I hope I haven’t attended my last good party. And if I have, I hope the good parties I attended, were the best of the era. Mark Fischer wrote about how nostalgia is also a yearning for “future that failed to happen.” In his essay about the album Burial, he describes post-rave London, a city where the sites of past raves are left in “depopulated dereliction.” To me, a site of depopulated dereliction seems great! The perfect space to hold a party. I wonder what Mark Fischer have to say about the crowded dancefloor at Nowadays.

The other night, I watched the movie 1985, shot in the style of the 80’s, and could not figure out which era it was made in. Only the main characters’ “iPhone face” and the cadence of their speech, gave the film away as something from our present. It feels like this era of authoritarianism and dystopian capitalism has really collapsed our understanding of time. Trump’s campaign is obviously built on nostalgia for his own youth. I deleted Instagram because I kept getting AI nostalgia slop—strange POV renderings of the day in the life of a coal miner or an 80s investment banker. The desire for this content (assuming there is a desire for any AI content at all) suggests a really depressing dissatisfaction with the present. It feels sometimes like nothing will ever be good again for us.

On Saturday I walked from the 4^th avenue, near the Barclays Center, where I lived in 2015, down to South Slope. I was taking a tour of my mid 20’s. I wanted to see what had changed. What shut down and opened in its place? I wanted to find out what the streets would make me feel now, a decade later.

By the Barclays Center I found derelict vape shops, Insomnia cookies, and unfinished housing developments. I continued south past the empty bars I once went to. A lone man in white underwear, draped in a pride flag danced to Disco Inferno, determined to keep the party going. I did feel nostalgic. Or I felt a desire for nostalgia. I walked down 6^th avenue to 7^th, past the townhouse where my ex’s current wife once lived, the site of our past parties, the site of their affair, a site of significance because it is where my youth took place. And there was nothing of note there. The lights were off.

What I think now is: we thought it was bad then, but we didn’t know how much worse it would get. I thought I was broke then but I could stretch my money further. I think, I wish I could go back. But also, I’m glad I’m not there because it sucked then too!

There is a line from Vincenzo Latronico’s new novel, Perfection, about a couple who lives through the rapid gentrification of 2010s Berlin, which I think of often lately.

The couple has returned from a somewhat disappointing vacation to Italy, which they now remember fondly through images captured on social media. “And this, their inability to access a version of their past unfiltered by nostalgia, will be their understanding of nostalgia.”

This quote captures the ambivalence I feel in my memories of my 20s. In my self-guided trauma tour of Park Slope, I thought I was feeling nostalgia, but it was actually just profound ambivalence.

I wish I could be a real rave elder to the Zoomer babies who like me, want to have a good time.