Trying to become the first person to have every thought

I'm writing from inside the culture I’m trying to understand. I’m 22, post-grad, living in New York, trying to figure out the same stuff everyone else my age is: work, money, friends, fun, ambition, burnout, social media, all of it. I went through COVID in high school, learned how to be online before I really learned how to socialize, and I’m still watching my generation make sense of what that did to us in real time.

I’m interested in culture the way you experience it day to day, not the way it gets summarized from a distance. The jokes, the tweets, the memes, the sports conversations, the ways we talk, the ways we cope, the habits we pick up without realizing it. When something funny or stupid pops up online, I don’t just want to laugh and scroll, I want to know why it landed, where it came from, and what it says about how we’re learning, connecting, and surviving right now.

I’m pulling from philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and whatever else helps make sense of it. I’m part of Black culture, Gen Z culture, athlete culture, tech culture, American culture, and I’m interested in how those worlds overlap, clash, and remix into something new. The goal is to slow things down just enough to really look at what we’re doing and why.

This is for people my age who want language for things they already feel, for professionals working in culture who have to make decisions inside these systems, and for anyone who's not trying ot hear that “kids are lazy” or “that’s just how it is now.” I want people to take these ideas, push back on them, argue with them, bring them into group chats, classrooms, locker rooms, and meetings, and use them to think a little more clearly.

I really live this. I’m in it, the same confusion, same jokes, same contradictions. I’m just taking the time to think about what it all means.