Category: field notes

The following originally appeared yesterday, February 12, 2026, in the weekly email newsletter that went out to the Disquiet Junto:

I spent a lot of my 20s going to concerts. I still go to a lot of concerts, but my 20s were different, resting between college (New Haven) and mature adulthood, between living with my parents (Long Island) and settling into a long-term relationship (San Francisco, where I have now lived most of my life), between focusing on learning and … well, the parallels aren’t all necessarily self-evident, and can even be a distraction from a deeper truth. The key thing is: in my 20s, I went to concerts all the time.

The modern internet was still nascent during my 20s (1986–1996, the latter chunk in Sacramento), a development central to this personal narrative, because not only did I myself eventually (though not until 2004-ish, after I left New Orleans) slowly age out of the intensity of that local-band concert-going, it also became less common a generalized experience.

This broader cultural shift away from live entertainment was in part due to the rise of digital connectedness (or what passes as connectedness — yes, an odd qualification, given how this is going out as an email and eventual blog post), and in part due to the way those same technologies transformed everyday life: work, art, education, romance, family, friendship, solitude — especially solitude — and everything in-between.

Not that there is much “in-between” anymore. I don’t think it’s a radical suggestion to say that the economic and professional pressures one experiences in one’s 20s in 2026 can be significantly greater than when I was in my 20s. Gen X became synonymous with “slackers,” and while that mode wasn’t a uniform or even widespread way of living, it played an outsized role in culture. One’s 20s were in-between. I sometimes wonder if they are any more.

I have no idea the extent to which slack is even possible these days — and there is no small irony to the fact that, as a friend noted to me recently, the word is more closely associated now with a ubiquitous software platform that has helped turn work into an always-on, weekends-be-damned, attention-fracturing scenario. Once upon a time, Thursday night became the new Friday night. Now every evening can feel like late Tuesday afternoon, if you’re not careful.

I do know, all that said, that online life has its virtues, and that online communities can have a vibrance that runs concurrent with physical life, and that these two realms are by no means separate. Had I started the Disquiet Junto in my 20s (I was, instead, 45), I might have experienced it differently, but as I reflect on the concert-going of my 20s, I recognize and appreciate certain correlations, in particular: watching how musicians develop, how creative acquaintances flourish, and most pertinent to this far-longer message than I’d expected to write, how spaces (some virtual) have their unique ways of shaping and encouraging both personal development and collegial interaction.

The Disquiet Junto has been running weekly for nearly a decade and a half, nearly 750 consecutive Thursdays. For most of that period, when I thought about what the Junto is “like,” rather than what it “is,” I would compare it to a next-generation record label. Not that the Junto is a label, per se, but interesting record labels are often windows on scenes, on communities, on creative networks. However, more recently I’ve come to think of the Junto as akin to a virtual venue — an asynchronous, natively digital one. Which is to say: I’m not going out to concerts as often as I once did, but I’ve come to see that I’m no less engaged in an industrious and communal performance zone.

Again, the parallels are diffuse, and trying to pin things down is a distraction. It’s not the same, and that’s OK, because the same is not the point. The same is at best an arbitrary measure of meaningfulness. Online creative activity is its own thing, and a little reflection (perhaps here more than a little) in that regard can be rewarding and informative.