Sep 05, 2025
Cocoons and K-holes
I am writing this from Los Angeles. On Inauguration Day. The smell of smoke is still pungent, ash covers the roof of my car. Looking at the vistas of cold, sharp, snow blanketing DC, it’s easy to imagine we are at the End of Days. Any promise of a bright new year has been hammered down into grayscale. Where do we go from here?
My fear is that ‘we’ is rapidly shifting into ‘me.’ This is a trend we saw beginning to take hold in early 2024. As the world continued to swing from disaster to disaster, with wars in Europe and Africa continuing to rage, Gaza still under siege, American politics dangerously up for sale, and global warming birthing storms and fire events unprecedented in history, we want escape. We long to hide. We want a safe space.
We see young people slipping into sweet cocoons of self-care, wrapping wellness around themselves like a childhood blanket, designed to soothe and soften the edges. Finance bros are dipping out at lunchtime to drop into ketamine-induced k-holes, spelunking away from stress. The share of U.S. adults having dinner or drinks with friends on any given night has declined by more than 30 percent in the past 20 years. Hyper-nesting is showing up as a significant trend for 2025. Home is where our only control seems to lie.
And so we spend an average of seven hours a day on screens, wielding our devices like a shield from human contact, absorbing the world in tiny, pixelated bites. We are becoming micro world builders – designing the spaces and places we feel safe, populating them with the social media denizens we choose, ordering in the food we crave, and talking only through text. We are dropping out – but not necessarily tuning in.
I get it. There is a feeling of helplessness right now. No way to push back against the staggering thrust of bad news, fake news, bad actors, and fake ones too. Home feels safe. Numb feels good.
But none of this will make things better. And none of these will actually, in the long run, make us better. Like it or not, we need each other. As Jonathan Haidt wrote, “People don’t get depressed when they face threats collectively; they get depressed when they feel isolated, lonely, or useless.”
Yes. We all need a moment right now. Some time to grieve, to collect ourselves, to rest.
But I hope that as we dig in, we find our underground safe spaces are not burrows but are actually warrens - tunnels – places where we find ourselves connecting, one by one, with others looking for solace. Limbic spaces where we can catch our breath and reconnect with the people we need.
The future can only exist as a collective thought. We must find our way to each other so we can dream again, together. We can do this. One tunnel at a time.
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