David Davis 42, part 1
Of all my bad habits, it is the ruthless desire to befriend that exerts the strongest pull on my behavior. Not that I want more friends — God, no. If anything, I’d love to drop about 80 percent of the ones I have, so I could stop remembering their birthdays. But because I can’t quit — because constantly pulling strangers into my orbit is what stabilizes my bearing in the universe — I have determined to double down.1
This excerpt from Caity Weaver’s recent NYT piece about group-travel companies designed to help upwardly-mobile Millennials make friends caught my attention: in describing her compulsive need to gather companions, Weaver pins down my own compulsive need to get laid23. Swap “befriend” with “fuck,” and she’s describing my relationship to casual sex.
While on a meticulously curated trip to Morocco, Weaver finds herself in the company of 12 other women like her—“the Jeff Bezoses of friend-making”—and arrives at the conclusion that what really unites them is not how they make friends, but why. “My tendency to mechanically entrap others into friendship seemed suddenly explicated: I do it because I have no tolerance for those who unintentionally imperil fun party moods by fostering atmospheres of social awkwardness,” she writes.
The founders of the group-travel company in question rely on this tendency, of course. Their clients are “‘decision makers or leaders’ in their regular lives who ‘want somebody else to take control’ of their vacations” because they have “decision fatigue” from the pressures of having it all. Coming as no surprise to anyone, Type A types like Weaver are control freaks, and vacations like this one have been devised not for relaxation but for a distinctly unrestorative pleasure, which is found in the illusion of giving up control without having ceded a single inch.
If you’ve been around since the beginning of DAVID, you might remember how often I wrote about fantasy in the early days. At the dawn of hormonal transition and the pandemic, this project was my distraction from loneliness, fear, and overwork. On the bleeding cusp of being alive, I was tipped back into the ether by 2020 (as so many of us were) with a series of personal tragedies and frustrations. Like finally deciding you want that surgery, only to be told that you must wait another year—another five—before you can have it, I learned through contrast what it’s really like to be crushed by desire.
In my lowest moments, I missed Jade and my friends, I panicked about money and my chronic illness, and I grieved the worlds I once took for granted. Without reducing its substance, fantasy—whether it was about getting hurt by my friends, or fucking strangers, or simply being in a bar4 with other people again—stood in for yearnings too hurtful to look at dead-on. I’d rather want than need, you know?
But I kept going. So did you. The first years of the pandemic are now behind us, as is my second puberty, more or less, and I’ve been given some freedom to pursue the daydreams that kept me going. Some have been attained, others still wait in the wings, and yet others will forever defy realization, as they should. With age, experience, and a tempering of urgency, I’d like to think I’ve gotten some perspective on all of it, enough to return to DAVID’s roots, now that it’s aboveground. If early DAVID was about fantasies yet to come, this stage will ask after fantasies old, failed, retired, and betrayed. The memory of a fantasy, after all, is its own fantasy.
To hearken back to the old DAVID tagline—a mise en abîme in serial—we’re not looking at mere fantasy, here, but fantasy remembered, refracted, even regretted. I typically structure these series in posts of three, but since fantasy is my gluten-free bread and dairy-free butter, this one may take a while.
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Italics mine.
It feels bitchy to describe this piece as “fluffy,” although I think that it is, while also being well-written, funny, and insightful, as I’ve come to expect from Weaver over the years.
By the way, I don’t subscribe to the New York Times. Steal the New York Times! This is what I think about the New York Times!
When I tell you that I’ve cried to this TikTok.
I don't think this is quite what you're referring to, but this newsletter really got me thinking about fantasy and how for me it can sometimes be great but also can sometimes be a coping mechanism that becomes all-consuming. Early-ish in the pandemic, I went through a long phase of being wildly unhappy, literally listened to the Inside soundtrack over and over and over, and found myself falling into old habits of fantasizing about specific types of scenarios that excited me. That in and of itself wouldn't necessarily be bad, but it led to me feeling really hostile towards my actual life (and people in it) and withdrawing, because of the allure of the fantasy. I can't even explain what eventually pulled me out, but something did, and I'm glad for it. Less than a year or so after all of this, my life took some unexpected by wonderful turns that actually brought me closer to making some of those fantasies as much of a reality as possible. The relationship between reality and fantasy is strange and interesting. I look forward to hearing more about your takes on fantasy!