--- ## Highlights this is life under capitalism. And yet, sometimes I worry that, regardless of our ironic self-awareness, we lose a little bit of one another each day. I know I’m being sentimental. I’ll be blunt. Each day, we are losing one another. And by one another, I mean: everything. And by everything, I mean: in a world where it sometimes feels we have to jerry rig into our lives both what we love to do and who we love to do it with, where we have to apologize for the excesses of personality that are not the same as the excesses of production, where we have to somehow — I did not know this was possible, tell me if it’s possible — make time, we lose the possibilities of connection that make up so much of the inherent value of a life. In his book This Life, Martin Hägglund puts it best when he writes: “If we are committed to capitalism, we are committed to commodifying more and more aspects of our lives.” the entire “We” corporation was “helping you live and not just exist.” In Ross Gay’s essay “Inefficiency,” he writes about how he loves “just wandering,” before adding the sentence: “Maybe you’re with a friend, and maybe the inefficiency will make you closer.” I worry friendship is the next territory of consumption and commodification, to the point where you can no longer simply wander with a friend, just to see what closeness might occur. I’m a teacher who wakes up early to read. One of my friends hasn’t read a book in years. And yet, because of how often we have moved together through inconveniences, how often we have breathed side by side, or how often one of us has paused while the other has tied a shoe or sprinted into a bathroom or stopped for a drink of water, we have learned the value of connection brought on by vulnerability, the love required to go by the same stopwatch while moving, sometimes, at different speeds, each of us with wholly different needs. My friend who doesn’t read still reads everything I write. The thing about laughter and loitering is that we engage in such acts among people. And the thing, sadly, about production and consumption is that our culture has fashioned it so that we can engage in such acts alone, even when we are in a room full of people. We browse alone. We buy alone. We are so close to living and dying alone. Living does not need to be qualified as time spent producing, time spent buying, time spent playing, or time spent planning. Living can simply mean time spent among among us among the dailiness of us Tiny useless canes that end up meaning the world. We lose our various saint friends. Those people in our lives who carry themselves while they carry us. I don’t know what they’d be replaced by. I do, though. Fake high fives. Co-working spaces with glass-paneled offices. Product-driven social networks. Before I had to commute to the school where I teach. Before whatever commitment I made for the weekend, whatever augmentation of time, whatever penciled-in-thing. I said I am carving out space to be my best self, and then I put my headphones in, tilted my phone sideways to get a bigger screen, and sweated in isolated silence for an hour