The New York Times went to some of the sharpest, most influential public figures to ask the following: “What are the things we do today that will seem embarrassing or otherwise regrettable to our future selves?” That is to say, what is “the stuff that will make us cringe when we look back on how we lived our lives in the early 2020s?”
The answers were many and various. Some were fine. Cord Jefferson said we’d cringe at wearing crocs. Michael Musto thought it would be gender-reveal parties. Others were on the peculiar side. A “TV writer, journalist” said we would cringe at talking on the phone. An “essayist, novelist” said the pandemic. A “comedian, writer” thought that a backlash to “hookup culture” would occur in “30 or 40 years.” Pretty low stakes all around, though.
Being myself an important intellectual who is also self-conscious about what zoomers think of me, I did not hesitate to submit my own thoughts. I’m guessing my submission got lost in the spam folder. (Or maybe the editing process was too restrictive for the wisdom it contained.) But of course I think it is still worth making public. So it will doubtless be your esteemed privilege to read what I sent:
I think that people in the future will finally come around to the idea that it’s possible to be “just friends” with someone who has no body.
The relations between the bodied and the bodiless have been improving for the most part. No reasonable person today looks upon someone who has nothing below their chin or neck and finds a lesser person, in spirit. Someone who is only a head has as much equal standing and dignity as you do. But sometimes that generates a lot of fine ideas about yourself that are out of proportion with the actions you take toward others.
The temptation to see a bodiless person as some sort of transactional counterpart, rather than someone worthy of camaraderie or respect, is difficult to suppress even now. You may be comfortable interacting with heads in casual settings, of working alongside them, and even under them. But as you do so, you struggle to bury inappropriate thoughts; in fact they only seem to multiply.
“That one would be great for keeping my pile of papers in order, or holding my books in place,” you think of your boss. “I can double-team that one with my roommate or my dog in the park,” you say about a bodiless bank teller. “Man, I can get maximum reps in if I attach those to a bar,” you think about twin heads just going about their day. And clearly you don’t rewatch 8 Heads in a Duffle Bag every other week for the sheer pleasure of seeing Kristy Swanson at her career peak.
But you counter: “I do have bodiless friends! Strong, independent heads that I proudly support and with whom I can be myself in their perfectly platonic company.” Yeah, we’ve seen your Instagram profile. But that compartmentalization is not so easy in real life, is it?
What about when you’re at the brunch table, downing successive mimosas with your bodiless besties? It is not long before you’re back into your old habit. You turn to each head and impose your dark desires upon them. One you imagine using to nail a 7-10 split. One twirls around and around on a tetherball pole. If you stack one of them on top of another, you have a foot rest. A few more and you have a barstool. One you lose hours just sort of blankly staring at on your coffee table.
I mean, you could easily clear the air. Find the one head with the most potential and tell it how you feel. But you’d never. So high is the pedestal on which you place your cranial “friends” that the thought that they’d reciprocate extra-friendly sentiments, let alone think of you as you do them, would be absurd and nauseating.
So you, much like the rest of us, are stuck in a hell that alternates between days of seething at joyous, toothless get-togethers—brunches, rock-climbing, mixed bachelor parties—and nights of self-flagellating penances for your unenlightened attitudes.
People in the future, how far into the future I can’t say, will find this all very silly and (quite rightfully) ban 8 Heads in a Duffle Bag.
This is somehow perfect, although I cannot for the life of me figure out what (if anything) it means.