6/18/2023 0 Comments Nyc lockdown 2021The city runs on FOMO, a connoisseurship of opportunities and possibilities the catechism of “Did you get invited, are you on the list, can you get a table?” the performance of plans. (McGinnis is booked back-to-back now: “The amount of press and speaking inquiries that I’ve gotten just in the past six weeks has been the most I’ve had in my career.”) It couldn’t be otherwise. It’s time to reenter society,” Cuomo said at a press conference in early June, as a screen flashed IF YOU WANT TO START LIVING AGAIN … DO IT IN NEW YORK.įOMO might have gone into hibernation for a while, but we may now be on the way to a new golden age as we try to make up for the year we lost by doing more than ever. And now here they were, good as new, as if we hadn’t had the time to philosophically reconsider our priorities after all. They hadn’t been banished they were only hibernating. By early June, Governor Cuomo relaxed restrictions, and, on cue, my phone buzzed with a text, unbidden, from the Pilates place I’d last seen during the Trump administration: “Hot Girl Summer Take.” All the invitations, the commitments, the double bookings, and the RSVPs came flooding back. In mid-May, the CDC updated its guidance to say that “fully vaccinated people can resume activities without wearing a mask or physically distancing” (except where prohibited by “federal, state, local, tribal, or territorial” laws), and the dam broke. But the biggest backlash was from people who weren’t invited.” When the crowds were hustled home at 11 p.m., an overstuffed elevator got stuck, requiring Fire Department intervention. “The entire night, people were just like, ‘It’s the first time I’ve gone to any events with more than, like, two people in a year,’ ” Nate Freeman, the art-world reporter and gossip columnist, told me about the Frieze bash he hosted on a Tribeca-hotel rooftop. Some of the first parties I could remember hearing about in months were happening. So when, in early May, Frieze unfurled at Hudson Yards - which only months before had been a weird wasteland with its own towering shawarma Ozymandias - with Vaxxed Important People dinners afterward, I knew something was being reawakened. One of the city’s most FOMO-driven subcultures is the art world. Vaccines were going into arms, and social life was creeping back. In April of this year, the canaries in the coal mine started to chirp. “ I’ve become super–irrelevant overnight.”īut not so fast. “I thought to myself, Oh God,” he told me. ![]() By cosmic misfortune, McGinnis, who has a parallel career as a pop entrepreneur and a podcaster, published his official treatise on FOMO in May 2020, right in the midst of the pandemic. Ask Patrick McGinnis, the venture capitalist who coined the snack-size acronym in the pages of the Harvard Business School student newspaper in 2004, who had cause for concern. And, in fact, the FOMO economy collapsed. Only later did she realize that, for most of a year, she had not suffered the pangs of FOMO - “fear of missing out” - because sitting at home was what everybody was doing. “Turns out I’m perfectly happy only speaking to, like, three people for months at a time,” said a woman I know who spent the past year nesting at home, pandemic-pregnant with her second child, while her husband worked in the emergency room at Bellevue. This could be a relief, even a revelation. The pandemic had tamped down just this kind of social triangulating. ![]() “Over the course of the game, texting friends,” a Knicks fanatic I hadn’t seen in a year told me when we ran into each other during playoff season, “it became clear that everyone was at Madison Square Garden but me.” New York City is becoming itself again: crowded, busy, and competitive. Any conversation might reveal that the couchlock of 2020–21 was no longer in effect. ![]() I was thrilled and afraid to say no to any of it: dinners with people I had not seen in person in months, which could be indoors or out the opening of a new shop selling trompe l’oeil ceramics and vintage glass (“To release!” two guests toasted, clanking together their White Claws) another friend’s comedy show a Park Slope after-party a fancy daylong picnic upstate.īut there were also the things I wasn’t invited to that clogged my phone’s interminable scroll: the rooftop pandemic-baby showers delayed multi-person makeup birthday parties and sweaty, hundred-strong club nights. ![]() After spending much of the past year on the sofa, my social life reduced to a few close friends and family members, I suddenly had something to do every night of the week - maskless, outside my apartment - whether I wanted to or not. Or rather, a bunch of things started happening.
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